Matthew Rorie isn't calling you a loser for enjoying World of Warcraft. He also isn't suggesting you send a nasty e-mail to [email protected], either.

　　I guess the moral of the story is that even though it's still just a video game, and a lot of people don't see it on the same level as real life, there are still real, flesh-and-blood people sitting there at the other end of the fiber-optic line. When you're disrespectful in an online game, you're not just being rude to a gnome warrior, or some other cartoon character. You're doing something that could be hurtful to an actual person who's controlling that avatar. It's something that's all too often forgotten just because you don't have to look that person in the eye. Yes, I'm talking to you /afking honor farmers on the Lightbringer battlegrounds, and especially all of you jerkfaces on Xbox Live.

　　Shiny, precious items...

　　Well, I, for one, am not going to have this problem anymore. Or, at least, I won't be having it in World of Warcraft. I'm done. Finished.

　　Let's begin this tale with Diablo II. I've never encountered a game as deviously compelling, or as purely addictive, as this one--especially when you throw the expansion pack into the mix. Unlike WOW, Diablo II is all about action. There are few quests to receive and few lengthy trips across the world to slow you down. There are also not many battles in excess of 60 seconds against a single enemy that's roughly as powerful as your character. Instead, the bulk of your time is spent cutting down monsters like a lawn mower. Although the game was balanced fairly well, it didn't have a massively multiplayer game's innate need for temperance when it came to doling out puissance to its players. Massively multiplayer games that went ahead and let you mow down 20 enemies at once by shooting two dozen arrows simultaneously would be nonstop chaos (especially if you had 20 characters all looking for enemies to fight), to say nothing of the performance hit you'd take on your computer. But Diablo II was never really about being challenging (although it could be on the higher difficulty levels); instead, it was all about finding those sweet, sweet items.

　　Here's how I spent the bulk of my summer in 2002. I would load up Diablo II, log in with my level-80, 300 percent Amazon specialized in the "magic find" skill, warp to level two of the Durance of Hate, find the stairs leading down, then clear out the level and kill Mephisto. That's pretty much all I did. The Mephisto run could easily be done solo, brought far less risk of death than trying to take down Diablo or Baal, and yielded great items. Precious, precious items...

　　Here's the thing: I never even cared about what I got, so long as it was good. I didn't really trade with anyone; I just liked carrying around lots of cool items. I had "mules"--alternate characters created for the sole purpose of carrying items--that would hold nothing but unique items, rare gems, cool charms, and so on. There was no point to any of it--it was all about possessing little pieces of randomly generated computer code. I was spending vast amounts of time performing a repetitive task that yielded no real-world gain. One day, I woke up and realized: "Hey, this would probably be classified as a serious addiction by a licensed psychologist." So I gave away all my stuff, posted my account logins and passwords (yes, there were multiple mule accounts--eight characters just couldn't hold it all!) in the busiest chat channel I could find, then physically broke my discs to prevent myself from reinstalling it.

　　Somehow, I guess I managed to convince myself that World of Warcraft would be different. It certainly wasn't a case of love at first sight. When I started playing it in beta, it was still a rough approximation of what it wound up being. You could only get to level 30, you could only play as the Alliance, there were no talents implemented, hunters weren't playable, and so on. So I thought it was neat, but I didn't spend a huge amount of time on it.

　　Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

　　To make a long story short, I got sucked in later. Bad. In retrospect, oddly enough, it wasn't even the items that I desired in WOW, so much as it was the cold, hard cash. Instead of running around "farming"--repeatedly killing the same monsters just so I could pick up their loot--I wanted to make money with the auction house, WOW's in-game exchange, which lets players buy and sell their items without having to broker each individual sale. So I spent endless amounts of time, both in the beta and in the real game, using my character's mining skill to run around tracking veins of ore, smelting what I mined, then selling the metal at the auction house. I didn't even take a second trade skill that had anything to do with mining. Instead, I took up skinning and sold whatever animal skins I picked up from defeated enemies for even more cash. It was about as mindless an activity as you're likely to find this side of a hamster wheel (and at least the hamster gets some exercise).

　　The thing about spending time in games like WOW is that, outside of the exceptional occurrences like meeting someone you become good friends with in real life, most of the time you spend playing will be spent doing nothing of long-term value for yourself. It seems unlikely that our generation's Proust will be writing his or her version of À la recherche du temps perdu in 40 years with an elaborate description of the time their guild took down Ragnaros, then spend another page elaborating on the fact that this was before Blizzard "nerfed" him--that is, weakened his skills and abilities for the sake of game balance--and made it so that any old guild could kill him.

　　Why you gots to make me delete you, baby?

　　It's hard to castigate people for doing something that's so obviously pleasurable to so many of them, but as I see it, there just isn't much joy in WOW or other games of its kind. I've never had the misfortune of being addicted to anything in real life (although singer-songwriter Robert Palmer, RIP, suggests otherwise), so at the risk of sounding flippant, I hesitate to compare my experience with computer games to something as destructive as a drug addiction. There's definitely the same sense, though, of spending money and time on something that does absolutely nothing for you, at least in my particular case. WOW isn't necessarily different from any other game on the market; it's the amount of time that I've invested into it that scares me. I might be able to pick up the latest Call of Duty game and take 10 hours out of my life to have a good time, but I've probably spent around six or seven hundred hours in-game with WOW, which is a time investment far, far out of proportion to the amount of actual enjoyment or memorable experiences I've had with it.

　　It's time to cut the cord. So, yes, I've gone so far this time (I've tried to quit before, but my characters were stored on the server, waiting...and watching) as to sell all my equipment, give away all my gold, destroy my mount, delete the characters, then cancel my account. One can only hope that this time I'll have the strength to stay away for good--or at least until Diablo III comes out.

　　Next Up: Freeplay by Cliff Hicks