Addicted to an Online World

When many people think about videogames, they imagine a thoughtless experience where someone idly plays a game to pass time, compete with friends, or procrastinate from work. But in her book Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle explains how role-playing games and other MUD’s (see this post) have created near-utopian escapes from real life trials and tribulations. Because of the appeal these games have, it is not surprising that people are susceptible to becoming addicted to Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMORPGs).

In this article, Michael Fahey describes the course of an addiction to the MMORPG EverQuest. He explains how, over the course of a mere four months, he managed to lose his girlfriend, car, job – essentially his life, all because he was completely consumed by his life in an online world. At one point he stopped eating, sleeping, or interacting with the people that he loved, all because it would take up time that he could have been spending online in EverQuest. Ultimately, he says, the videogame was not at fault, he was. Personal problems and self-esteem issues drove him to the game, and he found it easier to play the game than address his real life. “I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place”.

This story is a fascinating read, and I found myself truly sympathizing with Michael’s problem. But in doing so, I realized, both myself and Michael may have been missing a very important point to consider. Perhaps spending all of his time in a virtual world was not a terrible thing to be doing. How and why do we differentiate our virtual lives from our real ones? Why would it not have been perfectly acceptable for him to have an online job, online girlfriend – to basically spend his main life online?

MUD's: The New Newspaper

In chapter two of his book "Imagined Communities," Benedict Anderson describes the role that media, specifically newspapers, have had in unifying large groups of people, since around the 16th century. He argues that although reading a newspaper may seem like a truly independent affair, which he explains by saying "it is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull" (Anderson, page 35), habitually reading the paper ultimately serves to establish the reader's place in a larger community. Anderson goes on to say that this occurs because,

"each communicant is well aware (while reading a newspaper) that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has no the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked imagined community can be envisioned?" (page 35).

In almost a direct response to that question posed by Anderson years before, Sherry Turkle, introduces the current scenario that exists with users of Multi-User Domains, also known as MUD's. In chapter 10 of her book "Life On The Screen," Turkle describes this technology, which enables people to create a separate online identity in a virtual domain, on that can coexist with their "real" identities in the physical world. Turkle evokes the work of social psychologist Kenneth Gergen, and explains the unifying effect that these online worlds can have. Just as was made possible by the creation of newspapers centuries ago, with the adoption of MUD's "Individual notions of self vanish 'into a stage of relatedness. One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relations in which he or she is embedded," (Turkle, page 257).

So although their creation is separated by about 500 years, newspapers and Multi-User Domains achieve the same thing - they create independent experiences and identities that actually serve to unify a larger group amongst all who use them.