Dangerous Obsession

Salon e-zine has a new piece titled Life, Death, and Everquest. It concerns a massively multiplayer game which provides thousands of people with an alternative place and life to live. A typical Everquest player spends 10-20 hours a week in the game, and some fall into an addiction that puts them there for most of their waking hours. The article describes the virtual suicide of a player in the game and the communal, virtual mourning (and non-virtual detective work) that followed.

So... here's a tool so powerful that we have to worry about it affecting people too much...unlike most educational strategies where the instructional signal is barely heard above the noise of real life. If we had an educational simulation of the electoral process, or of life in a globally overwarmed world, or of the antebellum South, wouldn't it be great to have even half this much engagement?