Ever Quest

EverQuest is a popular (maybe the most popular) commercial MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineRolePlayingGame? (MMORPG) In EverQuest, a player takes on the persona of a character in a fictional DungeonsAndDragons-style universe. Thousands of other players are in the same universe, and you can interact with them and with non-player characters.

Players have a first-person view of the action. The universe is rendered in 3D. Some of it looks crude, and some of it looks pretty good. Spell-casting characters generate cool special effects.

There is no real goal to the game, other than to have fun. Your character starts out with little skill or wealth, but you can acquire both by exploring the world, receiving training from masters, selling handmade goods, fighting monsters, and taking part in quests.

Many players of the game are online twenty or more hours per week, leading some to refer to the games as "EverCrack", an allusion to the destructive effects of addiction to crack cocaine.

EverQuest Addiction is a real phenomenon caused, perhaps, by the game providing an ever present need to progress further. It could also be caused by the fact that people like to see incremental progress in a measurable way - something that's not available to most people during their regular daily life in the real world.

It can lead to diminished social contact, although I would suggest that more extreme claims about the consequences of this condition may have a deeper rooted cause. At the same time, while social contact "in person" may be diminished, many players find an increase in overall interaction with other humans, albeit in an online medium. Online games provide a unique opportunity for participants to meet and interact with other people, though they may be heavily introverted in real life. It also has the side effect of broadening your social horizons, since the people you meet online are expressed more solidly in their feelings, ideas, and viewpoints; as opposed to the traditional first impressions of physical interaction. Online, you don't worry about what race, gender, or appearance someone has - you interact with them on the more meaningful level of "who they are."

Others find the game to be uninteresting and tedious.

Tedious is the operative word!!

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest maybe we can move this page there

see also Engineering EverQuest from IEEE Spectrum July 2005 http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705eq.html

CategoryGame