A few months ago, I stopped logging into Everquest
entirely for a little while. It wasn't so much a conscious
decision to quit as the end result of a gradual decrease in
interest in the game. Part of this decrease in interest was
because most of my on line friends had already wandered off to
other things.
It was at about that time that I started putting this website together. Also I started reading again, practicing my juggling more, and I started running two or three times a week. In retrospect, I'm surprised at how much more time I have in my life now that I'm spending a lot less of my life on line.
Keep in mind, the whole time I've played Everquest I have pretty much considered myself to be a casual player. After a few months of playing almost every night, I made a big effort to keep my play time down to three times a week or less, and I almost always logged off by midnight at the latest. This may sound like a lot of play time to some, but many of my on line friends were putting in much more time on the game than I was. I even knew a few people who put in an average of more than 40 hours a week, making Everquest the equivalent of a second full time job. I gave myself a lot of credit for keeping my play time down to perhaps half that much.
So, now that I'm no longer quite so involved, does my experience with EQ lead me to believe that today's primitive version of Virtual Reality is addicting (as has been claimed in a number of news stories)? I have a feeling this question will be hotly debated in the not so distant future as VR experiences become more and more advanced and compelling.
Like most people, I do feel that the term "addiction" is seriously overused. By some definitions, any activity can be considered an addiction when excessive participation starts to negatively affect normal day to day activities. I personally find this definition to be rather suspect, since it can be argued that any time spent doing something for pure enjoyment takes time away from more productive activities. Therefore, we should only spend our time doing things which are "good for us" (I know people who actually think this way, and they really get on my nerves). Also, as I mentioned earlier, most of my online friends eventually got bored with Everquest and moved on to something else. To the best of my knowledge, few people ever quit taking Heroin because they just plain lost interest in it.
Still, I look back on the time I spent playing Everquest and I can't help but think that I got sucked further into it than I had really intended. For a period of a year or more, EQ was my escape from reality, and for a good part of that time I had to make a conscious decision to limit my play time in order to keep it from taking over my life.
In a way, Virtual Reality is little different from the myriad of other distractions which are available to us in modern society. Television in particular comes to mind as being much like VR in its ability to distract people from participation in their own lives. It could be argued that at least VR invites participation and interactivity instead of the pure passiveness of TV. And no doubt before there was TV many people argued that reading books was a waste of time -and if the label had been in vogue at the time, I'm sure many would have argued that escaping reality via excessive reading was a form of addiction. I think that people will always seek to escape reality, and I think this is part of human nature and not necessarily a bad thing at all.
However, the fact that VR is such a compelling form of escape, even in its primitive beginnings as embodied in today's on line games -this does worry me more than a little. I'm not sure how much VR is going to impact society. Certainly, TV has not done much good to our level of physical fitness and our ability to interact with our fellow humans, I can hardly see VR as being much more positive (although at least people may learn how to interact on line).
Only time will tell how things will develop. One thing I am sure of though from my own experiences - you don't want to let VR sneak up on you, or you could just find your website faultering, your juggling skills rusting up, and your butt expanding from lack of exercise to fill up the chair you are glued into while you are trying to get just one more level before you go to bed with the wife who already fell asleep without you over an hour ago.