[MUD-Dev] MEDIA: Virtual Dopers Crave High Scores

[J C Lawrence]

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63578,00.html

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Virtual Dopers Crave High Scores 
By Daniel Terdiman

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So why would a designer put something into a game that would kill off
its customers?

"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."

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."

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.

"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."

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.

"It's probably na\x{00EF}ve 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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!!"

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.

"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.

Yet to some, drugs are a natural outgrowth of the intensity with which
online game players immerse themselves.

"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."

"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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--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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