One Night in Azeroth

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Besides the chat channels, there are two ways to interact in WoW: grouping and guilds. Groups are temporary alliances between players, and commitment is minimal. Guilds are larger, more formal groups with officers and a leader. Members wear a guild tabard, and you'll occasionally stumble across their avatars kneeling in front of a higher-level player in a super-serious initiation ceremony.

WoW has a pop culture, too. One player-made WoW video has been downloaded so many times that its star, Leeroy Jenkins, was a clue on College Jeopardy last year. There's WoW fan fiction, WoW pornography, and you can find a wedding video from an in-game ceremony featuring over 100 guests, an exchange of vows, and a processional march and fireworks. There are also funerals.

Over the Chinese National Day holidays last year, a young Chinese player named Snowly died after playing WoW in an internet cafe for 56 straight hours. His family refused to speak to the press, but his guildmates said he was preparing to attempt a particularly difficult instance dungeon, and he seems to have died of exhaustion with possible complications from dehydration. The few details available (usually misidentifying Snowly as a young woman) raced across the internet and resulted in the passage of legally mandated gaming time limits for online games in China. Meanwhile, Snowly's guildmates gathered within the game and held a funeral for their friend. An obsession with WoW had caused Snowly's death, but the game also gave his friends a place to memorialize him. Gathering their avatars in the same virtual space and bowing their heads felt emotionally appropriate. It felt real.

According to the law, though, Azeroth isn't real. When Qiu Chengwei, a Chinese gamer playing "Legend of Mir 3," a fantasy MMORPG, asked his friend to hold onto a virtual sword for him, the friend turned around and sold it. Qiu went to the police but they could do nothing—legally, the sword didn't exist. Most countries, America included, do not recognize virtual worlds as actual property. They are chattel belonging to the companies that created them. Read the terms of use and you see it spelled out clearly: everything within the game is the property of the designers, not the players. Try telling that to Qiu. Enraged over losing what he viewed as a valuable possession, he stabbed his friend to death.

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I'm hiding in WoW. This is very easy to do. My body is at the kitchen table in my apartment, but my mind is in Azeroth. I'm hiding there from fights with my wife, from work, from deadlines, from money worries—and I'm not unhappy about this in the slightest. In fact, I wish I could stay here. If you decide to play WoW intensively then you quickly discover that you're leading two lives. In one life you're struggling, worried about your job and your relationships. You can't tell if people like you and they probably don't. You can invest all of your effort into a project only to see it never pay off.

In your other life you know who you are because it says so just below your name: you're an Undead Warlock. If you make an effort you will be rewarded with treasure, and by advancing through levels. If you help someone out they say "ty." You can be a hero, make a difference, kill monsters. It beats writing reviews of "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" and "Little Man."

I can feel the deadlines whizzing by my head but that just makes me feel worse and so I play more Warcraft to feel better. There's a constant feeling that things are going to get really cool in just five minutes, just over this hill, just after this quest, just on this next level. There are so many different ways to advance that at any given moment you're about to improve your character in some way. And so you keep playing. And playing. And playing. A long time ago I did some interviews with gaming addicts and was horrified by stories of lives ruined by gaming. It sounded like hysteria to me, but after blowing two deadlines and almost screwing up a business arrangement because I couldn't tear myself away to send a fax, it didn't sound like hysteria anymore. It sounded like me.

In Korea and China the government supports the serious treatment of gaming addiction, but in the US it's up to informal groups like OLGANON (Online Gamers Anonymous) and Warcraft Widows to offer online support for people whose loved ones have vanished down the digital rabbit hole. Their stories are heartbreaking. A husband missing his child's first step because his guild is about to raid. A wife being punched by a husband who's on tenterhooks after playing for almost 24 hours straight. Parents living with a kid who no longer talks to anyone but stays in his room playing Warcraft all day. People sneaking behind their spouses' backs to purchase a better computer in order to minimize lag, running up credit-card debt they can't pay off. Living two lives takes a toll.

But despite its novelty value, gaming addiction isn't much of a story. Some people enjoy beer, other people can't handle it, but hardly anyone believes it should be illegal. And the people who play MMORPGs like WoW are not the shut-ins and antisocial outcasts we might imagine. According to researcher Nick Yee, their average age is 26 (only 25% of them are teenagers) and half of them work full time. 36% are married, and 80% play with someone they know—friends belong to the same guild, husbands and wives play together.

Non-gamers want to know what on earth these people are doing on their computers when they could be out at a party or meeting people. The short answer is that they are out at a party, meeting people. Any way you measure it, the social life of the average American has collapsed since the 1950s. We're not going out, we're not participating in our communities, we're not socializing in nearly the numbers we used to. Mostly what we're doing is watching TV. Dmitri Williams, a social sciences professor at the University of Illinois, sees WoW as a game that provides social interaction to an audience hungry for company. To him, games like WoW are a bridging experience, providing a way for people to meet. And while the depth of their interaction—their bonding, so to speak—isn't as deep as it might be in a real-life meeting, he's found that over time friendships do deepen and bonding does take place. As an added bonus, according to Nick Yee's surveys, the average WoW player spends 22 hours a week in Azeroth, but only around 7 hours watching TV, compared to the national average of 29.

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I played WoW for one month and logged close to 120 hours of gameplay. Almost everything I had thought about WoW had turned out to be wrong. What ate up other players' time wasn't just killing monsters and buying swag but showing off that swag to friends and negotiating complicated interpersonal dramas. These were people who were choosing a new way of relating to one another, but I couldn't, and didn't want to, navigate it as nimbly as they did. I had in-game friends, people I grouped with on a regular basis, but I also had real-world commitments, and I was lousy at balancing the two. On more than one occasion I logged on "for a half hour" only to look up and find that two hours had vanished down the rabbit hole. If I wanted to get serious about WoW I needed to join a guild, but lurking on message boards and reading about the various guild dramas made it feel like more work than pleasure. I decided to quit.

On my last night I logged in at 3am. The server was practically empty, and when I came across a couple of other players we clung to one another like shipwreck survivors. Our interaction consisted mostly of emoticons and ungrammatical sentence fragments, but it was better than nothing—and at 3am, ‘nothing' was the alternative. We played through a couple of quests together, then decided to call it a night. "Good group," Zocharay said as we disbanded. Scyllis headed south and Zocharay and I ran in the same direction for a while before she peeled off to the east. A wave of sadness passed over me as I watched her vanish in the distance and I couldn't help it. I stopped running and typed: "/wave."

"Nancyreagan waves to Zocharay." the computer said.

A second passed. Then:

"Zocharay waves to Nancyreagan."

Each of us was alone, but for a few hours that night in Azeroth, neither of us was lonely.1