Virtual Dopers Crave High Scores

Daniel Terdiman Email 05.25.04
In A Tale in the Desert, as in other online games, players find that they have to navigate substance-abuse issues as well as more traditional story lines.

The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.

The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug -- known as gleam -- as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to infiltrate the game's cities. And some players can't take it fast enough.

"What we wanted to do with gleam was we wanted to see how the player base would react to something that's pretty bad," said Matthew Mihaly, the CEO of Achaea publisher Iron Realms Entertainment. "It's really nasty. We didn't tell them it was addictive.... (Non-player characters) showed up and said, 'Hey, I've got this stuff here, wanna try it?' Being new, they pounced right on it."

Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly -- suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game's players are angry about gleam's introduction into their world.

But this was hardly the first instance of substance abuse in online games. Indeed, many online games are themselves strongly habit-forming. After EverQuest players became known for 80-hour weekly binges, some began calling the game by the sardonic moniker, EverCrack. These days, there's even a blog on which people can share their stories of watching loved ones disappear into an EverQuest black hole.

Beyond that, though, several multiplayer games, as well as traditional role-playing games like Fallout and Ground Zero, have elements of substance abuse that affect characters, and often, even players themselves.

In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel across the game's wide three-dimensional globe.

Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die. If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within 29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.

Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short enough that even the hard-core couldn't keep up. According to Andy Tepper, the game's lead designer, 18 players' characters have died from addiction to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game's history. Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A Tale in the Desert, a character's death is final. It means starting over from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing potion.

So why would a designer put something into a game that would kill off its customers?

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