Online Treachery

Shawn Woolley was a junkie. The floor of his Wisconsin apartment bore testament: fast-food wrappers, dirty clothes, chicken bones. He rarely answered his phone. He had stopped going to work, instead staying home to play EverQuest, an online role-playing video game. Woolley was an epileptic, and his marathon sessions triggered frequent seizures.

The 21-year-old had been evicted from his previous apartment after he sequestered himself to play the game. "He stayed in his apartment from July until the end of September," explains his mother, Liz Woolley. "All he did was play. He didn't work. He quit buying food. He wasn't bathing." Without an income, he was forced to move in with his mother, where he reimmersed himself in EverQuest, staying up for days. His obsessive playing concerned his mother enough that she placed him in a group home for people with addictions. A doctor diagnosed his depression, said he had a schizoid personality disorder and put him on medication, but because residency at the home was voluntary, Shawn was free to leave. "When I took him in for his problem, they just said, 'You should be glad he's not on drugs or alcohol,'" says Liz. To her dismay Shawn rented another apartment. This time he shut his family out. Shawn chained the door, refused all visitors and disappeared into the game.

Guiding a character across the Permafrost Caverns of EverQuest makes it easy to understand how the game (concluded on page 142) Online(continued from page 93) can drain hours of a player's time. The game's structure pointedly avoids competition. There are no scores, no designated means of winning. The openended story line liberates players from following a plot, leaving them free to live through their characters. They can sit in a tavern and chat with other characters or band together to explore an ancient cavern. There are no wrong choices. The more you play, the stronger your character grows, opening even greater opportunities.

With names such as EverQuest, Ultima Online, Lineage, Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot, these are called persistent world games or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Players load software onto their computers, log on to the game server via the Internet and navigate through an enormous online 3D play space with thousands of others moonlighting as wizards, shamans and barbarians. When they log off and return to their boring lives, the game keeps going. For the most hard-core gamers, that's where things go wrong. They can't log off.

According to Sony, the average online gamer plays 14 hours a week, and others estimate some play 50 hours a week. A recent online survey revealed that 37 percent of players claimed they were addicted to the game and another 27 percent admitted they were probably addicted. One elite guild of players named Fires of Heaven requires members that "have no lives, can attend eight hours every day of raids and will never quit." Wives and girlfriends of EverQuest addicts commiserate in online forums with names such as EverQuest Widows. Here disgruntled exes and partners swap tales of living with players immersed in the game.

One recent EverQuest Widow post indicated, "I'm not ugly, stupid or selfish so I don't understand why he would choose imaginary people over me."

For Shawn Woolley, those imaginary people were his life. Imaginary money was more important than real money. Imaginary friends were more important than real friends. "He said those were his true friends and that we were not his friends anymore," Liz Woolley remembers. And then someone turned on him.

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A character named Xander remembers the first time he killed someone for fun. It began innocently enough, strolling up to another Ultima Online character, striking up a conversation. Then, for no reason at all, Xander attacked him. "That entire first evening, to me, was a real rush. I remember my heart beating. I was swaying back and forth in my chair as if on a roller coaster," he recalls in an online posting.

Meet the grief player, a gamer who exists simply to make life miserable for others. The most malicious of them form gangs, ambush unsuspecting new players, and rob and kill one another. For Xander and other grief players, it's about "looting someone even though you don't really need the items. And then hanging out and waiting for their return so you can rub it in their face. It's killing someone over and over and over again. It's coming up with clever ways to halt someone's game." A posting in the Philosophy section of one site reads, "We kill, we steal, we build our fortune, we make people crazy and we do our best to spread chaos and ill feeling. And guess what we get from all that? The greatest pleasure and satisfaction of all our players' careers."

This behavior alienated many new players, who left the game and never came back. In response, game creators altered the worlds so that players can't be attacked and hurt by other players unless they choose to play in that mode. So desperate are players for protection from each other that today only four of the 44 EverQuest servers allow players to kill other players.

That doesn't entirely spell safety. Grief players have been known to build walls around a new player to imprison him, stack shovels to climb over a wall and loot a victim's virtual home or even lure dangerous creatures toward crowds of new players. "It's this endless cat and mouse associated with creating features you think are innocent that people then find a way to use in a destructive manner," says online game pioneer Richard Garriott.

So why would someone join a game just to harass, kill and steal from others? The explanation is simple, according to Garriott. "People don't go to fantasy worlds to live a life similar to the way they do here on earth." Indeed. They enter fantasy worlds to kick ass, take names and get paid.

Shawn Woolley found this out the hard way. In his own apartment he was eager to return to EverQuest in an environment free of his mother's monitoring. He had taken a job at Papa Murphy's pizzeria to raise the cash for a computer while he continued playing EverQuest at his mother's. "I found him sneaking into my house," Woolley remembers. "He would wait until I was asleep or at work." Desperate, she tried taking the keyboard ("He bought another one," she says) and hiding the modem.

A low point in the game occurred when one of Shawn's best friends in the game turned on him one day. He stole all the virtual money and the items they had spent months amassing. "My son was totally shocked. He was upset," says Woolley. "This was a person he had trusted." Disenchanted and depressed, Shawn sobbed to his mother and even briefly stopped playing. "I thought maybe I had him back, but as with most people who leave the game, he eventually went back," she explains.

The day came when Shawn had made enough money to buy a secondhand computer. "That was the beginning of the end," his mother recalls. "He quit taking his medication. He quit going to the doctor. He wouldn't see the caseworker. He stopped cleaning his apartment. All he did was play the game."

Shawn was back. On November 11, 2001 he quit his job, locked himself in his apartment and refused to answer the telephone. His mother attempted to get in for two days before cutting through the chain lock on Thanksgiving. She found him in front of the computer, dead from a .22 caliber gunshot wound. EverQuest was on the screen. A computer log shows that Shawn had played the game virtually nonstop since quitting his job. Police reports refer to several notes pertaining to the game scattered around the room with words such as Phargun, Occuler and Cyber-nine written on them. Liz Woolley is unsure whether the words are names of characters (he had 15), friends or former friends who had betrayed him. The most telling is a character created October 30 named iluvyou.

Meanwhile, multiplayer online games grow more bloodthirsty and absorbing. Eve Online: The Second Genesis, by Simon and Schuster Interactive, is a grief player's paradise. If someone in the game is harassing you, place a bounty on his head. Assassins in the game will then go after that person to collect the reward.

Other games will continue to battle against grief players. Most games have a beta testing period, when thousands of players test the limits to uncover opportunities for scams and "exploits" before launch. But according to Haden Blackman, producer of Star Wars Galaxies, that doesn't mean much. "The problem with exploits is that testers don't report them because when they find them, they want to wait until the game goes live and use them," he says. Beta testing can be a training ground for grief players who find cheats, hacks and exploits so that when the game goes live, the griefers will be waiting, ready to unleash their campaign on unsuspecting new players.