BOB GARFIELD: But most of those games have failed to catch fire here. One exception is Everquest, an immensely complicated and reputedly addictive fantasy game peopled with elves and gnomes, among others. It has 430,000 subscribers in the United States. At its peak, roughly a hundred thousand people played simultaneously. Some time back, Brooke gave it a spin.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're going to help me pick my character for Everquest? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, sure. Mm-hm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, here's the box.

BOB GARFIELD: She looks like Barbie-meets-I Dream of Jeannie and she's-- embossed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Stop feeling her. Okay. These are all the races I get to choose from: barbarian, dark elf, dwarf, erudite, gnome, half elf, half ling, high elf, human, ixar (which is a lizard), ogre, troll and wood elf. So-- what do you think?

BOB GARFIELD: Well, you know I hate to say half elf; I'd prefer to say half people of small stature but....

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Recently an Everquest convention convened outside Baltimore, Maryland. [CONVENTION CROWD]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is your name?

MAN: My in-game name is Bragalot. I'm wearing chain mail. This chain mail, I made it all myself so--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's amazing!

MAN: Yeah. Thank you. It's kind of out of character because I am actually enchanter, a spell caster.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Someone (actually it was an Everquest PR rep) told me a moment enjoyed is a moment not wasted, and by that measure these people, well over a thousand of them waste not.

WOMAN: Oh, it's a blast. We do it constantly. I'm a 53-Wizard. My husband is a 53-Shaman. My friends here are 53-Clerics and Warriors.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What's the difference between a 53 and a 52?

WOMAN: I got some more spells where I could do more damage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Everquest subscribers pay about 40 dollars for the CD-Rom and then about 10 dollars a month to play. And boy do they, spending an average of 20 hours a week logged in to Everquest. Actually that was low for most of the conventioneers I talked to -- but not for Dave.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How often do you play?

DAVE:Probably about a good 40, 30 hours a week. Not as bad as some here. They'll, they'll put in about 40, 50 hours a week. You know, that's like having a second job.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What's the attraction?

DAVE:You get to be whatever you choose to be. I mean, this is still basically a crude game compared to what's going to be coming out. In 5 years, this'll be mainstream.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And does that mean that more and more people won't have a life outside of a job and Everquest?

DAVE:Well you see,that's an interesting thought. Technically if nobody here has a life and yet you've got 1200 people in the room, and they're all having a great conversation and they're all carrying - sharing something in common.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you ever worry, Dave, about the addiction -- they've called it "Evercrack" - stuff like that?

DAVE:It's a great standing joke. I still dare them to challenge that conviction to TV. At least here, you're interacting with people. It's like, you know, you have big conventions of football fans that get together--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah, but they don't watch football 30 hours a week!

DAVE:Not if they don't have the ability to. They only lack the ability. If you gave them the capability to watch football 30 hours a week, you know there would be couch potatoes there watching 30 hours a week. Some people are pretty -- pretty scary.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It should be noted that Dave was in leather mask, horns and a furry cape.

JEFF ZOTKIN: Once we set it in motion, it was in a lot of ways no longer our own game.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jeff Zotkin is one of the principal designers of Everquest which borrows heavily, he says, from J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis with a little George Lucas thrown in. [EVERQUEST MUSIC]

NARRATOR: Wizards, sorcerers and enchanters master powerful magic and mystical arts.

JEFF ZOTKIN: Being a 3-D kind of world, you'll walk through a fantasy city, and it's like you're looking through your character's eyes, and hundreds of other people will all walk by you. They're all real people, playing from different places. If your character waved his hand, the 20 people who are, like, immediately next to you would all see the character wave his hand. You realize you're not playing versus just a computer any more -- that you're playing with all of these other real people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're the woman on the box!!

WOMAN:Yes, I am! I'm actually the model that posed for the painting, so-- it's kind of a double fun thing -- they actually get to see - you know - me! [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: She has the pointed ears of an elf but the body and sartorial sense of Britney Spears. Does it ever worry you -- I mean there are a number of adolescent boys at this convention-- [LAUGHTER] and I have no doubt that some of them have at some point or the other had thoughts about your image on that box.

WOMAN:Yes, I am sure of that. [LAUGHS] Doesn't bother me. No. If they get enjoyment out of my picture, you know, more power to them -- as long as they don't try and put their hands on me. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ninety percent of Everquest subscribers are male, but only about 70 percent of the characters they play are. One gamer told me that if you play as a girl you tend to get stuff from other players. When the new player logs in for the first time, he must choose a gender, face, body, profession and race -- by race we mean elf or troll or gnome -- out of a limited selection before entering his home city, determined by race. Computer-generated characters or other real players may approach him as he learns to maneuver, find provisions, hook up with others of similar disposition and go on quests. At the convention, Everquestrians were offered a real life quest. [GUITAR FLOURISH]

MAN: [SINGING] NOW I COULD VIEW THIS SACRED TRUST SEEK THE PIXIE WITH PIXIE DUST SEEK THE PIXIE WITH PIXIE DUST MY FRIEND--

MAN: [Michelle]! Hail!

WOMAN: Hail, traveler! I need little shiny things.

MAN: What kind of shiny things?

WOMAN: Little coins.

MAN: I will be back with two coins.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Little shiny things, pixie dust -- objects are powerful in this game, and acquiring stuff is key to an Everquestrian's progress. Over time a gamer's character will acquire not just experience points and currency but mighty accessories -- all of which you can buy on E-bay despite the best efforts of Everquest's owner, Sony. Two hundred and eighty two Everquest items were posted on E-bay this week, including a necklace of superiority for 500 dollars and a Deathbringer's rod for a 152. But you can also buy the characters themselves. This week, a level 55 Monk (if he were a car, you'd call him fully-loaded) was priced at 800 bucks. That means the seller was looking to unload a character he spent hundreds of hours to make wealthy and powerful. The gamer who created that 55 level monk may be running a lucrative side business in character-building, or he may have decided at long last -- to log out. Everquest has taken credit for creating some real life marriages. It's also taken the blame for breaking up a few. Rich Young almost lost his girlfriend over a game some critics and fans call Neverrest.

RICH YOUNG: At one point, I was playing it almost 8 to 12 hours a day - nonstop. On the weekends [LAUGHS] - if I wasn't sleeping, I was playing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:He has cut back, but he's still at it about 30 hours a week. After all, it's the place where everybody knows your on-line name (though he wouldn't tell me what it is).

RICH YOUNG: I think the big trap is the social aspect of it. It's like, you know, you ever watch Cheers? The guy walks in -- Norm! You know -everyone screams out his name. It's kind of like that! When you log in and you say how's it going everybody, all of your friends -everyone that's in your guild says Hi, What's up - How you doing?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rich Young was forced to concede that the pleasures of a place like Everquest can't be transferred to the world of flesh and blood. They can only distract us from it.

RICH YOUNG: I got to the point where I was burning out. I was starting to lose a little bit of perspective. I realized "Hey wait a minute -[LAUGHS] - this is not the path to absolution."

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Everquest designer Jeff Zotkin loves to hike in the real world, but when he's too busy, he enjoys trekking the ever-changing landscapes of Everquest. The goal of any designer, he says, is to push virtual reality closer and closer to the real thing.

JEFF ZOTKIN: With better technology, you'll see better immersion. You'll see hooking up speech so that you'll actually talk into a little microphone, and probably 5 or 10 years after that you'll start seeing the virtual reality in there - very much like the holodeck from Star Trek -- if they wanted to pop into a virtual bar and just go meet virtual people they could. If they wanted to go drive a sports car in the Indy-500 they could. A custom-designed world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The real world being what it is, it's inevitable that a safe and satisfying virtual world may be irresistible to some.

JEFF ZOTKIN:That's always going to be a danger -- is that as we get better and better technology, people might decide that a created world is better than a real world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And that danger is by no means limited to on line media. Last Thursday the Post Wire Service reported that a man in Melbourne, Australia just married his television set. Incidentally, it was also made by Sony.

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, campaign reporting past and present, and a nearly silent film that defied the talkies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.

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