At Ten Ton Hammer, a member of the notorious/infamous/renowned Goonswarm writes about EVE Online:
There is a jagged fissure of insanity which runs through the heart of the EVE playerbase, a kind of feverish bad crazy that you simply don’t find in other online games.
[…]
Sleep was sacrificed, work was skipped, and as each day passed a greater edge of delirium inserted itself into the normal operations of the alliance. One of our logisticians woke his wife up in the middle of the night shouting that “We’ve got to pack up everything and move the babies to Delve!” Another Goonswarm director told his wife that she should only use half the detergent in the dishwasher, because the “salad bowls are in reinforced mode.” And yours truly (so I am told) once sat bolt-upright in bed and warned his spouse: “Don’t touch that! Don’t open the refrigerator! The spy is in the refrigerator!” before abruptly passing back out.
It’s a great read.
I forwarded this to some of my friends, and their comments ranged from “Wow, I’m glad the learning curve on EVE was too steep for me to get invested” to “Oh, yeah, I went through a lot of that back when I ran a corp. Had to quit for school, though. Still, I’d like to get back into it. Maybe we should all join up and start our own small corp!”
An issue I keep coming back to, and have debated with some of the people I know who like the game a great deal (or work on it), is whether obsession counts as immersion.
Sure, I say obsession counts as immersion, but it’s for sure one of that city’s bad neighborhoods.