I recently lost my fiancée to World of Warcraft, but I have a different perspective than the writeups above, and I've come to a radically different conclusion. I'd like to share it with you.
Kelly and I were together for nearly four years, all the way through college. We had what seemed like a perfect relationship. We never fought, we were deeply in love, we could read each other's mind, we liked the same things (that is to say, anything one of us liked, the other would discover that he or she liked too), as well as a lot of deeper reasons that I have trouble putting into words. Many people were jealous of how close and happy we were.
What they weren't jealous of was that we were long distance. Starting after freshman year, and except for a one-semester period during junior year, we were several states apart all of the time. We spoke every night, eventually using video cameras and Skype. We saw each other in person at least once a month, as often as we could with our limited resources. But we were so deeply in love that it didn't seem to matter. When we were together, stars fell around us, skies were always blue, oceans rushed forth no louder than the shared beating of our hearts. We became engaged late junior year.
In around December of sophomore year, two friends of ours encouraged us to begin playing Warcraft. Both were very casual players (one barely made it above level 30 in the entire time he played, which puts you at the level of Severe Noob as far as the Warcraft elite are concerned) and good friends, who offered to let us use their accounts and get in on this fun game.
For a while, it was pretty casual. Kelly didn't really play at first; I was fairly far advanced on a character before she started one on the same account and I had to switch over to the other friend's account and start over (you can't have two people logged in to the same account at the same time). Some people stick with one character in Warcraft and pump all of their time and effort into making it powerful; that was Kelly's pattern. I would get bored with a character after a while, once I was thoroughly used to its play style, and make a new one. It didn't really matter; we had gotten into a guild (an association of players that has its own chat channels, shared resources, and works on large-scale game objectives together) that supported both our play styles.
It became clear after a while that Warcraft was becoming Kelly's life. She had no friends outside of it other than mine, and almost any spare time she didn't spend working on class, eating, sleeping, or talking to me, she would spend on Warcraft. Even when she was working on other things, she would be logged into the game, checking every now and again on what was going on with the guild, answering questions and trading at the auction house.
I didn't mind for a while; she had always had problems socializing, getting out and meeting people, arranging activities (I had pretty much been the driving force behind our relationship), and Warcraft gave her a social circle and a place where she felt empowered. It bothered me after a while that she was spending her entire time in college becoming friends with Internet people when she could be out meeting real people and making friendships that would last her whole life, but she would get defensive and upset when I tried to suggest she go out and make friends on campus (she had transferred to another school than the one I was attending). Anyway, it wasn't all bad: we met a guild member in real life once, and he turned out to be a nice guy whom I'm still friends with.
My most recent birthday coincided with Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Since I would be both fasting and occupied all day long in services, Kelly was going to come to visit me a week early. Two days before she came, she told me she'd been talking to a guild member a lot recently. That is to say, every night after we got off the phone (I had a day job at this point, and would go to bed at 10) she would call him and they would talk for hours. She said she had feelings for him, and he was going to come visit for a week, starting the day after she returned from visiting him. Alarms started going off, and I begged her not to. She asked me to trust her. I agreed.
The weekend was a blur. I remember only three things clearly. One was hiking with her on a gorgeous day and learning that she had started it after asking me if it was all right to flirt with somebody. I had agreed, thinking she meant being generally flirty (something she had never felt comfortable with) and not realizing it was a specific person. One was her bursting into tears and sobbing while making love with me. And one was my mother's boyfriend, telling me that I was happier and more alive with Kelly than he had ever seen me before.
A week later, the day after my birthday, she told me she wanted to leave me for this man. She had slept with him multiple times during the week he had visited. I spent two weeks begging, but he pulled out every stop getting between me and Kelly. Had her cancel our next visit, went to her apartment and camped out for another week, and called me and lied about how she felt in order to break my spirit. She pulled the classic trick of asking if we could stay best friends. For the first time in our lives together, she betrayed my trust, betrayed it over and over again. Every promise she made about him and how she would handle things, she shattered at his urging.
It wrecked me. I became suicidally depressed, began therapy and started leaning on my friends like I never had before. Slowly, I recovered. I'm happier again now. You guys may have noticed that I stopped noding for a while, except for one piece of poetry I wrote to her.
But do I blame Warcraft? No. I blame Kelly, and I blame myself. She had serious problems that made Warcraft a more valid social life than the real world, and she would not have gone to another man and started flirting with him if there weren't real problems with our relationship. I'm not telling you everything about us — there are other psychological problems that she has that lead me to believe it wasn't so much that the relationship was broken as she was doing the most self-destructive things she could, and I had some deep-seated, long-term problems that I've begun to work through with my therapist — but I respect her privacy and need mine enough not to air all our dirty laundry. She has since estranged most of her real-life friends (basically my friends) because she didn't want them asking questions about her new beau.
The man she is with now is an ass. I know that it's standard to react this way, but even in the game, he has a reputation for being a petty, mean-spirited person who thinks he knows everything, who will insult anybody who makes the slightest mistake. He turned down a college scholarship in order to try to move in with Kelly, he has been unemployed for months and isn't looking for a job, and recently, despite the fact that he's unemployed and trying to support a family that really needs the money, he bought a new Mustang. He encouraged a woman he claimed to love to skip classes, lie to her family, cheat on her fiancé and abandon her friends. He's a homophobe, a budding alcoholic, a chain smoker. (You may wonder how I know about all of this; Kelly didn't keep many secrets from me, even at the end.) The empowerment of landing a man, being the active agent, even if it's somebody who's horrible for her, has allowed Kelly to overlook many, many problems in him and the way that they came together.
It's become pretty clear to me that although Warcraft was the enabler, the problems were there beforehand. At the point where she was unable to talk to me three nights out of the week because the guild needed her to be playing and on voice chat, she was free to tell them "no," but decided not to. The fact that she chose the virtual world instead of the real world tells me that she was looking for an easy escape. For a different person, it may have become a drug addiction, but her escape had always been isolation: she spent the time in high school before she found Warcraft pent up in her room reading instead of going out to meet people.
I could blame Warcraft for what happened. But it wouldn't change the fact that there are plenty of people who treat it as just a game and have healthy lives anyway. I myself got bored of the game and quit a couple times, and came back when I had played other games and got bored with them; I never saw it as more important than my friends and loved ones. In fact, I've noded the game a whole bunch. If somebody destroys a marriage, an engagement, or even a casual partnership as a result of Warcraft, Everquest, Guild Wars, Firefly, or any MMO, it isn't because the game forced her to. It's because she has serious problems that need to be addressed.
It's the same as any other addiction. Blaming the drug for ruining somebody's life isn't nearly as helpful as asking why the person turned to the drug in the first place. You can't be angry at a marijuana addict*. You're only making it worse. But when you help them, give them the kindness and support they need, and more than anything, love them, you can change their life. It's too late for Kelly. But it may not be too late for the people you love.
*I choose marijuana because it's a psychological addiction, not a chemical dependency on the drug. It seems more appropriate.
A grateful "thank you" goes out to everybody who has shared their kind thoughts with me after reading this. You guys rock. | 
