Video games have replaced cocaine, ecstasy, and 'ludes as a cultural obsession, not to mention an addiction. These days, a guy who stumbles around bleary-eyed in the morning probably wasn't out snorting rails; more likely, he was killing locusts in Gears of War or slaying dragons in World of Warcraft. And he's probably not the stoned techie from the IT department you'd assume him to be. Today's problem gamers are guys who win literary awards, who edit books that you need an advanced degree to read, who handle your taxes and your divorce—guys with big IQs and big Rolodexes.

And while psychologists continue to argue over whether being glued to an Xbox is technically an addiction, it sure ain't pretty when a game takes over a gamer. Danny Yoo, a Southern California real-estate developer, knew he had a problem when he went on a Tahoe ski vacation and never once hit the slopes—he was too busy conquering the epic adventure game Halo in a single sitting. ("It was on the 'medium' level," Yoo says. "It probably would have taken me longer on 'hard.'") He knew the dangers—he'd watched a friend from UCLA keel over and get rushed to the hospital after playing Counter-Strike for three days straight. Yet Yoo would end a typical week of travel and consulting by flying into LAX on a Friday night and heading straight to his friends' apartment (known to them as "the Hole"—as in "black hole") to play Counter-Strike until his next flight out, on Sunday afternoon. Week after week, he'd miss his departure, then spend hours crossing his fingers for the red-eye.
At the insistence of his girlfriend, Yoo kicked the habit—he's now into racing cars—but some don't get out so easily. "I know people who have been arrested, who have lost their jobs, and who have ruined their relationships," says Maressa Orzack, director of the Computer Addiction Study Center at McLean Hospital and an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School. "I call it the three A's: It's affordable, accessible, and anonymous."

Experts don't agree on the games' addictive power. "We should not forget that millions of people play video games, and only a tiny minority experiences any kind of problem, whatever the cause," says Dr. Richard Wood, a professor and researcher at the International Gaming Research Unit of Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, England. Still, Orzack has witnessed video-game habits among doctors, artists, musicians, and white-collar professionals: "Ninety-nine percent of the time, these are people who have some sort of emotional disorder that maybe they didn't even know about. The game is what they're using to avoid reality. These are bright high achievers, working in jobs that indicate they're capable of doing much more than they're doing."

Stories of video games causing repetitive-stress injuries (or wasting one-year Rome fellowships) may sound trivial, but online support groups like Everquest Widows, Online Gamers Anon- ymous, and Gamer Widow are awash in upsetting tales of financial ruin and of gentle men who turn violent. One Texas woman with two kids, 28-year-old Pam Rinder (not her real name), learned that her consultant husband was cheating on her—not with another woman but with Everquest, which she says he played obsessively in his hotel room during months-long consulting gigs. In October 2006, Rinder discovered he was buying in-game currency with their real-life savings. Last January, ill with an undiagnosed disease, he stayed home and played Everquest around the clock, even as his wife kept paying for child care. "I couldn't leave the baby with him," she says. "I was scared that when my son woke up in the morning, his dad would just have gone to bed." In May, with her husband still homebound, Rinder moved the family to a small three-bedroom rental apartment; their house will go into foreclosure, she says, if it doesn't sell by September.

Cases like Rinder's, while extreme, fuel a growing anti-game movement, some of whose followers trade rumors about video-game companies' hiring psychologists to build addictive qualities into their virtual worlds. In 2001, Elizabeth Woolley's 21-year-old son, Shawn, killed himself in front of his computer while Everquest played on without him. Woolley founded Online Gamers Anonymous in 2002. "They're no better than drug pushers," she says of game companies. "They want addicted customers so they can make money." Maxim Kuschpel, a 26-year-old Berlin-based businessman (and, since quitting gaming, a professional yoga instructor), allows that the games are an "art form" that some, including himself, need to avoid, like drugs or alcohol. "You know that song by Pink Floyd, 'Comfortably Numb'?" he says. "That's how I felt all the time."

Since Everquest came on the scene, in the late nineties, gaming "widows" have complained that their partners no longer engage with them sexually. More recently, the widows complain that they're losing out to competition in virtual worlds like Second Life. Wagner James Au, author of the upcoming book The Making of Second Life, has heard countless tales of relationships ruined by online infidelities. (Most Second Life players believe avatar sex constitutes cheating; Au cites one player whose fiancée gave him the boot after finding his avatar cuddling with a sexy female avatar.) "It's hard," Au says. "You're in this wide imaginative space, and you can look like whatever you want and act like whatever you want, and a lot of people face temptations they've never dealt with."

In Rome, Tom Bissell sounds anxious about an upcoming assignment for the New York Times—traveling to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro—because he's been shirking the training. "I should have been getting into something resembling better shape for this climb," he says. "And instead I spent all my time playing Oblivion. It's crazy." (Although his anxiety may be the result of the 17-hour Oblivion binge he says he's just finished.)

Back in Brooklyn, Bissell's friend Jeff Alexander, a book editor, uses Bissell's first Xbox (the Amazon purchase was Bissell's second). Alexander, 34, insists that video games aren't inherently addictive. Still, when he met Bissell—at the time, Alexander was a part-time assistant to the writer Susan Sontag, who died in 2004—he found himself playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on Bissell's new PlayStation 2 until 3 a.m. on, let's say, a fairly regular basis. Bissell and Alexander hooked in three more friends: two novelists, plus another book editor, who, Alexander recalls, "didn't want to play but seemed pretty content to stare dully at the screen, watching us stare dully at the screen and playing." Today, Alexander is hooked on Guitar Hero—anyone who's seen him play "Cowboys From Hell" on expert level must simply bow in respect—but he still isn't comfortable mentioning his habit in mixed company. "It doesn't necessarily reflect well in a professional setting that this is how you would choose to spend your free time."

Bissell did make it up Kilimanjaro, in July. "It was murderously difficult," he says. "The last thousand feet or so may have been the most physically difficult thing I've ever done—other than complete the nirnroot quest in Oblivion." He celebrated his return by watching a DVD called The Making of Oblivion with his buddy Paolo Bernagozzi, a sound technician and translator whose former girlfriend had given him an Xbox for his 33rd birthday—and then thrown him and his Xbox out five months later.

The writer's misspent year ended in August. After that, he was off to a fellowship at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute. And he says he's quitting gaming, cold turkey.

But his buddy Alexander isn't so sure. "I'm taking a wait-and-see approach on that," he says. "The new Grand Theft Auto is coming out. Which is a pretty strong argument against quitting."