there was another guy who committed suicide from playing EQ after he gave his account info to a "friend" and they hacked his account and took all his stuff. i remember it made the national news and his mom was interviewed about it and everything.
What Made EQ Great? Tell your stories to a filthy casual
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And the story about the mom who let her kid die due to neglect while EQing it up. I want to say this was a media frenzy right after the summer of sharks? and before 9/11.
One of the major points I think it's important to understand from a nostalgia piece, is that EQ basically invented the concept of hardcore gaming via camping and total immersion. There were self-help groups and even groups of moms (Everquest Widows?) set up to support failing kids and adults alike. This was well before WoW came along and made not having a social life, socially acceptable.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingre...urrentPage=all
The Quest to End Game Addiction
Julia Scheeres Email 12.05.01
With the holidays just around the corner, many people are relishing the thought of relaxing at home, munching all manner of fatty sweets and spending extra time with their ... computer games.
Instead of slurping hot cocoa with loved ones, the gamers will be off by themselves in darkened rooms, slaying monsters, conquering new worlds and otherwise stroking their heroic alter egos.
That behavior bothers a lot of people. It's not fun being jilted for a computer game, especially during a season that's supposed to be about human love, harmony and all those other warm and fuzzy notions.
And while hard-core gamers insist their favorite activity is a harmless pastime, their loved ones sometimes suspect that their hobby has turned into something a little more compulsive, which raises the question: Is there such a thing as gaming addiction or is the very concept a crock of excrement?
It depends on whom you ask. At one extreme, there are gamers who threaten to "get medieval" if someone so much as suggests they step away from their computer for a butt break. At the other extreme, there are the neglected spouses, former gamers and a bevy of therapists dedicated to treating game junkies.
Some games are more reviled than others by the loved ones. EverQuest -- or EverCrack as some people call it -? tops the list. Yahoo has two clubs devoted to the sword-and-sorcery game where players slip into the bodies of barbarians and erudites and chase each other around the fantasy world of Norrath: Spouses Against EverQuest and EverQuest Widows.
The latter, which boasts over 1,000 members, has all the markings of a virtual Al-Anon meeting.
"Hi, I'm 19 years old and I have been an EQ widow for a year now. My boyfriend plays at least 5 hours a day ..." reads the typical new member introduction.
The "EQ Wids" commiserate over tales of woe (one husband insisted on playing the game in the delivery room while his wife gave birth) and offer each other encouragement and company.
"It's just a forum for people to help each other vent," said the group moderator, Tony, who didn't want to reveal his last name. "A lot of the members have come to the point where they've gotten on with their lives. They don't sit at home watching the back of their spouse's head anymore."
Members also share tips on how to sabotage EverQuest by deleting characters or blocking access to servers. As a result, the board is regularly raided by angry gamers who warn the widows "not to fuck with EQ."
And then there's the business of EQ marriages. In addition to being snubbed for a piece of software, many EQ widows fear getting snubbed for a virtual lover. EverQuest characters frequently marry online and sometimes the romance carries over into real life.
"It's really destroyed a lot of marriages," said Tony, whose wife had an affair with her make-believe husband. He allowed her to return home for the sake of their three children. "I told her that if it happens again, I'm not going to take her back."
Some former players have gone online to preach the evils of gaming themselves.
Jeffrey Stark, a high-school student from Ontario, Canada, wrote an impassioned essay in a self-help forum in which he charged that EQ had ruined his life.
When his not-too-tech-savvy parents threatened to unplug the machine, he told them that doing so would destroy it (they believed him). He'd go for a week without bathing or eating a proper meal. He finally stopped going to school for a semester because he couldn't tear himself away.
"I dropped out of school for a semester and was feeling really low," he said. "My parents told me that if I continued to play games, I'd become a garbage man. It was totally insulting."
Stark eventually reached the highest EQ levels and sold three characters on eBay for $4,500, he said. Now he advocates that parents regulate their child's game playing at all times.
Reuben Logsdon, a software writer from Washington, played Civilization for seven straight years after a college dorm friend gave him the installation disks. At the time, the ability to create an alternate world was a refreshing break from the routine of student life.
"For the first week, I didn't go to sleep," said Logsdon, who has also posted his experience online. "It was worse than being on crank. I'd always get a sinking feeling when I looked out the window and saw it was dawn. I'd get angry at myself for being such a loser because the game was controlling my life."
Logsdon finally went cold turkey by smashing the disks, but finds it harder to resist temptation now that he can simply download the game from file-sharing sites such as Gnutella.
Both men exhibited the classic signs of game junkies, according to the criteria of Maressa Hecht Orzack, the director of the Computer Addiction Studies Center.
Symptoms of game addiction include falling behind in school and work and basically deferring everything else in your life so you can play, she said. Compulsive playing tends to mask underlying problems such as depression, anger and low self-esteem, said Orzack, who said she was once hooked on computer solitaire.
"A lot of people get into these (games) because they're bored," she said. "The excitement is so reinforcing. They get pleasure from it and want to repeat it. That's how the addiction builds up."
Her treatment program includes behavioral therapy, anti-depressants and Zyban, a prescription drug used by smokers to kick the tobacco habit.
But for all the game naysayers, there are those who argue that games are beneficial.
Just ask Camilla Bennet, the Quake3World.com administrator and an avid gamer from New Zealand. The computer saleswoman creates "skins" -- customized characters for computer games -? in her spare time, and hopes to turn her passion into pay dirt.
"I really want to get into game development," she said. "I've already handed in my first production skin, something that may well lead to a career."
MIT's Games-To-Teach project studies how gaming technology can be incorporated into education.
The project's research manager, Kurt Squire, has found that games sharpen players' critical thinking, improve their social skills and increase their empathy (by choosing the opposite sex for their character's gender).
"The notion that games are powerful enough to ruin someone's life is just ridiculous," said Squire. "The main concern people have is that technology is overpowering people and making them helpless. That's happened with every new medium that has come along -- even books were once regarded with suspicion."
In the final analysis, almost anything can be called an addiction if it routinely interrupts life's basic components, including school, work and relationships, he said. The important thing is balance. So align your chakras -- and remember, it's just a game.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingre...urrentPage=all
The Quest to End Game Addiction
Julia Scheeres Email 12.05.01
With the holidays just around the corner, many people are relishing the thought of relaxing at home, munching all manner of fatty sweets and spending extra time with their ... computer games.
Instead of slurping hot cocoa with loved ones, the gamers will be off by themselves in darkened rooms, slaying monsters, conquering new worlds and otherwise stroking their heroic alter egos.
That behavior bothers a lot of people. It's not fun being jilted for a computer game, especially during a season that's supposed to be about human love, harmony and all those other warm and fuzzy notions.
And while hard-core gamers insist their favorite activity is a harmless pastime, their loved ones sometimes suspect that their hobby has turned into something a little more compulsive, which raises the question: Is there such a thing as gaming addiction or is the very concept a crock of excrement?
It depends on whom you ask. At one extreme, there are gamers who threaten to "get medieval" if someone so much as suggests they step away from their computer for a butt break. At the other extreme, there are the neglected spouses, former gamers and a bevy of therapists dedicated to treating game junkies.
Some games are more reviled than others by the loved ones. EverQuest -- or EverCrack as some people call it -? tops the list. Yahoo has two clubs devoted to the sword-and-sorcery game where players slip into the bodies of barbarians and erudites and chase each other around the fantasy world of Norrath: Spouses Against EverQuest and EverQuest Widows.
The latter, which boasts over 1,000 members, has all the markings of a virtual Al-Anon meeting.
"Hi, I'm 19 years old and I have been an EQ widow for a year now. My boyfriend plays at least 5 hours a day ..." reads the typical new member introduction.
The "EQ Wids" commiserate over tales of woe (one husband insisted on playing the game in the delivery room while his wife gave birth) and offer each other encouragement and company.
"It's just a forum for people to help each other vent," said the group moderator, Tony, who didn't want to reveal his last name. "A lot of the members have come to the point where they've gotten on with their lives. They don't sit at home watching the back of their spouse's head anymore."
Members also share tips on how to sabotage EverQuest by deleting characters or blocking access to servers. As a result, the board is regularly raided by angry gamers who warn the widows "not to fuck with EQ."
And then there's the business of EQ marriages. In addition to being snubbed for a piece of software, many EQ widows fear getting snubbed for a virtual lover. EverQuest characters frequently marry online and sometimes the romance carries over into real life.
"It's really destroyed a lot of marriages," said Tony, whose wife had an affair with her make-believe husband. He allowed her to return home for the sake of their three children. "I told her that if it happens again, I'm not going to take her back."
Some former players have gone online to preach the evils of gaming themselves.
Jeffrey Stark, a high-school student from Ontario, Canada, wrote an impassioned essay in a self-help forum in which he charged that EQ had ruined his life.
When his not-too-tech-savvy parents threatened to unplug the machine, he told them that doing so would destroy it (they believed him). He'd go for a week without bathing or eating a proper meal. He finally stopped going to school for a semester because he couldn't tear himself away.
"I dropped out of school for a semester and was feeling really low," he said. "My parents told me that if I continued to play games, I'd become a garbage man. It was totally insulting."
Stark eventually reached the highest EQ levels and sold three characters on eBay for $4,500, he said. Now he advocates that parents regulate their child's game playing at all times.
Reuben Logsdon, a software writer from Washington, played Civilization for seven straight years after a college dorm friend gave him the installation disks. At the time, the ability to create an alternate world was a refreshing break from the routine of student life.
"For the first week, I didn't go to sleep," said Logsdon, who has also posted his experience online. "It was worse than being on crank. I'd always get a sinking feeling when I looked out the window and saw it was dawn. I'd get angry at myself for being such a loser because the game was controlling my life."
Logsdon finally went cold turkey by smashing the disks, but finds it harder to resist temptation now that he can simply download the game from file-sharing sites such as Gnutella.
Both men exhibited the classic signs of game junkies, according to the criteria of Maressa Hecht Orzack, the director of the Computer Addiction Studies Center.
Symptoms of game addiction include falling behind in school and work and basically deferring everything else in your life so you can play, she said. Compulsive playing tends to mask underlying problems such as depression, anger and low self-esteem, said Orzack, who said she was once hooked on computer solitaire.
"A lot of people get into these (games) because they're bored," she said. "The excitement is so reinforcing. They get pleasure from it and want to repeat it. That's how the addiction builds up."
Her treatment program includes behavioral therapy, anti-depressants and Zyban, a prescription drug used by smokers to kick the tobacco habit.
But for all the game naysayers, there are those who argue that games are beneficial.
Just ask Camilla Bennet, the Quake3World.com administrator and an avid gamer from New Zealand. The computer saleswoman creates "skins" -- customized characters for computer games -? in her spare time, and hopes to turn her passion into pay dirt.
"I really want to get into game development," she said. "I've already handed in my first production skin, something that may well lead to a career."
MIT's Games-To-Teach project studies how gaming technology can be incorporated into education.
The project's research manager, Kurt Squire, has found that games sharpen players' critical thinking, improve their social skills and increase their empathy (by choosing the opposite sex for their character's gender).
"The notion that games are powerful enough to ruin someone's life is just ridiculous," said Squire. "The main concern people have is that technology is overpowering people and making them helpless. That's happened with every new medium that has come along -- even books were once regarded with suspicion."
In the final analysis, almost anything can be called an addiction if it routinely interrupts life's basic components, including school, work and relationships, he said. The important thing is balance. So align your chakras -- and remember, it's just a game.
Fight
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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What an old and tired debate.
In large population sizes, you are going to have people from all across the spectrum of human behavior... smart, dumb, introverts, extroverts, good at games, bad at games, happy, depressed, and yes crazy. The price you pay for being a success, is doing business with will all sorts. It is inevitable in any business that does well for itself. Everyone wants to blame someone else when tragedies happen, but rarely is it themselves.
In large population sizes, you are going to have people from all across the spectrum of human behavior... smart, dumb, introverts, extroverts, good at games, bad at games, happy, depressed, and yes crazy. The price you pay for being a success, is doing business with will all sorts. It is inevitable in any business that does well for itself. Everyone wants to blame someone else when tragedies happen, but rarely is it themselves.
Borzak
Bronze Baron of the Realm
- 24,815
- 32,294
The love/hate relationship with patch days. The love being there were going to be a lot of targets up to kill and the hate being the server being reset several times or taking forever to log in. The lottery aspect of what was broke in my favor in this patch or what was broke that broke my class in this patch.
A couple of times I won the lottery on patch day. One was the you can forage anything on the loot table in a zone and the other was the no delay/range limitation on archery. Both those didn't last long.
A couple of times I won the lottery on patch day. One was the you can forage anything on the loot table in a zone and the other was the no delay/range limitation on archery. Both those didn't last long.
Fight
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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When you look at progession like a math formula, you had ~7 day respawns with "x" number of raiding guild members. You might look at Trakanon and say, we are going to be stuck farming him for the next 2 and a half months, but then you get a patch day and get his ass 3 times and send your time tables rocketing forward.
Patch days were the shit.
Patch days were the shit.
Yup, I believe Worn Greatstaff was 3g or some such, but Cracked Staffs were 1pp+.nah, Cracked Staffs sold for about a plat, at least since early 2000. they sold for a lot more than the rest of the rusty/splintered/worn tier, for some reason. finding a cracked staff at level 1 meant you were going to have an easy first few levels.
That article was from 2001. I'd be surprised if there are such astonishing revelations now that WoW has made timesink gaming mainstream.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 6,288
- 4,055
Parents just want to blame something else. It was right there in the second sentence of the article:
There's your answer. EQ wasnt the problem, his emotional issues were.
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Yeah, even 20/20 had EQ and the addiction thing as a story back then. I can tell you for certain I was addicted and addicted hardcore. And I wasnt even remotely hardocre player sine I had a career and family at the time. But there were a few years there where if I was not playing EQ I was not happy. And everything that took me away from EQ made me angry, including the wife and family. Yeah, it was fucked up.
I would spend the entire night playing EQ, then going to work, sometimes on 2-3 hours of sleep, and then doing nothing but looking at alla for the next 8 hours at work, then rinse and repeat.
damn, i used to think about eq so much during school it was borderline frantic. id watch the clock tick tock every class period, counting down until i could rush home and go kill sarnaks in LoIO. it was torture
i got lucky in the fact that EQ came out when i was a senior in college (was only taking 3 classes to graduate) and then i moved to california and had about $10,000 saved up in my bank account so i pretty much just lived off of that money, didn't work at all for 7 months, and played roughly 12 hours or so a day when ROK was released. i got a job when SOV came out, but still continued to play 8 or more hours a day. it was ridiculous, and i went through just about every penny of money that i had saved up, but totally worth it.
I lived in Hawaii during Velious (when I started) and the only guild i could raid with was a HK/Taiwanese guild. Would fall asleep at the keyboard several times a week, sometimes bound outside ToV and would get killed several times by people training Sontalak. I lied and told my wrestling team I was going back to the mainland for Christmas break and wouldn't be back until school started in January so I could play EQ uninterrupted for about 3 weeks.
Teekey
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 3,644
- -6,335
I remember when there was a bug with the Eye of Zomm. As a Mage, if you summoned one and then killed it, you could summon another pet. I summoned like 50 Air Elementals and then challenged people 10+ levels higher than me to duels for platinum.