Addiction to an unreal world online?

I’ve never played any games at the PC (except solitaire which doesn’t really count). For some of you that must seem a bit crazy because it became a more and more usual thing to do in your free time. But is also seems crazy to think about an online community where you go to spend your day in a role of an avatar. Believe me.

When my friend told me about his youth I was shocked. He spent from 2 hours up to 12 hours playing Ultima Online, every day. It’s a fantasy role-playing game which is played by thousands of players at the same time.

“ Partially designed as a social and economic experiment, the game had to account for the widespread player interaction as well as deal with the long history of players feeling as if they were the center of attention, as had been the case in single-player games” (access to that on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online [16.2.2011])

In Ultima Online you’re playing in a mystic world with a lot of doors to different other worlds. There are dragons, wolves, dears, witch, magicians who can be both, bad or good. Player versus Player are fighting against each other, to get more money for buying weapons, dresses, building houses and living a luxury life online. You can also fight against wolves, dragons, bears or other beasts there.

The inventor Starr Long explained before releasing the game that everything has a purpose in this game. When people are trying their new weapons and are killing a lot of dears, the wolves don’t have anything to eat anymore and are killing people for instance. “Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities."
(access to that on: http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/blog/blog_20090126.htm [16.2.2011])
That means also that if you’ve any kind of pet, they’re producing resources for you which make you even more powerful because you could trade with that meat for instance.
But why are people wasting so much time there?
My friend told me that he met a lot of friends there. So he used it basically as a chat room. With his character he was able to have a lot of fun with his friends, creating crazy houses online, pissing off the other players and fighting against the other groups to get their goods. And he was actually really proud of what he reached their. Telling me about really rare goods he earned there, making magic potion, and learning the online language in a kind of school.
He stopped playing that because his social life changed. He started meeting more and more friends in real life, too.
But he still has a lot of friends from playing Ultima Online, around 150 he mentioned. They probably never met face-to-face but in chat-programs of course.

250.000 people paying to play that game online were registrated at the highest. After that online role-playing games like EverQuest (in 1999), Asheron’s Call (in 1999), DarkAge of Camelot (2011) and finally the most successful online game ever, World of Warcraft (WoW,in 2004) was released.
WoW reached 12.000.000 users in October 2010.
For a person who never played online, it seems crazy that so many persons are spending their days in a fantasy world. That’s more a dangerous development than a place to meet people and have fun, in my opinion.

I can’t believe that just 6-7 % of the users are addicted to that, what I read. When people are spending up to 12 hours in a game-role they are already addicted.