Unplugged

by Van Cleave, Ryan G.; Griffiths, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780757313622
• ISBN10: 0757313620
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-01
• Publisher: Hci

Summary

WARNING: THIS VIDEO GAME MAY IMPAIR YOUR JUDGMENT. IT MAY CAUSE SLEEP DEPRIVATION, ALIENATION OF FRIENDS AND FAMILY, WEIGHT LOSS OR GAIN, NEGLECT OF YOUR BASIC NEEDS AS WELL AS THE NEEDS OF LOVED ONES AND/OR DEPENDENTS, AND DECREASED PERFORMANCE ON THE JOB. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY MAY BECOME BLURRED. PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SUICIDE ATTEMPTS.No such warning was included on the latest and greatest release from the Warcraft series of massive multiplayer online role-playing games'”World of Warcraft (WoW). So when Ryan Van Cleave'”a college professor, husband, father, and one of the 11.5 million Warcraft subscribers worldwide'”found himself teetering on the edge of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, he had no one to blame but himself. He had neglected his wife and children and had jeopardized his livelihood, all for the rush of living a life of high adventure in a virtual world.A fabulously written and gripping tale, Unplugged takes you on a journey through the author's semireclusive life with video games at the center of his experiences. Even when he was sexually molested by a young school teacher at age eleven, it was the promise of a new video game that had lured him to her house. As Ryan's life progresses, we witness the evolution of video games'”from simple two-button consoles to today's multikey technology, brilliantly designed to keep the user actively participating. For Ryan, the virtual world was a siren-song he couldn't ignore, no matter the cost.As is the case with most recovering addicts, Ryan eventually hit rock bottom and shares with you his ongoing battle to control his impulses to play, providing prescriptive advice and resources for those caught in the grip of this very real addiction.

Author Biography

Ryan Van Cleave, Ph.D., serves as Executive Director and Publisher of C&R Press (www.crpress.org), a non-profit literary organization. He also teaches writing at the Ringling College of Art and Design and works as a Digital Addiction & Recovery consultant. Dr. Van Cleave resides in Sarasota, Florida. Visit www.unpluggedthebook.com.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. v
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Admitting I'm a Video Game Junkie	p. 1
Range Wars, or How I Got Hooked	p. 7
Networking at Northern Illinois University (NIU)	p. 25
Why I Really Left Niu	p. 62
Mea Culpa	p. 74
Connecting at Last	p. 97
The War at Work	p. 117
At War with my Family and Myself	p. 152
Dependence	p. 187
Why I Couldn't Stop	p. 192
Recovery	p. 229
Getting Unplugged	p. 246
Appendices
Three True Stories	p. 254
What the Experts Say	p. 277
Recommended Reading	p. 308
Resources	p. 312
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

ADMITTING I'M A VIDEO GAME JUNKIE The truth is rarely pure and never simple. OSCAR WILDE December 31, 2007. I'm standing on the Arlington Memorial Bridge, maybe an eighth of a mile from the Lincoln Memorial loop-de-loop, and the mid-teens windchill has my breath coming in gasps. My asthma gives me a rough enough time, thanks to the 235 pounds my five-foot-nine frame heaves about daily. Tonight I've forced myself to march out into the 9:00 PM darkness to where few cars dare to go, thanks to the intermittent freezing rain. Even my thick-soled Colorado hiking boots are having a difficult time gripping the slickness. I told my wife I was heading to CVS for cough drops. Instead of stopping at the drugstore at 23rd and C Street, however, I just kept plodding along, head hunched against the cold and the wet. Yeah, I was unsure of my destination. But damned if I was going to head back home to another bout of the 'What the hell's wrong with you?' one-upmanship that always leaves me on the losing end. I'm focusing on the plink-plink of rain against icy ground and the crunch of my boots as I head farther away from home. For as long as I can recall, I've been my own best company. I enjoy long walks to nowhere, although lately that's proved to be less calming than ever, thanks to my perpetually unquiet mind. For three years, every thought has been dominated by a single focus: the World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online computer game (MMOG), also called a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), in which players control characters who explore a huge virtual world, battle monsters and other players, socialize in enormous cities, and complete quests for money, fame, experience, and loot. While others are living normal lives, I'm actively occupying my alternate world. I inventory my characters. I prioritize quests. I mull over high-powered weapon trades. I reimagine my gaming group's website. I fret about the battleground honor I need to earn. I consider how many real-world dollars I can afford to spend to buy in-game equipment on eBay or from gold farmers (people who make a career out of playing video games simply to sell acquired virtual loot for real-world cash). Consumed by this never-ending, breathtaking virtual universe that I discovered by accident three years earlier, I might as well have been clicking away with my mouse in front of my twenty-one-inch screen even here, dozens of blocks from my home machine, as if an unseen digital umbilical cord is keeping me eternally wired to the game that demands my every waking moment. Halfway across the bridge, I stop. My brain is telling me to climb up on the barrier. In fact, it's insisting on it, ridiculous as it seems for a thirty-five-year-old professor to huff his way up a frozen concrete barrier on this D.C. bridge. I haven't climbed a tree or a fence or anything for fifteen years, but muscle memory serves me well. As a child, I squirreled up the fifty-foot p