Basically, the only way to see the end game content is to "raid" it. You need a force of more than just a group of friends to take the bosses down. When I quit EQ, we had 72 man raids, although I hear it's been increased since then. So if you want to "win" the game, get the uber loots, etc., you have to be part of a raiding guild. You & your buddies can't do it alone. Although the way the games are designed, there is no end of the game, there is no winner. You just have the best shinys.
A bunch of friends and myself play quite a few games regually, mainly first person shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield etc) and quite often host lan parties between friends or go to big competitions. Nothing is taken too seriously in the lan parties, usually a bit of offensive banter between beers and cigarette breaks., However the competitions we go to are rediculous. 100+ people in a hall for 3 consecutive days starts to get a little intense, and there are people screaming at one another, calling bullshit left right and center, and one another trying to take each other outside for punchups's. Quite amusing actually considering some of these guys would be blown over with a strong gust of wind.
Cheating in video games (and trolling in general) is barely a step above killing pets in the hierarchy of indicators of sociopathy. Knife to the head was a totally justified pre-emptive strike. Hopefully it rewired his brain to be less of a Ted Bundy in training.
This isn't really any worse than people getting into fights over the rules of beer pong, or whether you tapped the cue ball while playing pool. And, it's not much different than people who get too worked up over drama at work or with their friends. It's just people who don't have enough meaningful stuff in their life, so they end up assigning too much value to things that don't really matter.
<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage</a> And some folks go to un-fucking-believable lengths to do such things. I'm not going to lie, I've put some serious hours into games, but never 18 hour sittings. Fuck me, the group in the article wasn't even successful. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/08/pandemonium-war/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/08/pandemonium-war/</a> First paragraph says it all.
What I find to be completely incomprehensible about some of these online games is people spending real money to buy virtual property. Literally tens of thousands of dollars to buy something that exists only on a server somewhere.
While I wouldn't either and it is somewhat boggling to me too, one thing to keep in mind is that "money" is mostly something that just exists on a server somewhere too so I can start to understand why trading one virtual good for another is less bizarre to some people.
Is it any less crazy than buying stock in a company? There are millions of intangible goods out there for sale. As long as there's a market for it, it will alway be around.
The games themselves are virtual property. And, I've spent money on expansion packs for games. This is pretty comprehensible. What I don't get is people who spend money on mother fracking Mafia Wars. Random people on my Facebook feed are seriously fucking into Mafia Wars. They post requests for people to fight/hit list turds that pissed them off and act like it's an actual matter of honor to fight back. I get that some games really draw people in, but you think the spell would be broken when you embed the game within another giant waste of time like Facebook. Whenever someone posts a "please fight this guy" message, I always troll them. "Why?" seems to do really well.
Speaking of World of Warcraft and the such.. anybody seen Second Skin? It's a documentary about a handful of MMO addicts (WoW, EverQuest), and how they live their lives. Some pretty ridiculous stories. Use to be on Hulu, but any major torrent site will have it. Or you can buy it from the site, like I did. NSFW april fools. isohunt.com ftw.