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EverQuest

It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.

On the contrary, she was a computer professional who had laughed at the hearings on videogame violence conducted by Joe Lieberman in the United States Senate and likewise dismissed the anti-game hysteria surrounding the recent Columbine school shootings that had been carried out by a pair of troubled DOOM-loving teenagers. According to one reading, popular among old-school MUDders, the EverQuest team had co-opted many of the ideas behind MUDs whilst tossing aside the most important one of all, that of a truly empowered community of players, in favor of top-down corporate control and deliberate psychological manipulation as a means to their end of ever-increasing profits. Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.

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