Online Treachery

The 21-year-old had been evicted from his previous apartment after he sequestered himself to play the game. “He stayed in his apartment from July until the end of September,” explains his mother, Liz Wolley. “All he did was play. He didn’t work. He quit buying food. He wasn’t bathing.” Without an income, he was forced to move in with his mother, where he reimmersed himself in EverQuest, staying up for days. His obsessive playing concerned his mother enough that she placed him in a group home for people with addictions. A doctor diagnosed his depression, said he had a schizoid personality disorder and put him on medication, but because residency at the home was voluntary, Shawn was free to leave. “When I took him in for his problem, they just said, ‘You should be glad he’s not on drugs or alcohol,’” says Liz. To her dismay Shawn rented another apart

Shawn Woolley found this out the hard way. In his own apartment he was eager to return to EverQuest in an environment free of his mother’s monitoring. He had taken a job at Papa Murphy’s pizzeria to raise the cash for a computer while he continued playing EverQuest at his mother’s. “I found him sneaking into my house,” Woolley remembers. “He would wait until I was asleep or at work.” Desperate, she trued taking the keyboard (“He bought another one,” she says) and hiding the modem.

A low point in the game occurred when one of Shawn’s best friends in the game turned on him one day. He stole all the virtual money and the items they had spent months amassing. “My son was totally shocked. He was upset,” says Woolley. “This was a person he had trusted.” Disenchanted and depressed, Shawn sobbed to his mother and even briefly stopped playing. “I thought maybe I had him back, but as with most people who leave the game, he eventually went back,” she explains.

Guiding a character across the Permafrost Caverns of EverQuest makes it easy to understand how the game can drain hours of a player’s time. The game’s structure pointedly avoids competition. There are no scores, no designated means of winning. The open-ended story line liberates players from following a plot, leaving them free to live through their characters. They can sit in a tavern and chat with other characters or band together to explore an ancient cavern. There are no wrong choices. The more you play, the stronger you character grows, opening even greater opportunities.

Some topics in this essay:
Ultima Online, Papa Murphy’s, Shawn Woolley, Liz Wolley, Shawn November, Caverns EverQuest, Age Camelot, Liz Woolley, Wars Galaxies, Schuster Interactive, grief players, shawn woolley, woolley remembers, multiplayer online, ultima online, names everquest, liz woolley, beta testing, unsuspecting players, online role-playing,