Lost in an Online Fantasy World

That dedication sometimes pushes Mapes to see the game as more of a chore than a pastime. "Sometimes I realize that I'm not having any fun, but I just can't stop," he said.

Several of the MMO researchers interviewed for this story pointed out that many game companies employ psychologists who analyze the games and suggest ways to make them easier to play over long stretches of time.

Della Rocca argues that because online games' monthly subscription rates remain constant regardless of how many hours a subscriber spends on the network, developers profit less when gamers play more intensively.

The psychologists "monitor subjects playing the games in order to eliminate flaws and points of frustration," Della Rocca said. "The notion that we are trying to seduce gamers is a fabrication of people who don't understand how games are developed."

Since Blizzard Entertainment released WoW in 2004, calls to Online Gamers Anonymous have more than tripled, according to Woolley, who said the industry is directly at fault for the suffering of the people she tries to help.

"I think the game companies are nothing more than drug pushers," she said. "If I was a parent, I wouldn't let them in my house. It's like dropping your kids off at a bar and leaving them there."

The signs of excessive MMO use are similar to those of alcoholism or any other dependency -- tolerance, withdrawal, lying or covering up, to name a few. However, many in the industry are hesitant to call it an addiction because, in the case of MMOs, the nature of the problem is based on how it affects the user's life, not the amount of time spent playing.

According to tvturnoff.org, Americans spend an average of 28 hours a week watching television, a fact that has yet to spawn a bevy of dependence clinics.

"If a person was reading novels excessively, we'd be less likely to call that 'addiction' because we value reading as culture," said the University of Illinois's Williams. "We see game play as frivolous due to our Protestant work ethic. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there to suggest this is a problem, but it's not the role of science to guess or bet."

Mapes, who has played other engrossing titles such as Medal of Honor and Diablo and eventually set them aside, said the decision to control excessive gaming is one any player can make.

"Ultimately, every player has a choice to stop," he said. "I've stopped before, and I've seen other people stop if they get burned out."

'No One Was Talking About It'

Woolley disagrees, especially after witnessing the bitter outcome of her son's Everquest obsession.

Shawn had played online games before, so she didn't suspect anything different when he picked up the newest MMO from Sony. Within months, Woolley said, Shawn withdrew from society, losing his job and apartment and moving back home to live a virtual life he found more fulfilling.

After a number of game-induced grand mal seizures sent Shawn, who was epileptic, to the emergency room repeatedly, he chose to pay ambulance bills rather than stop playing. The medical professionals he saw treated his external symptoms but dismissed his gaming condition.

"They told me, 'Be glad he's not addicted to something worse, like drugs,' and sent him home," Woolley said.

On Thanksgiving Day 2001, Woolley found 21-year-old Shawn dead in front of  his computer after having committed suicide. Everquest was on the screen.

Readers' responses to an article written about the incident in a local Wisconsin paper poured in, and the national attention Shawn's story subsequently received prompted Woolley to start up a self-help Web site. In the four years since its launch, Online Gamers Anonymous (http://www.olganon.org/) has had 125 million hits and registered more than 2,000 members, Woolley said.

"I realized that gaming addiction was an underground epidemic affecting thousands of people, but no one was talking about it," she said. "I wasn't worried about pressure from the gaming industry. I thought, 'You already took my kid, you can't take anything else.'"