(This article was originally published in June 2000)

You've had a hard day lying and distorting for your clients. You're one tired lawyer. You don't want to think about briefs and torts and irritable judges and missed filing deadlines. So you go home and you go online and you pick up your magic sword, your magic battle-ax, and you go to kill, to plunder, to explore, to build your legend in the sorcerous, barbaric land where you are not known as a corporate lawyer named Hymie Bupkiss…here in this virtual fantasy world you are known as Axatar—Baron of Castle Darkbone! But lo! You find that you are not to be admitted to the realm of Obtusaroth…you haven't got enough virtual gold, nor the magical power to win past the Two-Nosed Gatekeeper…So you put the game on pause, you call up a certain online company, and you transfer FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS OF REAL MONEY to some GEEK who will transfer to you the virtual game items you need to pass into the realm of Obtusaroth …Game items that the geek won, playing the game…

Not believable you say? No one would do that? But they do, you know.

Or maybe you're saying: Hey, I know people who are heavily into that shit, man; they'd totally cough up the dough if they had to…

And that's what amazes me—that anyone could think it's normal to spend thousands of dollars upgrading your place in an online role-playing game. Not paying to play the game—paying someone else to play the game for you, win some stuff that they then transfer to you.

It happens, according to the L.A. Times—and according to my sister Teresa, who plays (more sanely) one of these games herself. This isn't chat room role-playing—the player sees a virtual, three dee world on screen, and can interact with literally thousands of players roaming this vast world of many interlinked levels and villages and castles, fighting monsters and other players, making alliances, thieving, betraying.

According to Ashley Dunn at the L.A. Times, one of the most addictive online role-playing games is EverQuest—which is so addictive some players call it "EverCrack". The Times quotes a "hunter" named Ebaid who "is part of a growing wave of online game players who hunt down and collect weapons, equipment and other accessories from popular online computer games, then sell the booty to other players for up to thousands of dollars apiece."

"This is hilarious," said Ebaid, a Riverside County resident. "All it is, is data . . . But when I turn off my computer, I see cash." Ebaid and his partner made more than $6,000 in under a month selling their captured game "items" and "gold" on eBay. Buyers pay, for example, $170 alone for EverQuest's Short Sword of Ykesha, which kills monsters quicker. Some games prohibit this kind of sale but since items can be freely traded within the games, as part of the fun of playing, it's difficult to stop. The hunters are "reviled", says the Times, despite their success, probably by people who resent those who surpass them in the game purely because they've got the cash to buy items other people have to earn by cunning game play. Ebaid quit a $68,000 a year job to do this fulltime…

Sony's EverQuest is only a year old and now has more than 200,000 players. Asheron's Call, from Microsoft, has 80,000 players after a puny little five months on the market. The software is fifty bucks, plus you pay a ten-dollar monthly subscription fee. Multiply that times 200,000…That's the legit online role-playing commerce. The games' parasites can get pretty damn big-time too, like Mike Gmeinwieser and his game partner, Ben Schriefer, in Maryland who run a full-time business selling virtual gold captured from Ultima Online. They're looking at a yearly take, for now, of about $400,000 in sales. And all they do is play role-playing games all day. People pay them, of course, with credit cards. "We're one of the few Internet companies that actually makes money," Gmeinwieser said. The Times reports that their scheme is to buy gold from other Ultima Online players for about $200 for every 1 million virtual gold coins—they sell the gold on eBay in lots of 50,000 coins at a rate of about $500 per million. Gmeinwieser uses his game character to collect gold from sellers while in the game. When someone on eBay buys a shipment of gold, he again uses his game character to meet him or her at a certain time and place in the game and then hands over the gold to his customer's character. "…It's an instant-gratification world we live in," Gmeinwieser said. "To make gold in Ultima, you have to work chopping down trees, making bows and mining. People work, like, 50 hours a week in their real jobs. Who wants to go to Ultima and work more?"

"It speaks to the power of this medium that people are willing to pay for something that intrinsically is not real," said Toby Ragaini, design director for Turbine Entertainment Software Corp., the Westwood, Mass.-based developer of Asheron's Call.

EverQuest has warned that selling game gear is against the rules—players can get banned from game play. The EverQuest people are thinking of asking EBay to stop selling these virtual items—but there will always be other ways people can arrange for the transfers, so long as items can be transferred within the game.

Another problem is hunters who plant themselves in one place in the game, "killing off the same monster to "farm" a precious item and prevent others from having a chance to collect it themselves.

One hunter said that kind of behavior is only to be expected when you can make $2000 and more a week doing just that. It becomes deadly serious, and very competitive.

Teresa informs me that there's also a certain amount of virtual theft in the games. People offer to trade goods, they get the other person to make a transfer first, then they run off, within the game, without transferring the item they promised in return. It's hard to find someone who really wants to get lost in the virtual world of the game—they can leap into a sort of instant transport gate, and vanish to any number of levels. The burned player then typically goes about in a fury, sending messages to everyone they meet: "Don't play with Zanzibarius [or whomever], he's a rip-off artist!"

One Georgia attorney paid $5000 for 'magical' gear won by other people—just to give him an edge in the game. He told his wife the money went for something else. She wouldn't understand, you see…

I almost understand. I was once somewhat addicted to Doom and then Quake. Not online, just playing against my computer, but that was addictive enough. I played for hours, drove my wife crazy with it. "Are you coming to bed or not?" she'd ask, and when I did go to bed I saw Quake monsters burned into my sensorium, for a while, digital monsters appearing behind my closed eyelids, coming at me with jaws dripping…

Finally I pitched the CD Rom into the brush.

What was I addicted to? A certain frisson—a certain thrill in moving through an unfamiliar 3D environment, the thrill of coming up with a working survival strategy, solving problems—and the thrill of the kill. A kind of backbrain-connection to some ancient primeval hunter-gatherer/cave-protector instinct.

I could see how role-playing games would be even more addictive. They allow that sense of hunting through a virtual world, of exploring and triumphing, as well as adding a sense of growing identity, of accumulated 'legend', a history, a reputation…an alternate life. A place where you can be known and powerful and important—when in the real, world you're just one of the faceless masses struggling to make the rent or the mortgage.

Is all this bizarre excess a comment on our centerless, empty society—on the decadence and the meaninglessness of our so-called civilization? You bet your sack of imaginary gold coins it is. Does it show that all too many people in our lonely, entertainment-sick society ache with emptiness? You bet your magic battle ax it does.

Playing the game isn't the sickness—the sickness is in the abuse of it. My sister enjoys being a sort of wizardly healer, a wise woman in EverQuest, with a good reputation for being helpful. For her it's another point of contact with the world, with other people, as well as playtime. She keeps it in balance—she doesn't play too much and she'd never use real resources (beyond the subscription) for unreal benefits.

But for some of these people, one automatically thinks: Get a life.

They have lives, of course. They just prefer their unreal one.

And the L.A. Times reports that there are more than two-dozen new online role-playing games in the works…

Copyright © 2000 John Shirley. All Rights Reserved

John Shirley is the author of numerous works including the recently re-released, revised editions of the ECLIPSE cyberpunk trilogy, from Babbage Press, and the award winning story collection BLACK BUTTERFLIES.

Check out the Authorized John Shirley Website Here.