http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/mar02/31536.asp
Death of a game addict
Ill Hudson man took own life after long hours on Web
By STANLEY A. MILLER II
of the Journal Sentinel staff
Last Updated: March 30, 2002
Shawn Woolley loved an online computer game so much that he played it just minutes before his suicide.
EverQuest
EverQuest is played by more than 400,000 people worldwide.
The 21-year-old Hudson man was addicted to EverQuest, says his mother, Elizabeth Woolley of Osceola. He sacrificed everything so he could play for hours, ignoring his family, quitting his job and losing himself in a 3-D virtual world where more than 400,000 people worldwide adventure in a never-ending fantasy.
On Thanksgiving morning last year, Shawn Woolley shot himself to death at his apartment in Hudson. His mother blames the game for her son's suicide. She is angry that Sony Online Entertainment, which owns EverQuest, won't give her the answers she desires. She has hired an attorney who plans to sue the company in an effort to get warning labels put on the games.
"It's like any other addiction," Elizabeth Woolley said last week. "Either you die, go insane or you quit. My son died."
In the virtual world of EverQuest, players control their characters through treasure-gathering, monster-slaying missions called quests. Success makes the characters stronger as they interact with other players from all over the real world.
Woolley has tried tracing her son's EverQuest identity to discover what might have pushed him over the edge. Sony Online cites its privacy policy in refusing to unlock the secrets held in her son's account.
She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun." "Occuler." "Cybernine." But Woolley is not sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests.
"Shawn was playing 12 hours a day, and he wasn't supposed to because he was epileptic, and the game would cause seizures," she said. "Probably the last eight times he had seizures were because of stints on the computer."
Woolley knows her son had problems beyond EverQuest, and she tried to get him help by contacting a mental health program and trying to get him to live in a group home. A psychologist diagnosed him with depression and schizoid personality disorder, symptoms of which include a lack of desire for social relationships, little or no sex drive and a limited range of emotions in social settings.
"This fed right into the EverQuest playing," Woolley said. "It was the perfect escape."
Vulnerable to addiction
Jay Parker, a chemical dependency counselor and co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, Wash., said Woolley's mental health problems put him in a category of people more likely to be at risk of getting addicted to online games.
Parker said people who are isolated, prone to boredom, lonely or sexually anorexic are much more susceptible to becoming addicted to online games. Having low self-esteem or poor body image are also important factors, he said.
"The manufacturer of EverQuest purposely made it in such a way that it is more intriguing to the addict," Parker said. "It could be created in a less addictive way, but (that) would be the difference between powdered cocaine and crack cocaine."
Parker doesn't make the narcotics analogy lightly. One client - a 21-year-old college student - stopped going to class within eight weeks after he started playing EverQuest his senior year.
After playing the game for 36 hours straight, he had a psychotic break because of sleep deprivation, Parker said.
"He thought the characters had come out of the game and were chasing him," Parker said. "He was running through his neighborhood having hallucinations. I can't think of a drug he could have taken where he would have disintegrated in 15 weeks."
Common warning signs
There are several questions people who think they are addicted to computers and the Internet can ask themselves to see whether they might have a problem, Parker said, including whether they can predict the amount of time they spend on the computer or have failed trying to control their computer use for an extended period of time.
Parker said that any traumatic setback to Shawn Woolley's character in EverQuest could have traumatized an already vulnerable young man.
It may be that the character was slain in combat and Woolley had trouble recovering him. Or, he could have lost a treasured artifact or massive wealth, or been cast out of one of the game's social clubs, called guilds.
"The social component is big because it gives players a false sense of relationships and identity," Parker said. "They say they have friends, but they don't know their names."
Elizabeth Woolley remembers when her son was betrayed by an EverQuest associate he had been adventuring with for six months. Shawn's online brother-in-arms stole all the money from his character and refused to give it back.
"He was so upset, he was in tears," she said. "He was so depressed, and I was trying to say, 'Shawn, it's only a game.' I said he couldn't trust those people."
Sony Online Entertainment declined to comment for this story, but EverQuest fans say the game is a fun diversion that is much better than watching television.
'It's like an adult playground'
Donna Cox of Schaumburg, Ill., has played for about two years and enjoys the adventuring and socializing. Cox and her husband, Bob, play together and team up against the game's challenges.
"It's like an adult playground," said Donna Cox, a professional who manages a team of computer programmers. "You can become anything you want. People only see the side of you that you want them to see."
Cox played about 40 hours a week at the height of her gaming but now plays only a couple of times a week. "Once you get into the high-end game, it takes a a lot of time," she said.
Dody Gonzales of Milwaukee has played the game for about three years and has more than a dozen characters spread across the EverQuest realm. Gonzales, who plays about four hours a night, knows EverQuest has been blamed for people's problems because it's a topic discussed in the online community.
Said player Vincent Frederico of Rochester, N.Y.: "It's almost like a drug. If you are not happy with your real life, you can always go in. . . . Someone who lacks social skills, they could find it much easier just to play the game instead of going out to a bar."
A game without end
How does it pull people in?
One key component is that the game can be played indefinitely, and there are always people populating the online world. EverQuest and other online games also have a social structure.
"The graphics are absolutely thrilling. They just haul you in," said Parker, who has treated several people for EverQuest addiction. "The other piece is that it takes time to leave the game. You have to find a place to hide to get out, and that makes people want to play longer."
For people who are unhappy, socially awkward or feel unattractive, online games provide a way to reinvent themselves.
Shawn Woolley - who was overweight, worked in a pizza restaurant and lived alone in an apartment the last months of his life - may have depended on EverQuest to provide the life he really wanted to live.
"People like to create new personas," Parker said. "You see a lot of gender-bending."
Hooked on 'EverCrack'
Interest in online games grew in 1997 with Origin Systems' Ultima Online, now with about 225,000 players. Microsoft's Asheron's Call, with around 100,000 subscribers, provides a virtual world similar to EverQuest's. Most online games require an initial software purchase plus monthly fees of about $10.
The games have roots in Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing game created in 1974 by TSR Games in Lake Geneva. But D&D requires human contact to play; its digital counterparts do not.
David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, said many EverQuest players refer to it as "EverCrack."
Walsh, who didn't know the details of Woolley's suicide, thinks mental health problems linked to playing online games, especially EverQuest, are growing.
"Could a person get so engrossed that they become so distressed and distraught that it could put them over the edge?" Walsh said. "It probably has something to do with the game. But your average person or average gamer won't do this. It's a coming together of a number of circumstances."
Walsh and Parker both said online games as a whole are not inherently bad, and Walsh compared playing online games to drinking alcohol. Both can be harmful if abused.
A call for warning labels
"I've seen a lot of wreckage because of EverQuest," Parker said. "But they are all the same. It's like cigarettes. They need to come with a warning label. 'Warning, extensive playing could be hazardous to your health.' "
Warning labels are exactly what Jack Thompson, a Miami attorney and vocal critic of the entertainment industry, wants to result from a lawsuit he plans to file against Sony Online Entertainment for Elizabeth Woolley.
"We're trying to whack them with a verdict significantly large so that they, out of fiscal self-interest, will put warning labels on," he said. "We're trying to get them to act responsibly. They know this is an addictive game."
"I am sure we are going to find things akin to the tobacco industry memos where they say nicotine is addictive," he said. "There is a possibility of a class-action lawsuit."
John Kircher, a professor at Marquette University Law School and expert in personal injury law, said a negligence action might be won if plaintiffs could successfully argue EverQuest's publishers "should have foreseen an unreasonable risk of harm, that people could potentially hurt themselves.
"Then there is the issue of First Amendment rights," Kircher said. "Does the First Amendment right trump the rights of the plaintiff? If the Internet is a form of publication . . . there is a balance the courts try to strike, and it's not an easy question."
Journal Sentinel correspondent Joe Winter contributed to this story.
EverQuest's Web site is everquest.station.sony.com. The Web site for the National Institute on Media and the Family is www.mediaandthefamily.org. Internet/Computer Addiction Services is at www.icaservices.com.
