I used to play the online role-playing game EverQuest a lot. By "a lot," I mean probably fifteen to twenty hours a week on average, and on weeks where I didn't have to work, as many as thirty or forty hours.

In the world of online gaming, my behavior wasn't that unusual; lots of people I knew in the game played EQ that much. And I have to say that though sometimes EQ felt like work (performing repetitive, carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing tasks for hours in order to raise tradeskill abilities; sitting around waiting for a bunch of people to show up so that I could participate in a guild raid), most of it was incredibly fun. There were a few moments in my EQ experience that came close, in terms of emotional intensity, to the most dramatic moments of my "real" life.

Last week I came across "EverQuest Daily Grind," a blog devoted to the friends and partners of EQ players who abandon their real-world lives for Norrath. I found a lot of the stories moving and upsetting, mainly because I recognized myself in them. This entry is fairly typical:

That was more or less me.

So why did I quit the game in March 2002? Jane, I think, explained it best: "When EverQuest was more fun than your life, you played EverQuest; when your life became more fun than EverQuest, you quit the game."

What that explanation gets at, without moralizing, is the degree to which EQ is, for many people, more fun than their "lives." In fact it breaks down the difference between "game" and "life" in fairly powerful ways: the friends I made playing the game felt just as "real" as any other friends I had, though our relationships were produced by a restricted social space and unmediated by our physical bodies (but why should bodies and physical interaction be the structuring limit of "life" or the real?); the emotions I felt were just as strong as "real" emotions (and just as real).

Edward Castronova, who with several other important game scholars writes for Terra Nova, has argued that virtual worlds, sustained by technological shifts that make them possible, offer the very real possibility that people will "move" to places like Norrath (EQ's world) and "live" there instead of living on Earth. As it becomes possible to make money inside the world, the need for real-world jobs that sustain the body's living space and sustenance and the game's monthly fee ($14) will diminish.

But I think that it will take most non-game-players a while to recognize that such a thing is happening, partly because it is difficult to understand from the outside how the world inside the game could be so much more compelling than the world outside it.** E Wesp and I have tried to explain that at length elsewhere, but here's a simple three-part answer:

1) In EverQuest, increased effort produces increased rewards, inexorably. Anyone who spends time on/in the game can acquire objects and states of being that reflect that effort and allow others to recognize it. The job I had when I started playing EQ, quite frankly, couldn't compete.

2) A fundamental equality of starting conditions and a structured, laddered organization of accomplishment means that in Norrath, "genetic" differences (and here I mean "genetic" metaphorically to refer to inequalities not only in DNA-based ability but also "nurture"-type inequalities of starting conditions--being born into a wealthy family, for instance) do not exert a profound effect on the possibilities for accomplishment. More or less, Norrath offers its players true "equality of opportunity."

3) Norrath, like Soylent Green, is made of people. A lot of them are hilariously funny, smart, and friendly, and almost all of them like playing EverQuest, just like you. It's fairly easy to avoid the jerks. And when you find a group of people you like, you can work together to accomplish goals--it feels like, and is, teamwork.

The thought experiment:

Imagine, then, a world that invents a way for people to leave it behind. Imagine that the world is so unpleasant for some people that they decide to move out, even as they stay in place. You will rarely see them on the street; they may stop watching television or voting or bowling or believing in your gods; they will care less about what happens in your world than what happens in their own. Their world will, to be sure, depend on your world in a variety of ways--for a modicum of personal space, for power, for food, hardware, and software; but beyond that, they will truly have "tuned out" the social, political, and even physical space within which you live.

Some people will be in love with one of the people who moves, and they will not understand how it is that Earth birthdays are missed but ones in Norrath are celebrated, why the body's need for food becomes an annoyance rather than a source of pleasure, or why increases in control and power in the new world will almost always produce (and be produced by) decreases in control and power in or on Earth.

For now, the term the mainstream media has for this condition is "addiction"; the Yahoo group "EverQuest Widows" maybe comes closer to the truth by suggesting that those left behind have suffered a death in the family. Both possibilities--death and addiction--point us to the condition of ecstasy (ek-stasis: out of place), of the self driven or pushed outside the self, out of control, strange, foreign. On EQ Daily Grind the feeling speaks the language of "loss": "I was so lost in a fantasy world I didn't know up from down, right from wrong, or me from my online toon"; "I've lost my best friend to Everquest"; "she has become so lost in Everquest that her husband has kicked her out and is divorcing her."

These are of course real losses, poignant because those left behind feel abandoned, because many of those who move have reneged on commitments they have made to those who have stayed behind (in some ways it's more complicated than if the player had just run off to some other country, because in that case the here/there equation is so much simpler than with virtual worlds. And at least you know it's over, and can sue for child support or alimony). But thinking of online gamers as "addicted" or even "dead" is not going to solve the problem, because those concepts cannot confront the full import of virtual worlds: given a choice more social than hermitage and more compelling than mysticism, people are moving out of the world. As Castronova points out, the question is at some fundamental level economic: if reality can't compete with Norrath, that may well be reality's fault.

One of the things we might then be prompted to do is to wonder what's wrong with reality, or rather, to wonder what about Norrath deploys and makes actionable an alternative to that reality, and why that alternative is so compelling (especially for men). And once we have those answers, we can ask: How could we change reality to entice these people to move back "home"? And what's more, should anyone even try?