Earlier this year it was reported that a South Korean couple had become so obsessed with raising a virtual daughter on the online role-playing game Prius that they allowed their own real, three month-old baby to starve to death. The mind boggles.
Warnings and stories of unhealthy addictions to video-gaming is nothing new but having stumbled across this sickening story just recently, I have become fascinated by the hugely popular existence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs. Essentially these games allow players to create another existence for themselves in a virtual world. For me, they demonstrate a very harmful disengagement from the real world, far from the harmless fun their upholders might have you believe. To their players, these sorts of games offer something valuable to many people who struggle to find the same enjoyment in reality.
Personally, the thought of leading a second, virtual life on the internet has absolutely zero appeal, and when I’m presented with stories of fatal obsession like the one above, I can’t help but feel incredibly unsettled by the vast number of people that would disagree. Please, don’t get me wrong, I am not under the impression that all players of MMORPGs are socially delinquent and capable of the same atrocities demonstrated by the South Korean couple. I am, however, concerned by the enormous number of people who have this blatant desire to evade the real world, albeit to varying degrees of severity. These games demand people to dedicate vast amounts of time and money to design and imagine a new fictional identity for themselves, and as the case of the South Korean couple shows, this virtual second life can take priority over real life which can have very damaging consequences.
Another story that caught my attention involved an affair between two fictional characters on the aptly named role-playing game Second Life. This cyber affair actually led to a divorce in the real world. The wife of the cyber cheat caught him having online sex with his computer generated bit on the side. Have you ever heard of anything more tragic? Not only does this story illustrate my concern that too many people are becoming too preoccupied with a life that largely counts for nothing but also that the dividing line between the real world and the virtual world is becoming blurred for many players. How anyone can feel that an online fictional affair might provide some significance in their life is beyond me. The time and effort that has gone into such a pointless exploit would be much better spent on actually making a valuable contribution to society.
Perhaps though, I am being unfair and failing to take MMORPG addiction seriously enough. Type ‘MMORPG addiction’ into Google and a large number of websites will appear, all offering a list of important steps a player should take to overcome their addiciton. The very nature of these games demands serious time dedication and considering the massive sums of money that has been made by their developers in the last decade, limiting the addictiveness of these games is not high on the developer’s list of priorities.
Essentially, the world of online role-playing gaming is completely alien to me. The more I try and understand its undeniable attraction across the globe, the more I want to dismiss it as a weird, very worrying, and obsessional activity that goes beyond a hobby. It’s a free world, but I would suggest that some people are in serious need of a reality check.
A check of reality forces one to admit that the Korean couple lacked the maturity and parenting skills to raise their child, and as for the couple that divorced, I suspect she was looking for a way out of an unfulfilling marriage with a guy obsessed with computers. Those utterly extreme examples of virtual worlds gone wrong have no bearing on the millions of other users worldwide who suffer no such effects in their real lives. There are people who see the potential of virtual worlds for education, commerce, creativity, etc., while there are people who just see a game, and that’s all they want to see. That’s OK. Virtual worlds aren’t for everyone. But their effect on the future of the Internet experience will be profound.
Could we not have a slightly more balanced article from someone who can perhaps understand the appeal of online gaming? It sounds like regardless of the two tragic but extreme stories mentioned the author has no intention of trying to understand the MMORPG phenomena. I’d be very interested to find out if he practices no form of escapism in his own life – e.g. drinking, going to the cinema, reading fiction… Some people choose to escape through gaming. It’s not particularly different, and there are always the few extremes that make everyone else look bad! (Nb I’m not a gamer and have no interest in MMORPGs myself – I’m more of a tetris girl)