A note: I wrote this in the late summer not very long after having time to reflect on the events surrounding Shawn Wooley's death, outlined below. A warning to the light of heart: there are some pretty serious undertones here, but it needed to be said.

For those of you not familiar - and I'm sure that's quite a few of you - the past few years have marked the rise to market dominance of Sony Online Entertainment's massively multiplayer online RPG experiment: EverQuest. Developed by Verant Interactive and released in early '97, the game has become a success of phenomenal scale, selling millions of copies, spawning four expansion packs and ensnaring hundreds of thousands of regular subscribers worldwide.

Subscribers? What? Yes: subscribers. Unlike its more familiar cousins (think Final Fantasy or Warcraft), which for the most part set definite goals with clearly defined beginnings and endings (including occasional forays into online competition), EverQuest is of a different brand. There is no way to "beat" this game, and the only "beginnings" are individual. You see, EverQuest is an enormous, persistent, online gaming world, inhabited by thousands of players across the globe as they live out their Tolkien and Wizards of the Coast-inspired fantasy adventures. EverQuest doesn't sleep, it doesn't go to the bathroom, and it doesn't have to eat dinner. When you turn off the computer EverQuest doesn't end, and that's where the monthly fee comes in. Every month you are charged approximately $12.50 (the price went up recently) to continue participating in Verant's online fantasy universe. The game's play style is instantly recognizable to gamers graduating from D&D or MUDs, and though the cost of admittance is more than a tad pricey, many (many) individuals decided to try their luck in the world of Norrath.

Objectively, nothing about the game seemed particularly harmful: it was a quirky title developed by quirky people, and purchased by quirky customers, sure - we'd all seen that before. But 'quirky' was hardly the word fit to describe a full-grown man committing suicide after a series of gross misfortunes occurred to his main character in EverQuest. Shawn Wooley, age 21, living with his mother and burning over 12 hours of his day every day playing EQ, shot himself to death one morning mid-game. Presumably, says his mother, the incident was related to an EverQuest friend betraying his trust by stealing all his hard-earned character equipment. At first such a claim may sound absolutely ludicrous - after all, who would end his life over some stupid video game? - but when you take a closer look at the game it becomes more believable.

Shall we?

At the core of this beast is a surprisingly simple premise: navigate a character of your selection through the fantasy world of Norrath seeking adventure and gaining power. You choose your character's race (from such offerings as Dwarves, Elves, Humans, Trolls, and more) as well as their class (druid, wizard, warrior, paladin, yadda) and then set out on your own 'fantastic' journey through the enchanted lands of Faydwer, Antonica, Kunark, and Velious [now in addition to Luclin and the Planes of Power], making friends, destroying powerful beasts, completing quests of great importance, collecting magical artifacts of untold power, and - well, yeah: the reality is a wee bit more lackluster than that. Rather than provide the orgasmic roleplaying experience the box offers, EverQuest boils down to a rather mundane routine of monster bashing and item fetching in an attempt to ascend through level rankings. To raise levels you need experience, and to get experience you need to kill monsters. And to kill monsters you need, often, to solicit the aid of items to increase your power. To get items you need money. To get money you need to kill monsters. Yeesh.

It sounds boring, and repetitive and in fact, it is, yes, quite boring and, yes, quite repetitive. At early levels you gain a tremendous amount of experience from killing weak monsters, rising through the levels rather quickly. However, by the time your 30-day free trial period is up levels have become increasingly hard to tackle, some taking tens of hours or more. One might ask what the motivation to continue this cycle is, and the answer is actually quite simple. Each successful kill, each item earned, each level raised creates for the player a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling that they have in some way conquered their surroundings. It is an addictive sensation, and this false sense of accomplishment - which has absolutely no bearing on the real world, and little even in the world of EQ, where thousands have already exceeded you - this is your driving force, the chain that binds and enslaves you to EQ. With each addition to your inventory, with each subtle boost to your base character statistics you become more and more a servant to the maintenance and improvement of your character. Norrath is a world where anyone - should they be willing to sacrifice enough of their time to the cause - can meet with success. But the price is high: thousands upon thousands of hours are required to reach the maximum level in the game (60 at the time of this writing) and more yet to find the most powerful of equipment.

It is not so hard, then, to understand why Shawn Wooley, having forsaken the real world and invested entirely in a fantasy one, would be brought to tears in frustration and depression when well over a year's work (I won't pretend EQ is 'play') was lost with no hope of return. Suicide was an extreme measure, in any case, and was no doubt perpetrated by his reported chronic depression and schizoid personality disorder. Though there were obvious mental illnesses plaguing Shawn, it is, perhaps, best not to disregard this as an isolated case with little chance of reoccurring. Nicholas Yee, a former college undergrad at the University of Haverford, conducted an in-depth and prolonged study of the EQ playerbase (the website with the full account of the study is located here). Over the three years that he operated, and the roughly 2500 he surveyed, he gathered valuable statistics, proving conclusively what we all assumed: that a large portion of the EQ community is victim to high neuroticism, that they enjoy EQ for the "escapism" element, that a majority of the players went as far as to upgrade their computers specifically to play EQ, that most, in fact, had had dreams about EQ, and that a stunning 34.7% of those surveyed agreed that they were "Definitely" addicted (an additional 27.4% said 'probably'). Many surveyed cited extreme withdrawal to the game (telling stories hardly different from those told by individuals attempting to quit smoking for the third, fourth, or even fifth time). EQ clearly means a lot to a large group of people, and many of them are in the same psychological boat as Shawn was: depressed, addicted, and trying to escape the reality of a world that deemed them unfit to exist.

The world of Norrath is a dangerous one, a world where many things must be made forfeit. Don't let yourself into "their" world.