Players love online gaming, but there's a hidden, dark side to this lifestyle.

Jon Belanger, 21, is a recovering gaming addict. A piano performance major at Baldwin-Wallace, a small college outside Cleveland, Belanger is a gifted musician. He's also big into video games and a former Dungeons & Dragons devotee.

So when he stumbled across the online character game "Dark Age of Camelot," he was hooked almost immediately. Pretty soon, hours he once spent in the piano room pounding out melodies by Mozart and Bach were instead spent spinning out game commands on his computer keyboard.

And he's not alone. Belanger is only one of several thousand college kids, and for that matter only one of several 100,000 people across the globe, who have discovered the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs.

Mythic Entertainment, the company that created "Camelot," has tracked over 500,000 game players, and in October 2002 logged a record high 50,000 characters playing simultaneously. Game software usually costs between $20-$50 and most games carry a monthly fee of $10-$15. It's a flat rate for unlimited playing time, which is also a draw to players living on a student budget.

In Belanger's case, the game experience was a destructive one. "I started playing Dark Age of Camelot on October 14, 2001," he says, "and by the time I went home on December 14, I had logged 601 hours of playing time. I let it destroy my fall semester. My G.P.A. dropped from a 3.6 to a 2.8."

"Dark Age of Camelot" and similar games like Sony's "Everquest," or Microsoft's "Asheron's Call" (all three have medieval themes) are both social and seductive, says Belanger. Players create the game plot, and it's constantly changing.

"This is a created world and the world is going on whether you're playing or not," Belanger said. "I think part of the addiction comes because you don't want to miss anything."

Bret Helig, 22, a recent graduate from the University of California at Berkeley agrees. Helig says the popularity of MMORPGs is similar to the draw of most video games, puzzles to solve, items to collect, cool action graphics, and competition. But MMPORGs offer something extra: camaraderie.

"Player interaction is completely unrestricted," he says, "so players may team together for protection, or to assault other players, trade items...or just to be friends. The options that unfold in a situation like that are mind-boggling. Gamers love options."

Helig considers himself a hard core gamer and avoids MMPORGs for that reason. He sticks to games like Diablo and Runescape, which are multiplayer, but not massive. "When I get into a game, I like to play all-out, 16 hours a day- type stuff for three or four days and be done with it."

"[Online role-playing games] represent an amazing revolution in game design, but one that poses a health hazard to gamers that play like I do, on account of them never ending."

Twenty -one-year-old Jesse Daily, chemistry major at Muskingum College, has been gaming online for three years and says he logs between 10-40 hours a week. For him, the games are recreational down time.

"It's a break from thinking about life's problems and to give myself some relaxation time," he says. "I would compare it to the time most people spend watching TV. The thing that keeps me interested is I can do different things depending on my mood, and even though it's the same game each night, you never really have the same experience twice."

And the games keep getting better and more complex. The release of the new Sims Online game, upcoming MMPORGs like Final Fantasy XI and Star Wars Galaxies, and an EverQuest sequel, a game that late last year boasted about 430,000 players, are big events in the gaming sphere.

Helig is sure gaming will grow in popularity as more games flood the market.

"As someone who has loved computer games since about age three," he says, "I can confidently posit that this is only the beginning."

© 2008, Young Money Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

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