www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20397322/
Dude, if I wasn't married, this place sounds like it'd be super fishing grounds for hooking up. She's a hottie (and sooo neglected)! What a bunch of newbs!!!111!!
Game widows grieve ‘lost’ spouses
Mates have become consumed with ‘World of Warcraft,’ Second Life
Shelly Quintana
Shelly Quintana started a Web site called GamingSucks.com and a comic strip called "Widow's Revenge" in response to her husband's obsession with "Ultima Online" and "World of Warcraft."
By Winda Benedetti
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 5:48 p.m. PT Aug 22, 2007
They don't wear black veils. You won't find them shopping for caskets at the local funeral home. And they don't expect you to send them somber flower arrangements or cards expressing your sympathy.
And yet, they're widows nonetheless.
Though their spouses and partners haven't gone to the great beyond, these particular widows and widowers say their loved ones have gone someplace that's almost as distant and unreachable. Some have left this world for the "World of Warcraft," others have forsaken this life for "Second Life" and still others have been taken away by "EverQuest," "Final Fantasy XI" and "Dark Age of Camelot."
As the ranks of those playing video games in general — and massively multiplayer online games in particular — continue to grow, so grow the ranks of those who refer to themselves as "game widows."
They are the husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of gamers whose playing habits have consumed their lives. The bereaved say their mates have suffered a kind of digital death that has left only the shell of the person they loved behind. And like a real death, it has left the people who remain heartbroken, scared and angry.
"I felt like I wasn't even married anymore," says Sherry Myrow, 29, of Toronto. Her husband had become obsessed with playing "WoW," a hugely popular online role-playing game that now boasts some nine million subscribers world-wide. "He wasn't eating or sleeping. He wasn't cooking — and he loves cooking. He became this person who wasn't interested in life if it didn't have to do with 'World of Warcraft'."
Angry, frustrated and feeling alone, Myrow started GamerWidow.com — a Web site for "gaming's other half" — in June of 2005 and quickly discovered just how not alone she was.
"By July I had 400 active members and by the end of the year I had one thousand members," she says.
Sherry Myrow
Sherry Myrow, of Toronto, started GamerWidow.com in June 2005. The site has some 2,000 members.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These days, GamerWidow.com has some 2,000 members who gather in the forums to vent their frustrations and mourn their losses together. Meanwhile, Myrow isn't the only one who is, ironically enough, using the Internet as means of dealing with the devil it helped deliver into her home.
Jennifer Newberry sounds both discouraged and exhausted when she talks about her husband's addiction to "WoW," a game he has, at times, played up to 18 hours a day.
"Before he got into this game he had lots of other interests," she says. "He was into music and cars, he was active, outdoorsy, he used to hang out with friends. Now he's agoraphobic and won't go out of the basement."
Newberry joined the "WoW" Widows Support Group at Yahoo.com in October of 2005 so she could talk to other people who shared her plight. Back then there were 500 members. Two years later, Newberry has taken over as owner of the group that now includes more than 3,000 members.
"It wasn't like being in a relationship," Shelly Quintana says of life with her husband at the height of his gaming addiction, "it was like living with a zombie."
In March of 2006, Quintana, a New Jersey mother of three, started a Web site called GamingSucks.com and a comic strip called "Widow's Revenge" in response to her husband's obsession with the likes of "Ultima Online" and "WoW." At first, she did it as a way to tease the man she loved and missed. But then, "It just got crazy popular," she says.
Living with the dead
Certainly video game addiction has been a much-discussed topic in recent months. This summer, a Reno couple was arrested after they let their two children nearly starve to death while they played a role-playing video game. And in June, the American Medical Association considered a proposal to declare video game addiction a formal psychiatric disorder.
Much to many widows' dismay, the AMA decided against the official designation (at least for the time being), saying it needed further study.
Still, click through the pages of the widow support sites and you'll find plenty of terrible tales told by those living with players unable to control their habit. There's the woman whose husband left her in the hospital two hours after their baby was born so he could go home and play. There's the bed-ridden wife whose husband wouldn't take care of her because he was so busy gaming.
But it's the overwhelming number of relatively ordinary tales of loneliness and despair in the wake of a mate's compulsive gaming that make this phenomenon truly heartbreaking.
The posts in the GamerWidow.com forums frequently sound like this one:
He's sitting 2 computers away from me, playing WoW. 11 years together, 2 kids and now a $1,000 bill for marriage therapy that's not really working. I'm done, have been for awhile. It's not just WoW, before WoW it was Final Fantasy, and before that SOCOM….I've been the invisible woman in my home for over 3 years...and honestly I'm done. I deserve a man who wants to spend time with me not his stupid games.
Quintana knows the feeling. She recalls being halfway around the world, visiting family in New Zealand, when she called the husband she hadn't seen for weeks. But he wasn't exactly happy to hear from her.
"He said, 'I'll have to call you back I'm in the middle of a raid,' " she says, referring to the group events that take place within 'WoW.' "It was horribly painful."
And it's not just women widows out there. There are plenty of men who've lost their wives and girlfriends to gaming as well.
Writes one widower at GamerWidow.com: I'm a young dad with a little boy and baby girl and a wife who plays a whole lot of WoW…My wife plays during every free hour she has…When the baby wakes up during her afternoon nap, which is one of my wife's daily time-slots for WOW…she gets seriously pissed off.
"With these MMORPGs, they will swallow almost anybody," Myrow says, estimating that GamerWidow.com's membership is split 70 percent women and 30 percent men. "They're so user-friendly and so appealing to even a non-gamer that pretty much anyone can get sucked into them." |
There's more pages. I just liked the photo.
|
