In 2004, a 13-year-old Chinese boy jumped from the top of a 24-storey building and died, after playing too much World of Warcraft; the parents filed suit against Blizzard.¹ Another couple neglected their child to play World of Warcraft, and the child died.² Of course, before Warcraft, there was “EverCrack,” as EverQuest is sometimes called, in reference to its addictive tendencies.³ “I’ve seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today,” one person said of Warcraft—the kind of statement one expects from legislators and activists today. What makes this surprising is that it comes from one of the most prominent players in the World of Warcraft, one month before the release of the Burning Crusade expansion.

The guild Mr. Yeager got me into and with which I became an officer is the oldest and largest on the server I played on. It is around 18 months old and extremely well-versed in endgame instances. I was both the “mage class lead” and an officer. I have many very good friends I met through WoW (in real life - no kidding) and even have been “involved” with another councilor in real life (yes, I know, I’m weird for meeting girls through an online video game but honestly, ask Mr. Yeager, she’s head and shoulders better than all the girls I met DJing, waiting tables, in college, and bartending at clubs in Philly). But I digress…

I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave? Simple: Blizzard has created an alternate universe where we don’t have to be ourselves when we don’t want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I’ve seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ.⁴

As the author notes, what World of Warcraft provides is an alternate universe where we don’t have to be ourselves when we don’t want to be. This is precisely what makes it so addictive.

I am not one to judge a person’s situation, but when a father/husband plays a video game all night long, seven days a week, after getting home from work, very involved instances that soak up hours and require concentration, it makes me queasy that I encouraged that. Others include the kids you know aren’t doing their homework and confide in you they are failing out of high school or college but don’t want to miss their chance at loot, the long-term girl/boyfriend who is skipping out on a date (or their anniversary—I’ve seen it) to play (and in some cases flirt constantly), the professional taking yet another day off from work to farm mats or grind their reputations up with in-game factions to get “valuable” quest rewards, etc… I’m not one to tell people how to spend their time, but it gets ridiculous when you take a step back.⁵

The allure of such an alternative world can be strong—these may very well be people with problems at work, or school, or in their relationships, who prefer the World of Warcraft to our world precisely because it allows this escape. They may not want to admit that they didn’t want to go on that date in the first place, or that they really don’t want to have to deal with their wife, but the choice of the online game over the real person speaks volumes all on its own.

I’m not so innocent on this count, myself. I’m replaying Final Fantasy VII right now, and the fantasy of leading an eco-terrorist group against an evil corporation is naturally a thrill, and I’ve already told Giuli that I’ll be going away on November 1st—for Neverwinter. But then again, my gaming comes and goes with the tides. One week I will play video games and do almost nothing else; the next, I won’t touch a single one. What is the difference between the behavior of a somewhat-more-than-casual gamer like myself, and the “WoW” and “EverCrack” addicts we’re talking about here? The former councillor mentions a very important point: “Blizzard created a game that you simply can not win.” Perhaps even more importantly:

The game also provides people with a false sense of security, accomplishment, and purpose. Anyone can be a superhero here if they have the time to put in. Not only that, a few times I’ve seen this breed the “rockstar” personality in people who have no confidence at all in real life. Don’t get me wrong, building confidence is a good thing and something, if honed appropriately, the game can do very right. But in more than a few cases, very immature people with bad attitudes are catered to (even after insulting or degrading others “in public”) because they are “better” than the rest. Usually this means they played a lot more and have better gear. I’d really hate to see how this “I’m better than you attitude” plays out in real life where it means jack how epic your loot is - when you say the wrong thing to the wrong person it’s going to have repercussions and you can’t just log out to avoid the effects of your actions.

And people put everything on the line for these accomplishments with which they associate much value. I know of children and spouses being forced to play and grind for their parents, threats of divorce, rampant neglect, failing grades in school, and thousands of dollars spent on “outsourcing” foreign help. For what, you ask? Honor. The desire to be the best for at least one week. To get the best loot in the game. What do these “heroes” receive? Why, cheers and accolades of course as they parade along in their new shiny gear… which is obsolete the first time they step into one of the premier instances. The accomplishment and sacrifice itself are meaningless a few days later. Then it’s usually off to the races again.⁶

With this, the need that World of Warcraft satisfies comes into full view: affirmation, and more than that, community. As the author himself noted, “WoW” is a social medium. It connects players from around the would, and provides something like a community. Is the trend of addictive online gaming a cause of the growing social isolation in the United States,⁷ or a response to it? I think it is the latter—the affirmation of a real community is far more satisfying than that of a virtual one, and while internet games have emerged only recently, they have emerged as a much older trend of disintegrating communities has reached crisis levels. For some “WoW’ players, the game may provide the only real community they have in their lives. It is a place where the unconfident can find confidence, where those floundering in the increasing complexity of the “real world” can achieve astounding success.

Of course, World of Warcraft presents us with more than just a community. It’s not simply a chat room. That community exists within a fantasy world. This is often asserted as axiomatically negative—but is it?

Freud described dreams as the “road to the unconscious” and pointed to the value of discussing dreams and a patient’s associations to his dreams in conducting therapy. As the century progressed, the principles were expanded by various authors to both waking fantasy and to play in children for their projective value and revelation of primary process. Thus Freud discussed the relationship between fantasy and dreams but also described how play could be used as a repetition-compulsion to re-experience events that overwhelm the ego and thus to master them. This observation was modified and expanded by Erikson to demonstrate that play could be used to gain mastery. Waelder saw play and fantasy as: “Instinctual gratification and assimilation of disagreeable experiences,” in other words, mastery. Freud also suggested that fantasy provided immediate wish-fulfillment. Thus there is much to suggest in these observations that there is a relationship among play, dreams and waking fantasy. This relationship has been shown to be closer than analytic writers may have realized. Thus Cartwright demonstrated that the need for Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) dreams could be decreased by waking, drug-induced hallucinations. Cartwright and Monroe showed that REM deprivation could be fended off by encouraging waking fantasy. In a study of WREM dreams, Pivik and Foulkes demonstrated that: “waking story telling ability correlated with NREM dreamlike fantasy.” Klinger describes them as functionally interchangeable: “REM sleep suppression is reduced by permitting the substitution of waking dream description and related fantasy-like ideation for the dream loss.”⁸

Even in civilization, we spend most of our lives asleep—foragers spend even more time asleep. Our councillor compared the time some players spent on World of Warcraft to a second job, and that is an apt comparison, but it must be acknowledged that humans are supposed to have two “jobs”: “making a living” in the “waking” world, and a fantasy world, a dream world.

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia, for instance, maintain that the Dreamtime is an “everywhen” in which the past, present and future coexist. They hold that this is the objective reality of the world, and that our experience of linear time is only our subjective, waking illusion: an inversion of the priorities placed on waking and dreaming states by European cultures.

Furthermore, all societies are obliged to divide up the spectrum of consciousness into (probably) named sections, even as they divide up the colour spectrum in one way or another. Human communities are not viable without some (possibly contested) consensus on which states will be valued and which will be ignored or denigrated. Bluntly put, madness is culturally defined: what counts as insanity in one society may be valned in another. States that occasion embarrassment and are ignored in one society may be cultivated in another. But, despite such cultural specifics, the nervous system cannot be eliminated: all people experience dreaming on the first trajectory, and all have the potential to experience the states characteristic of the autistic trajectory. And they experience them in terms of their own culture and value system; this is what has been called the “domestication of trance.” (Lewis-Williams, 2002)

In our culture, dreams are routinely denigrated, but this is not universally so. The Naskapi, one of the Innu people, never officially surrendered to Canada, and so has been denied the benefits of “First Nation” status under Canadian law. They have been living there as hunter-gatherers for at least 2,000 years, predating the later Inuit migration. The Innu believe that a “great man” named Mistap’eo lives inside everyone, and gives us our dreams. They believe that he wants us to make art based on our dreams, “attend to those dreams, to test them, try them out, and draw their conclusions from them.” Thus, dreams form the very basis of Naskapi cosmology and spirituality. “They also sometimes discuss their dreams with one another and if a man or woman has a very impressive dream they spontaneously turn it into a song. If one man has a very good dream song then the others begin to sing it too, but even those songs fade out after a while, and then there is a new song from another individual who has transformed his dream into a song.” (Von Franz, 1980) For the Naskapi, like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, dreams are very real.⁹

Animists accept their experience in a fullness that seems radical to us.^{10, 11} Dreams are often expressed as reality—no qualifiers are needed. A hunter-gatherer is far more like to say, “I became a deer last night,” than “I dreamt I became a deer last night.” This latter phraseology denigrates the dream with its insistence that it was not real. The dream has its own internal reality, and is experienced in precisely the same way that waking reality is experienced—making it just as real.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell provides a number of studies and anecdotes to illustrate the power of our pre-conscious cognitive abilities, particularly “thin slicing.”

The Iowa study is just an experiment, of course, a simple card game involving a handful of subjects and a polygraph machine. But it’s a very powerful illustration of the way our minds work. Here is a situation where the stakes were high, where things were moving quickly, and where the participants had to make sense of a lot of new and confusing information in a very short time—and what does the Iowa experiment tell us? That in those moments our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It’s slow. It needs a lot of information. There’s a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it’s really smart because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates—at least at first—entirely below the surface of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, like the sweat glands on the palms of our hands. It’s a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions. (Gladwell, 2005)

What Gladwell discusses among modern, domesticated humans inside of civilization is the biological relic of a talent that hunter-gatherers actively cultivated. Gladwell discusses a number of ways that we can train and improve our pre-conscious mind, including drilling to take control of our “split second” reactions. According to Antti Revonsuo, that’s precisely what our dreams are.

In opposition to these theories, Revonsuo has put forward a novel evolutionary hypothesis according to which the biological function of dreaming is the simulation of threatening events and the repeated rehearsal of threat perception and threat avoidance responses. A dream production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable for the development and maintenance of threat avoidance skills during human evolutionary history. This threat simulation hypothesis is supported by several lines of empirical evidence on dreaming, including normative dream content, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post-traumatic dreams and children’s dreams. The evidence shows that dreams are too well organized to be mere random by-products of physiological processes; that dreams are systematically biased towards overrepresenting negative and threatening elements; that most recurrent dreams and nightmares are simulations of primitive dangers (pursuits, fights, attacks); that real threatening events encountered during waking invariably modulate subsequent dream content; post-traumatic nightmares simulate past threats over and over again, even for years after the original trauma was experienced.¹²

Of course, as compelling as this line of reasoning is, it seems to fall short of explaining all dreams. More likely, dreams provide us with a whole internal world, which can fulfill multiple functions.

Revensuo’s theory faces threats of its own, though. Evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherers indicates that dreaming functions in a variety of ways, argues psychologist Harry T. Hunt of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Members of these groups generally view dreams as real events in which a person’s soul carries out activities while the person sleeps.

Hunter-gatherers’ dreams sometimes depict encounters with supernatural beings who provide guidance in pressing community matters, aid in healing physical illnesses, or give information about the future, Hunt says. Individuals who are adept at manipulating their own conscious states may engage in lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer reasons clearly, remembers the conditions of waking life, and acts according to a predetermined plan.

Dreaming represents a basic orienting response of the brain to novel information, ideas, and situations, Hunt proposes. It occurs at varying intensities in different conscious states, including REM sleep, bouts of reverie or daydreaming, and episodes of spirit possession that individuals in some cultures enter while awake.¹³

So dreams can provide a means of training for threatening situations as Revensuo suggests, but it can also provide a number of other functions. Dream-like functions, from the entheogens used by some shamans, to the role-playing game,¹⁴ can, just like dreams, give us a means of opening up a deeper dialogue with our pre-conscious mind than is usually possible.

In Stage 2 of the intensified trajectory, subjects try to make sense of entoptic phenomena by elaborating them into iconic forms, that is, into objects that are familiar to them from their daily life. In alert problem‑solving consciousness, the brain receives a constant stream of sense impressions. A visual image reaching the brain is decoded (as, of course, are other sense impressions) by being matched against a store of experience. If a ‘fit’ can be effected, the image is ‘recognized’. In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a’sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena. The brain attempts to decode these forms as it does impressions supplied by the nervous system in an alert, outwardly‑directed state. This process is linked to the disposition of the subject. For example, an ambiguous round shape may be ‘illusioned’ into an orange if the subject is hungry, a breast if he is in a state of heightened sexual drive, a cup of water if the subject is thirsty, or an anarchist’s bomb if the subject is fearful. (Lewis-Williams, 2002)

Consider this common case: a shaman in a hunter-gatherer society dreams that he goes into the woods, and speaks to the Deer Spirit. The Deer Spirit tells him how many deer they can take down this season. This number turns out to be the precise cull number for healthy maintenance of the deer herd. Shamans often acted as “forest managers” in their communities, and none questioned that the shaman had actually gone out and spoken to the Deer Spirit, and made these arrangements. We, of course, do the opposite: we reject it completely. What we cannot fit into our rejection, though, is the indisputable fact that the shaman had the right number.

The shaman has been a hunter his whole life. He knows what is a typical take for a season. He’s been hunting this whole year, and he’s seen what has happened to the ecology. He’s noticed when deer are scarce, and when they’re plentiful. He’s noticed particular plants, particular birds, he’s noticed if there are more wolves howling at night than last year—in other words, the shaman is an expert, and he’s been thin slicing the state of the ecology he’s part of, that he’s always been part of, constantly since his birth. In fact, every member of the band has. What seperates the shaman is his ability to open up a dialogue with that ability directly. The shaman is a master of states of consciousness, and can consult his thin slices.

In dreams, biologically, our attention turns inward. Our perceptions are routed through senses not used to handling them—as Lewis-Williams writes, “an ambiguous round shape may be ‘illusioned’ into an orange if the subject is hungry, a breast if he is in a state of heightened sexual drive, a cup of water if the subject is thirsty, or an anarchist’s bomb if the subject is fearful.” What would be more natural than processing the shaman’s thin slicing through a dialogue with the Deer Spirit?

Dreams, visions, and yes, role-playing, also have great potential for healing. Michael Winkelman discusses shamanism in terms of neurotheology, and the ways in which shamanic practice and dream symbolism activate the natural healing processes of the human body.¹⁵ The potential for healing from psychological trauma can be easier to understand, as in the case of “Fred,” whose lawful evil character allowed him for the first time to express his frustrations in a safe context, confront and come to terms with his emotions, and recover from his suicidal depression.¹⁶ That double life where we live out our Shadow wouldn’t sit well with Edward Castronova, though:

When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.¹⁷

Of course, we are all, to one extent or another, “evil,” but it is the most wicked amongst us who cannot admit that—the most heinous villains of history have consistently seen themselves as saviors, or at least good people. Denial of the Shadow gives it license to rule over us. Allowing our Shadow to express itself in a safe environment—like a fantasy—is crucial. Without acknowledging its power, we become slaves to it.

The appeal of an online game like World of Warcraft has one last element, that cuts even deeper than the personal and private myths that make something like The Fifth World all it aspires to be, more than a digital community to replace our crumbling “meatspace” communities besieged by increasing complexity and its increasing costs: the nature of the community it creates. World of Warcraft up-ends the hierarchies of the “real world”; small children may have the most powerful characters, while highly-paid executives will be “n00bs” in Azeroth.

Generally, though, players of the game enjoy a form of com-ity rarely seen in the real world; higher-level players go out of their way to tutor newbies and accompany them on quests. Deep friendships are forged. Relationships begin that flower into marriage, with Tauren brides and Undead grooms tying the knot in some virtual tavern in Thunder Bluff.¹⁸

The “time out of time” that World of Warcraft provides is not just a dream world; it’s not just a replacement community; it is a space in which hierarchy dissolves, and we are judged solely by our actions in the game.

Is this to say that “WoW” addiction is illusory, or that EverCrack is non-habit-forming? Not at all. These things are deeply alluring; this is why we become addicted. This is why we retreat from an increasingly complex, increasingly costly world for a dream world where we have friends and community and egalitarianism. The fact that these are the things we flee to underlines how essential they are to human nature. Our dream worlds are vital—they give us a place to fight our demons, to define who we want to be, to train our reflexes, and to consult our oracles. We need to respect the power and importance of our dreams; we need to respect the essential magic of the world, and stop denigrating our dreams as “not real.”

The balance of our dream life to our waking life is not a balance between escapism and reality, but between which experience of reality we feel—the question of looking at it from one angle, or another. Above, I supplied two interpretations of the shaman’s dream: in a magical form, and in a neuropsychological form. Which is the “real” form? Both, and neither! The shaman really did go consult the Deer Spirit, and it really was a neuropsychological process. Both experiences of reality enrich us; both give meaning to the essential chaos of our world; both are real. To neglect either one is to neglect a whole reality. We typically denigrate the “escapists” who are addicted to things like World of Warcraft for becoming lost in a world that is “not real.” But it is very real, in the only sense that the word matters—in the experience of those who partake of it. Those who denigrate the “escapists” have themselves neglected a whole reality, by becoming lost in a world that is “not real”—a world of interest rates, currencies, and business plans built on artificial rules and baseless speculation, with no point of contact with anything from the sensuous, living world we are part of. By the same token, so do those addicted to Warcraft.

Works Cited

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown & Co.

Lewis-Williams, D. (2002). The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Von Franz, M.L. (1980). On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Toronto: Inner City Books.