If you ever see this green guy, step away from your computer. You’ve just met a dealer of one of the most powerful drugs in the gaming community – MMOG.
Side effects of MMOG include :
- loss of time
- tiredness due to loss of sleep
- distraction outside of the game
- loss of contact with family and friends
- email backlog
As a recovering addict, I can speak from experience.
It started just before christmas.
I was already weary of MMO after reading about the effects of variants such as Everquest or City of Heroes. But this little green guy seemed so cute and harmless, I felt safe enough to listen to him and give it a try.
I followed him to the buzzing streets of Stormwind, in the heart of World of Warcraft.
The first weeks where full of discovery and excitement. The feast of Winterveil brought elves, snowfights and presents. From the snowed mountains outside of Ironforge to the lush forest surrounding Darnassus, the scenery was exciting to explore.
The feeling of a persistent, living and breathing world was too engaging to resist, and the overall feeling of mutual help among total strangers was a pleasant surprise. No sneak attack on unsuspecting newbies from bored veterans. No annoying fights from overactive players… at least not at the beginning.
But once the initial quests were completed, reality started to send warning signs … which I completely ignored of course. Maybe it was because of the boredom of grinding repetitive quests such as ‘find me x items’, ‘bring this to x character’ or ‘go out and kill x creatures’. Or maybe it was because of quests too difficult for a particular level. Whatever the reason, the game quickly expose you to the appeal of playing with other people. After all, isn’t that what MMOGs are all about ?
So .. I played with other people and liked playing with some of them. Added them to my friends list. Played with them the next day. And ended up joing their guild. Where I met other people. And played with them in dungeons.
It was all great fun at first. But slowly, the warning signs because louder. More difficult to ignore.
Take a break from the game for a day – when you return, your ‘friends’ have completed some of the quests you were planning to explore with them.
Take a break of a weekend – when you return, your ‘friends’ have leveled up. Sometimes by two levels or more.
Soon, they are playing in a different region of the world. They try to come back and help you catch up.
And if it turn s out you want to have a life and play at the same time, soon you are left behind, looking for new friends as you watch the old ones level up and away.
Add this to the repetitiveness of the constant hunting, mining or skinning required to amass enough materials to progress in whatever skill you chose and the experience starts to look more like work than a game.
And if you throw into this mix, glitches introduced by new patches, unstable connections, and longer waiting queues when you want to play, the game becomes downright frustrating.
Until one night, you want to play for about an hour or two and you end up spending 30 minutes waiting in line to get in the game, another 20 mins waiting for other friends to join your group only to be disconnected after 15 minutes of play.
So I did what I should have done the first day I met that little green guy. I stepped away from the computer. Deleted my characters and terminated my account.
Just in time to get my hands on Oblivion… but at least, I had years to get used to that kind of offline drug 🙂
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