- The world of massively multiplayer online games is often
a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters
and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril
to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.
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- The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based
games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug -- known as gleam
-- as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to
infiltrate the game's cities. And some players can't take it fast enough.
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- "What we wanted to do with gleam was we wanted to
see how the player base would react to something that's pretty bad,"
said Matthew Mihaly, the CEO of Achaea publisher Iron Realms Entertainment.
"It's really nasty. We didn't tell them it was addictive.... (Non-player
characters) showed up and said, 'Hey, I've got this stuff here, wanna try
it?' Being new, they pounced right on it."
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- Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly --
suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational
sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some
of the game's players are angry about gleam's introduction into their world.
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- But this was hardly the first instance of substance abuse
in online games. Indeed, many online games are themselves strongly habit-forming.
After EverQuest players became known for 80-hour weekly binges, some began
calling the game by the sardonic moniker, EverCrack. These days, there's
even a blog on which people can share their stories of watching loved ones
disappear into an EverQuest black hole.
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- Beyond that, though, several multiplayer games, as well
as traditional role-playing games like Fallout and Ground Zero, have elements
of substance abuse that affect characters, and often, even players themselves.
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- In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing
their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could
gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel
across the game's wide three-dimensional globe.
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- Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required
the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die.
If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within
29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.
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- Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for
the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short
enough that even the hard-core couldn't keep up. According to Andy Tepper,
the game's lead designer, 18 players' characters have died from addiction
to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game's history.
Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A
Tale in the Desert, a character's death is final. It means starting over
from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing
potion.
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- So why would a designer put something into a game that
would kill off its customers?
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- "In every game, having some danger and having the
sense that there's some danger is exciting," said Tepper. "So
if you can make it so the danger to you is you, that's nirvana."
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- More than that, Tepper said, the game's other players
love talking about it when someone falls victim to Speed of the Serpent.
"It's not good for business to kill your customers, but overall it
makes it a much, much more interesting world."
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- Achaea's Mihaly, too, thinks that the benefit of having
drugs in a virtual world comes from the inherent danger and the way it
gets players talking.
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- "We try to make a gritty world sometimes, things
the graphical (online games) don't do," he said. "There's quite
a controversy over gleam."
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- Indeed, the drug has been outlawed in some of the player-run
cities, and characters are subject to ejection if they're caught with it.
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- "It's probably naÔve of me, but I was a little
surprised at the vehement attitude a few players took toward the introduction
of gleam," he said. "I have a hard time taking that seriously,
given that these games are based on mass murder and the like. I mean, come
on."
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- A Tale in the Desert and Achaea aren't as mainstream
as games like Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies,
so perhaps the smaller games' designers can afford to take risks by intentionally
injecting drugs into their games, as it were.
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- But even the larger games have elements some consider
akin to addictive substances. For example, in Galaxies, smuggler-class
players traffic in spices, spells that increase characters' skills.
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- In an article in RPG Expert called "Life of a Smuggler,"
the author wrote that spices can offer terrific benefits, such as increased
strength. Yet there are also side effects, like lowered strength and vomiting,
that last as long as the high.
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- Given the side effects, though, one might ask why the
risk is worthwhile. The author's answer sounds just like it came from a
real-world drug dealer.
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- "OK, who will buy and use your spices? Almost everyone
that tries them a few times gets hooked," the article read. "Free
samples are good for business!!"
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- In spite of that, Chris Kramer, Sony Online's director
of public relations, rejects the notion that Star Wars Galaxies players
are clamoring for anything addictive.
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- "We have a very large player base in Star Wars Galaxies
(and) everyone's going to have a different view toward the way the game
operates, but for us, there's not really a goal like that," he said.
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- Yet to some, drugs are a natural outgrowth of the intensity
with which online game players immerse themselves.
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- "People spend money, huge amounts of time (and)
get completely fanatical," said Ron Meiners, an expert in online gaming
and communities. They "get completely wrapped up in the experience
-- the second life. Virtual drugs are just the next step."
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- "Compulsive or addictive behavior is a facet of
life many hard-core gamers know a lot about," Meiners said. "If
they weren't compelled, they wouldn't be hard-core."
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- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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