MemeMachineGo!

Boing Boing linked to the Everquest Daily Grind recently, chock full of heartbreaking accounts of addiction to the Everquest MMORPG , most of them from the ‘widows/widowers’ of the addicts, some from the addicts themselves.

Well its been about 7 months since I left my husband. After a while the anger and hate is less but you still feel the hurt and pain. He wants me to come back, and to give him another chance but i feel so torn. I still dont trust him after him had that little fling, but he wants me to give him another chance. I dont know I just feel so torn apart. Its like I know I shouldnt go back. theres always that ‘what if’ you know… what if things go back to the way they were, what if he starts spending 10+ hours on the pc again,what if he… he meets someone else and decides to have a fling again, what if… I dont want to go through all that again, and I sure as hell dont want my son living in that kind of inviorment again. But I do want him to have a daddy.

There were a lot more there, but most have been taken down — apparently the site had been posting them without explicit permission and realized this was bad.

Some people get testy about the use of ‘addiction’ to apply to things other than substance abuse, but if you compare and contrast the behaviors of, say, computer game addicts, and their effects on their lives and relationships, you won’t see much difference (other than the direct physical effects of substance abuse.) But call it an OCD if you prefer.

All of which leads me to this: I dipped back into Civilization III (henceforth Civ3) this weekend.

In Civ3, one begins in 4000 BC with a single settler and a worker, maybe a scout, depending on which civilization one’s playing. You explore, research new technology, build cities, construct the Wonders of the World, conduct diplomacy, and wage war progressing from ancient to modern times and slightly beyond, ultimately, building a spaceship destined for Alpha Centauri (one of several means of victory.)

One of the things that’s so compulsive about it is that there’s so much going on at any given time that there’s almost always something exciting just around the corner. Discovering a new technology that lets you build new city improvements, or military units, or a wonder of the world. Finishing a mine or a road or a railroad that’ll boost your production. Waging a war. Circumnavigating the world, making contact with new civilizations, maybe even finding unsettled land.

It’s compelling enough to have inspired multiple fan sites like Civ Fanatics and Apolyton where you can find dozens of articles on strategy including amazing reverse engineering of the algorithms governing game behavior, e.g. :

Corruption calculations do not use Euclidean geometry, nor unit movement points, to get distance. Instead, the distance is based on the shortest path, where each orthogonal move costs 1.0 and each diagonal move costs 1.5. Another way of writing the distance formula is Distance = max(x,y) + 0.5*min(x,y), where x and y are the distance in the NW/SE and NE/SW directions, respectively.

(And there’s lots more where that came from.)

I don’t spend much time playing computer games. And that’s because I have a dangerous weakness for them. As an undergrad, I deleted Tetris from my computer, and I’ve installed and deleted Nethack a dozen times over the years. And I’ve uninstalled Civ3 (and Civ2 before it) in the past.

Lost weekend is an exaggeration. Lost Saturday would be much less of one: I did go to the Farmer’s Market , make chili for dinner, spend time with Pocahontas when she got home from work. But pretty much the rest of the day was occupied by the Americans conquering the world — mostly culturally and technologically, with just one wee bit of a war to capture some Aztec cities. (See, they had coal. I wanted it. In Civ3, I engage in many behaviors I would consider reprehensible with non-virtual lives at stake.)

I can’t remember the last time I spent that much time at the computer in one day. And I’m a great big geek.

I’ve been writing long letters back and forth with Jimcat who knows the game well and has been generously and patiently fielding newbie questions (Civ3 has spent much more time uninstalled on my machines than installed, and it’s a complex game — there’s a lot I don’t know.)

But I’ll have to meter my playing time. Not more than an hour a day, say. Well, maybe just one more turn…