Among other time wasting activities this week has been getting reacquainted with the PDA. While upgrading AvantGo (and at the same time discovering that I had been for months killing my batteries syncing at 9600 baud instead of 57600), came across a good Salon story about the behaviour of people obsessed with EverQuest, and it’s easy to extrapolate to any virtual environment (i.e. muds). Quote:

“Once you get to a certain high level of player you’ve got people who have spent literally months of time sitting in front of their machines. And it becomes a really big deal to them, it becomes their life, they become obsessed by it. Anything that threatens them — someone who threatens their guild standing or something as trivial as someone killing a monster they have their eyes on — that’s the kind of thing that spawns this vitriol and rage. It’s tunnel vision, really frightening.”

I know what the feeling is like, though I’ve never played EverQuest; I saw it a lot in other players during my heavy mudding years in university, and began to see it in myself. It’s a big factor in why I haven’t really played a mud for the last five years or so, and switched to coding and administration instead.

It’s one thing to run into a dedicated player who is exploding with rage (albeit in the stilted manner enforced by the limited text interface) and threatening you with death or worse, virtual or otherwise, for daring to mess with them and their characters. (I must however admit that I often brought this on myself: I was always heavy on the player killing power trip then.) If you’re feeling flippant about it - and at the time, I usually was - then you can just shrug it off and dismiss it offhandedly, feeling safe in your relative anonymity, and telling them with a smug and superior smile on your face that “it’s just a game, get a life you stupid twit”.

It’s however quite another thing to discover yourself turning into one of these players when provoked, and losing your self control in a way that you’d never, ever do in real life, although the effects spill over into the nonvirtual world. And it’s at this point you realise you’ve got to quit because it’s eating you up: but you can’t just stop cold turkey. Oh no, you’ve got to do it somehow in a dramatic fashion and in doing so draw attention to your dissatisfaction, and make the bastards who provoked you pay in guilt and anguish. It’s stupid, petty, and infantile, but in the anger of the moment it all just comes to a boil. And so, while faking a real life suicide like the person in the article never occurred to me, I can see where they’re coming from.

(In my case, I did quit. And yes, I tried to do it in dramatic fashion: I did my best to get virtually incinerated by the administrators and succeeded. But that’s past history. I’m over it now and am much better adjusted nowadays. Really.)