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Virtual Dopers Crave High Scores
(Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, May 25, 2004)
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. . . . "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. . . . 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. . . . "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."

[COMMENT: So how long do you think it will be before the DEA steps in. My guess is that they will eventually extent their draconian claws into cyberspace. But that may not happen until the advent of digital drugs that actually alter the consciousness of the players in a way that mimics the actual substances. Stay tuned!]

posted by LoZo 2:34 PM