If you are a frequent user of the internet, then you will understand what an MMORPG is. For those that might need a brief introduction, MMORPG (from here on in MMO) stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplay Game. These include the industry leader World of Warcraft, as well as a myriad of others such as Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Eve Online and more. If you were to ask an enthusiast of an MMO what the purpose of the game is, they’d probably tell you something such as “the idea is to progress in levels and increase your character”s power. By achieving quests and missions you become stronger, allowing you access to content further on in the game.’

This however, is utter nonsense. That’s not the purpose of these games. The actual purpose of these games is to keep you playing as long as they can without wanting to turn them off. Now don’t think that sounds sinister; this isn’t a clever trap by the creators of the games, it’s something that the game players want as well. I am a recovered MMO-aholic. After a three year love affair with the games, so much so that I went and worked for one of the companies who make them, which involved leaving my home country and moving abroad to do so, I got so burned out that the thought of playing a video game of any type now fills me with a cold nausea. When you’re in love with your online world though, it starts to take over. Your goals stop existing in the real world and become a kind of nuisance that gets in the way of you spending your time achieving your unreal online goals. Slaying dragons, finding treasure, getting that new sword that gives you +1 on all your imaginary statistics. It’s a very easy way for people who don’t achieve a lot in the real world to sink into this kind of online life. Everyday you can achieve something small but that you feel is important. There are ranks of numbers and statistics to tell you precisely how far you are from achieving your goals. Your online friends will congratulate you for your successes and groan with you when your party is wiped out on the last boss.

The way the media covers MMO games is absurd and shows their lack of knowledge about them. Television would like us to think that these games turn people into crazy killers, or that gamers frequently starve themselves. That’s simply untrue and clearly the very few heavily documented cases of such behaviour from the millions who play MMO games (11 million for World of Warcraft alone!) are not only rare but probably even likely to occur, given the vast sample size. However, what these games are doing to the generations of youth following us is, sadly, creating a whole legion of (mainly males) who aren’t terribly interested in the real world. Why bother trying to earn real money when you can subsist in a hazy low grade office job and then log on at six when you’ve woken up, slay demons until four am, then grab four hours of sleep before heading back to work. Why face up to the horrors of rejection by trying to have relationships when you have thirty online buddies who you speak to over a microphone every night? One of the guys I knew before whilst I worked for the MMO company was a twenty four year old vergion weighing in at twenty stone who was yet to so much as kiss a girl. The only things he was interested in were playing the company’s MMO and watching anime porn and to me embodied just how detached some of these guys are from reality.

Having abandoned these games now it’s actually difficult to come back into the real world. Where I would have had eight hours per day of monster killing to get through in the evening, instead I have to entertain myself. I’ve rediscovered what it means to have real friends again, the kind that you actually go out and visit. I’ve also recently had to rediscover what it means to fall for someone and be rejected, and how much the knife twists, a feeling that I’ve been completely devoid of for the last three years of game playing. Those friends I had online, the guys I spoke to every night, it turns out that without that common interest of goading one another on through the game we don’t really have any reason to talk to one another and since the day I quit the game I haven’t spoken to one of them. I’ve joined a gym and lost a stone in six weeks, I’ve rediscovered a bunch of old friends, I’ve broken out onto the other side.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with MMO games, in the same way there’s nothing inherently wrong with alcohol, cigars or eating hamburgers, but in the same way too much will seriously damage your health. If you’re suffering from MMO addiction – e.g. you play more than 15 hours per week, and that’s still a lot of time to spend on a single computer game – then trust me, get out before it gets worse.