By Peter JacksonContributing Writer
Immortalitas just killed a “dredge striker,” and it wasn’t pretty. After taking two fireballs to its slimy belly, the worm-like beast fell flailing onto the bleak landscape.
Cyber-scape might be a better word. Immortalitas is a magician in “World of Warcraft,” a popular online video game in which players take on roles as priests, warriors and knights, and set out for online glory. On the world of Earth, Immortalitas goes by the name Alex Neckar.
Three nights a week, the McCormick freshman and 30-odd teammates, or guild members, set out on cooperative “raids” into dungeons teeming with monsters and bosses to kill so they can gain experience and “level up.”
Immortalitas is at level 60, the current maximum. It took 1,848 hours of playing for Neckar to attain that status.
Back in the real world, Neckar’s roommates poke fun at the amount of time he spends playing online. He and other Northwestern players like to keep quiet about their habit, fearing social stigma might ensue. Some former players were too skittish to be interviewed. Others joked they would never “level up” in the world of dating if their hobby became public.
But they certainly aren’t the only people playing. In early September, Blizzard, the game’s maker, said 7 million people worldwide were paying between $13 and $15 per month to climb the online rungs. Next month, the company expects most players will spend another $40 for an expansion called “The Burning Crusade” that will enlarge the game’s territory and raise the level cap to 70.
The game is now the biggest business in online role-playing games, which is the video game industry’s largest sector. And it isn’t just big business for Blizzard.
Some players, known unofficially as “Chinese gold farmers,” slaughter heaps of relatively weak monsters for hours at a time in hopes of collecting rare items from their online carcasses. They can then trade the items such as a jewel-encrusted scabbard or a cursed amulet for gold in the game’s cities.
Farmers then auction the “gold” on eBay.com or sell it in backdoor deals. A good day’s work, Neckar and gaming Web sites say, can go for $166 or more.
Many of the farmers work for foreign corporations that profit by employing cheap labor in countries like Malaysia and China and then selling the gold to American buyers.
Some players manage to avoid total immersion in the game.
“Before college I played about an hour a day, ” McCormick freshman Jason Erickson said. “But now I rarely have time because of work.”
For others the game has blurred the border between the online and offline worlds.
When one avid player died of a stroke, her online friends decided to hold an in-game funeral featuring her character for buddies who couldn’t attend the real-world event. A guild called “Serenity Now” crashed the event, killing the mourners and the late woman’s online likeness. They then put video of the massacre on YouTube.com.
Neckar said he tries not to let the game consume his life.
“With some guilds, World of Warcraft actually has to be your life, and it’s considered bad if you miss a game,” he said. “Mine’s not that way.”
Reach Peter Jackson at [email protected].
