I’ve avoided making an entry about my newest obsession for a number of weeks now. Maybe I was hoping that if I didn’t talk about it, it somehow wouldn’t be legitimized and might be easier to conquer. Since it isn’t/wasn’t, I might as well start talking. Hey; that’s how AA meeting start, right? You’ve gotta own up to your problem before you can beat it.

My name is Jordan and I play an online mud. I can’t stop playing the online mud. I’m only going to link it once, and if you’re smart, you’ll stay far away from it. In fact, you’ll pretend you never even noticed the link. In my first four days of playing, I had managed to put in nearly 32 hours of playing time. That’s starting on a sunday afternoon to sometime mid-wednesday and I had 32 hours of solid gameplay. It’s now three weeks later and I’ve tempered myself so that I’ve only totaled something reasonable like:

Numatrix the sindar Conjuror (Heroic)
On for: 10s Gender: Male
Age: 4d 3h 46m 2s
Can be mailed: Numatrix@Havens

Umm, so let’s see, that’s 100 hours and three weeks which is 33 hours per week. That’s umm.. yeah, exactly. Ridiculous. Nearly as much as I work. Except I’ve been home sick a number of those days (no really, I actually am sick), so that’s contributed to my game hours and taken away from work hours. Like I said, this stuff is crack, stay far, far away. Did I mention there’s an auto-logoff every 30 minutes so you can’t just sit there idling for too long? Though I have to admit, I have stayed logged in while driving from location to location, timing it just right so that I could make the trip in under 30 minutes. The game has the unfortunate ‘feature’ that every time you log off you lose everything you had on you at the time (unless you rent a room in an inn and you paid for a safebox, however, every 2-4 days the entire game’s objects are reset to their starting point anyway, so nothing is permanant except your player, his skills, spells, and whatnot). That tends to fuel the addiction by making you dis-inclined to logoff.

If you’re bored with enough hours in your day to fund a seperate full-time job, then by all means play the mud. Join my clan and we’ll party ( partying is the act of joining someone’s party to go on fights on quests together ) sometime. But if you’re sane and would like to stay that way, please go on with your life feeling nothing but sympathy for me and the other poor trapped souls. I’ll leave you with a quote from an interview with one of the real hardcore players:

I’d say the mud in general has had a slightly negative effect on my real life. I kind of look at it like drinking…might not be the best thing to do, but it’s a damn good time if you don’t get too caught up in it. -Azarael

Posted by Jordan on Monday, October 13th, 2003 at 9:25 pm.