<< EVERQUEST CREATES A TRAIL OF CYBERWIDOWS
By Joe Salkowski
Tribune Media Services
February 5, 2001
Cheated on? You're in good company. Left in the lurch for someone with more money? Hey, it happens.
Sure, it hurts being lied to, locked out or just flat dumped. But you can take comfort in knowing you're one of many who have been though the same thing.
But what if you lose your lover to a video game? That's what happened to Manda Erickson, a 24-year-old mother from Chippewa Falls, Wis. She says her fiance, the father of her 7-month-old daughter, has abandoned her for a Net-connected game called EverQuest. Is she exaggerating? You decide.
She says her fiance stays logged into the fantasy role-playing game for as many as 20 hours a day, leaving her and her daughter alone at the dinner table and everywhere else. He was in the delivery room for the girl's birth. But he brought along a laptop computer so he could help a less-experienced player kill something called "Dorn."
"My fiance and I have no relationship," Erickson says. "I speak, he grunts. I ask him to do something, I do it myself. I want to go back to work, but I do not trust him alone with our daughter, simply because when I am here she will be crying and he will not do anything about it."
She may feel alone, but only in real life. Online, sad to say, she has got plenty of company. There's Mel, a 31-year-old Seattle resident who's convinced her live-in boyfriend cares more about EverQuest than he does about her. And Dee, 20, who cries herself to sleep while her boyfriend spends his nights jacked into the game. And Gidel, who moved from Europe to the United States to spend time with someone she met playing the game herself.
She returned home after he refused to move their relationship offline. "Four days ago I asked him to choose between me and EQ," she wrote. "He has been on EQ ever since." They call themselves EverQuest widows. When they can find a few free minutes at the computer, they get together in online discussion groups to swap stories.
"My fiance has never had any other addictions," Erickson wrote. "Before EQ, he was hardly on the computer at all." The story is the same for others among the 250,000 people who pay $9.95 a month to play EverQuest, an online fantasy.
Players direct elves, gnomes and other characters through fantasy lives in a massive online world they share with tens of thousands of people at a time. Like most addictions, you can't win at EverQuest--you just buy in deeper and deeper.
There's no ultimate battle in which you kill something, trumpets play and you get on with your life. Rather, the goal is simply to build a good "life," gaining experience, buying equipment and keeping a step ahead of everyone else.
That takes time--and lots of it. Fans of such games praise their social aspect, and with good reason. They create a unique environment where people can meet like-minded souls and share experiences. But for someone who has friends and family, the fantasy world of EverQuest--"EverCrack," as some widows call it--can cause serious problems. >>
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