One of my friends is quitting EQLive

[Windcatcher]

I ran into a friend tonight and he told me that he's quitting. Selling off his items, getting rid of his toon, the whole smash. This served as quite a shock to me, since for months he has been trying to convince me to get another account and begin playing again. Fending off his pleas to start anew had become a chore.

When I asked him the reason for the sudden change, he didn't seem too happy about it. Apparently his wife put the proverbial foot down. :P He was spending too much time on the game. As soon as he got home from work, on he was, and he'd stay on long past when he should be in bed for work the next day. When he wasn't playing it he was thinking about it. We all know the story, and I'm sure many of us have lived it. Thousands (maybe tens of thousands) don't call it EverCrack for nothing.

My first response: "GOOD: you'll be a better man for it". We all know the story about how this game can suck people in. I quit playing because I got sucked in. I was playing till after sunrise on the weekends, playing as soon as I got home from work, eating dinner at my desk, and so on. I'm not married, so I could get away with such things, but I missed a whole lot of life on the way. I'm out of EQLive now, and I'm writing a lot more, spending weekends at the gym, and am all around happier. I look forward to springtime with great anticipation.

One thought I took away from my conversation with him tonight was what this behavior says about life. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it seems that our eagerness to embrace an alternate life, even a virtual one, represents a severe indictment of reality. When I played EQLive, stories abounded about how certain people, who were the sweetest, nicest, seemingly most well-adjusted people ingame had serious problems and voids in real life.

I can't help but shudder and wonder, have we lost something, as a people, as a culture, that drives us to escape our existence? I think there is something that we lack, and that we desire, but I don't know what it is. I'm presently writing a book, a fictional story, and I'm acutely aware that it takes place in a fantasy world. Part of that is simply because I like fantasy in general, but I can't help but look at the popularity of fantasy and wonder how much of it stems from our need to escape, and what is driving us to want to.