Gamesite to SW Designer One on One

CGOnline was able to crawl through the ventilation system at Verant Headquarters to nail Ralph Koster, designer working on Star Wars Galaxies, for an in-depth interview discussing many of the aspects belonging to an MMORPG in general, including this almighty Thor’s Hammer, the addiction element:

Q: Why are these games so addictive, and is there a danger here?

A: I’ve always been of two minds about it. I’m not all down on it—I’ve seen too many people who came to the mud or MMORPG world and became addicted to it because they had real life problems, only to find that life in the virtual world can be every bit as real, emotionally and socially speaking. And they often learned the tools they needed to cope with their problems in real life. So I do believe that it can be therapeutic to go through that experience, if it’s a self-limiting one. I also believe that if you are forming real ties to other people online, well, they are still ties, and you can become just as emotionally attached to an online friend as to one in the flesh. Who are we to say that one friendship is more valuable or important than the other?

On a social tangent:
This is probably the most controversial topic in an MMORPG. How real are the online friendships? For me, I’ve learned that they indeed ARE just as real in a sense as the ones outside the game. However, I discovered while observing myself and others, an important realization. It’s a generalization, sure, but when a stressor from outside the game hits a persons life who’s playing an MMORPG with friends in that online world, it’s much easier to completely drop the MMORPG friends than it is a RL (real-life) friend. In this way I believe it could lead us to an insight, a generalization that could somewhat be phrased as “having an online friend is like having a cigarrette… except they don’t kill you in the end.”