Such incidents involved clearly troubled fans teetering on the edge of sanity and in need of some kind of real psychological help, but such people certainly don't make up the majority of the players of online role playing games. "The large majority of people aren't that eaten up with [gaming], but you get that with everything. The word 'fan' comes from 'fanatic'; you've got this in politics or people who chase rock bands around the country," says Jennings. "But with online gaming it's easier to track because you have an electronic trail."

Regardless of what the man behind "Sheyla" was trying to achieve with his hoax, the controversy has stirred up a strong debate about depressed or otherwise unstable players, and whether immersive role playing games actually encourage troubled people to become "addicted" to the game. Over the course of thousands of posts across myriad gaming bulletin boards in the last week, countless Everquest players have come forth with concerns about how obsessed they are with the game, how it's damaging to their offline relationships and how it's causing them to withdraw from the real world into the virtual one.

Chris Skinner is one player who felt that the Sheyla controversy hit too close to home. A two-year veteran of the game, he came close to dropping out of college and losing his girlfriend because he was spending every waking hour playing the game; he estimates that at least 70 percent of the people he's befriended through Everquest have at one time or another developed an unhealthy obsession with playing the game. "To an outsider it's just like looking at a crack addict -- you don't understand how it is until you've been there," he says. "It really is an addiction." Skinner believes that players who spend all their time in the game lose touch with the real world -- replacing it with a virtual one -- only to discover that when they are having problems their "virtual friends" aren't as supportive as a real-world network might be. In response, he is now organizing an online support group called Everquest Escape -- which he hopes will include chat rooms, bulletin boards, a Web site and perhaps even in-game advisors -- to provide support for players who are feeling alone, depressed or otherwise obsessed with the game. As he puts it, "We can provide a forum for these people to know that there are others out there, we care about them and they are important, and maybe together we can help them work through their situation."

It is clear that role-playing games appeal to people who are otherwise limited in their real lives -- where else in the world could a handicapped man get to live the life of a fleet-footed warrior, or a shy woman become a witty and desirable enchantress, or a minimum-wage grunt play the role of a wealthy king? You can be as good or as evil or as popular as you've always dreamed. It would seem to make sense that troubled or unhappy people would find the worlds of Everquest, Asheron's Call or Ultima Online a welcome escape from the woes of everyday life; and, in turn, escape just a bit too much.

"It's an escape that has these friendships encoded into the game, a kind of companionship is enforced by this game," says one anonymous systems analyst who watched his already failing relationship fall apart as his girlfriend spent all of her spare time developing a virtual boyfriend on Everquest. "You have to be social and interact with people [to succeed in the game] -- for some people, they become surrogates for real life. They've got more 'EQ' friends than 'RL' [real life] friends."

Bulletin boards across Everquest are currently hopping with posts from self-confessed "Evercrack addicts" and spouses who worry that their partners are more involved with their gaming lives -- sometimes even including a virtual wife or husband -- than they are with their real-life families. Carly Staehlin, the producer of Ultima Online, estimates that there are 5,000 "married" couples inside that game, and says, "Players invest an average of 12 hours per week in Ultima Online, and [there are] lots of people who spend a lot more than that. Let's say two hours a day, your evening is going to be spent in the virtual world. If you are married in real life you are not spending that time interacting with your real-life spouse but your virtual spouse." No wonder so many jealous husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends look with consternation at the phenomenon of role-playing marriages.

But that doesn't mean that the game is addicting, and many would disagree vehemently with Skinner's use of the term. The builders of Ultima Online and Everquest, for example, say that their games are no more compelling or addicting than any other pastime. Says Cindy Archuleta, community relations manager for Verant and Everquest, "Our average player plays about 20 hours a week; most of it is just a good sense of community when they are there. You can always find disturbing stories here or there when you do look for them. I have hosted three real-life events where people come to meet each other, and it's been extremely positive."

And it's true that any community or game, online or off, is going to have its more extreme enthusiasts as well as a much larger population of perfectly happy, well-adjusted participants. For every Sheyla, there is probably someone who has used Everquest as a way to reach out to the world and make friends, to learn something about themselves and gain a new perspective on life.

"It doesn't create a void, but it does help fill it," says Ron Hayden, an Everquest enthusiast and founder of the Well Guild. "For some people it's a bad thing because they avoid dealing with their life; for others it's a bridge to self-confidence. It really lets shy people who have a lot of self-confidence issues put on a personality and learn to overcome that in an environment where it's safe." After all, the whole idea of a role-playing game is to re-create reality, to create a world as immersive and entertaining as life itself, that allows players to live out their fullest fantasies -- to be better version of themselves -- in real time. This can be both wonderful, and dangerous, as the "Evercrack" confessions show. And thanks to ever-more-powerful gaming platforms like the Playstation 2 that can render shockingly realistic graphics, games are just going to continue to become more immersive. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts (the publishers of Ultima Online) brags that "as immersive as these games are today, we are about six months away from them taking a quantum leap in the level of immersion that people will experience."

A dialogue about how to deal with gamers who enjoy the virtual world more than the physical world is an important one to have now -- rather than waiting until more players have resorted to faked suicides or real ones as a cry for help. And for that small epiphany, the Sheyla hoax was probably good for the role-playing community. "This was an important event for the community, it's just something that always needs to be discussed," says "Tweety," who runs an Everquest fan site, and ruminated publicly about the suicide. "She did us a service in some way. I prefer to think of it as Sheyla the idea, rather than Sheyla the person."

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