Fantasy

About 18 months ago my boyfriend bought me a game. We had always been big fans of Final Fantasy games and this one was an online game made out of the series.He had thought that it could be something fun we could have done together but could he have been more wrong... Now next few paragraphs will be about online gaming, so in case you don't like games, go skip in a park or something...

I had never played online games before so I was a bit out of it and didn't know what to do. I remember creating a cool looking male character and run around in a town getting frustrated because I didn't know which buttons to press. After a little while I decided to delete that character and create a female character, since I am a girl in rl as well. I didn't want to have ears like the catwoman Mithras had nor did I want to be tiny stupid looking midget (tarutaru). Now looking back at my job choices I think I should have gone with tarutaru but meh, I just wanted to create a character that looked a bit like me.When I finally realized that I had to actually equip a weapon before I went to kill stuff and that everyone in the game aren't people playing the game but NPC's (non player characters) I started to enjoy it a lot. I was a level 5 thief and I was killing bees and worms in a desert looking area, KEWL!My first human contact was a Japanese guy who was playing with two characters. He, for some reason, wanted to help me level up. He was playing with a elvaan warrior which was about my level and then he had another character - a little tarutaru which must have been like level 75 whitemage or something. I didn't realize until a lot later that it was just one person playing two characters and was very sad that later on in the game he didn't even know who I was... Well anyway, I kept leveling up my thf, made it through dunes (a notorius area where all "noobs" get together for the first time), started to try different jobs and decided that I wanted to become a ninja. Took me about 40 levels (75 being the maximum) to realize that I wanted to be able to use magic with my characters... what a waste of time. By this time I was playing the game basically always when I had some spare time. My boyfriend had given up on me and our relationship was over, we were two people living under the same roof and that's about it... but what difference did it make, I had my new life online with the most amazing friends one could ask for.I leveled a healer job (whitemage) to 75 and felt very proud of myself and while I was doing that I met a guy in the game who told me the sweetest things you can tell to a girl. He told me he loved me, he told me he would do anything for me... I was melting inside every time I saw him log on the game - only problem was that he lived in the US.I had been saving up some money to go traveling and when I heard the words "come here I will pay for your flights" I went online and booked me a 2 week trip to go see him. I made him swear that he would actually pay my flights because I still really wanted to go traveling and he promised that he would.The two weeks I was there weren't the best. I never got any money for my flights from him and I ended up paying for everything we did there. The 2nd week this guy was ill and more than once I was sitting on the couch in their living room my eyes in tears because I was stuck in there and couldnt even go do anything because in US you need a car to do anything,(seriously ...anything!)I was happy to get back home but somehow I had gotten addicted to him and even this day I am recovering from the mistake I did to try to share a life with someone from a silly game, who lived on the other side of the world and was 7 years younger from me....But anyway... the game, I think huge online games like FFXI should have a limit on them. If you have played the game more than 20 hours a week it should block the user from playing it until the folowing week. The people in the game arent real and all the promises made online aren't real. I made a mistake of thinking that people online were my actual friends, I isolated myself a bit from real world when I was highly addicted to it but am happy to have found my way back to enjoying hanging out with my friends and watching movies. I still play but only if I have absolutely nothing else to do.I feel sorry for some of the people who have grown up with the game - they are celebrating their 18th or 20th birthday in the game firing imaginary fireworks to the sky and snogging their online partners. I have talked with several of them and these (mainly) boys are desperate on finding themselves a real online girlfriend because there is no way they could ever form a normal relationship with a person who didn't play the game. Going out doesn't excist for these people, if you go on a date you turn on your pc - it's so sad that it makes me cry, but they don't have a way out anymore - they need rehab - going cold turkey is not an option anymore.