Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin Page A

it was a case of trying to recreate that thrill.’
    Edmond, who lives in Alberta, USA, and his friends attempted to recreate the thrill by chasing ‘world firsts.’
    ‘When the game’s next chapter launched, we set our alarm clocks for three in the morning, in order to wake up before school to play,’ he says. ‘Wanting to be the best, and wanting our guild to be the first , is what motivated me. It was exciting to reach an encounter and figure out how to beat it so you could say you were the first guys to do so. Not only were you praised for your speed by others, but you had the enjoyment of figuring out how to beat the challenge.’
    Edmond was a keen sportsman and musician at school, but the thrill of acquiring a world first in World of Warcraft offered, he says, a far greater buzz than ‘beating another group of sixteen-year-old kids from a small town.’ Edmond was an accomplished student. He was active in the science fair and regularly entered national school jazz band competitions. But something about competing on an international scale within World of Warcraft offered a greater thrill than anything he had yet experienced.
    ‘I was into spreadsheets and mathematics, so I did a lot of the strategising for the group,’ he says. ‘I loved trying to find the optimal solution to a problem. I could use logic, math, and problem-solving, and I could find answers that would cause people all over the world to change the way in which they approached the game. To be admired by so many people was a great feeling. It started to get more serious once I took on more of a role in the guild. We were popular in this online world, and the power and attention was an amazing feeling for a sixteen-year-old kid from a small town.’
    As Edmond’s role in the guild expanded and he developed leadership qualities, he found that the way in which he interacted with others outside of the game began to subtly shift.
    ‘It was hard for a shy kid like me to stand up and boss people around,’ he says. ‘As I started to develop this assertiveness, it caused me some problems at school as I went from somebody people listened to and respected in the game world to just another kid in a sea of schoolchildren. At that age it was really hard to keep both worlds separate. It was easy to want to value the game world more than the real world as I felt more appreciated there.
    Powergaming is the pursuit of the time-rich, the domain of students and the unemployed, those who are able to dedicate the swaths of time necessary to master the game and then maintain their mastery. But this approach to playing games also demandsa certain type of player, the kind of human who can maintain focus on a single goal at the expense of all others. For Edmond, the dedication he gave reflects the part of his personality that wants to compete and to become the best.
    For Boyle, however, the obsession reflects something that he views as a negative aspect of his personality.
    ‘It was an absolute loss of time,’ he says. ‘I took nothing good away from it. Instead I lost several years of my life I could have done something else with. It was a cause of concern and disgust for my family, like a bad drug addiction where you would sacrifice nearly everything for the monthly subscription and Internet access. Those days were far from glamorous, and what money was made from playing got dumped back into the games to fuel the addiction. It took boredom for me to finally break the cycle.’
    While many powergamers set aside the pursuit of in-game excellence as they grow older and the demands of adulthood squeeze free time and energy, the inner mentality developed through these experiences is not so easily discarded.
    ‘To this day I still enjoy playing games at the top tier,’ says Edmond. ‘When you’re just a casual player you muddle through. When you’re at the top level, you have to experiment and truly understand the concepts. This gives you more freedom in a way. Most