It’s 3:30 in the morning. This article, about how I’ve become obsessed with the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, is due in a few hours. I pitched the idea a couple of weeks ago, but have not written a word since, because actually writing it ... would cut in on my gaming time. I, a grown woman who has always prided herself on the fact that she reads more than 100 books a year, who has always gone to bed at a reasonable hour, am hooked on a video game. Completely pwned, as the gamers say (translation: the game owns me). I’m so ashamed.

I’m not so grown up that I won’t try to place the blame on someone else, so here I go: It’s all my friends’ fault. They got me the game for Christmas in the hopes that my boyfriend and I would join them in playing online. Gone are the days of huddling around a TV with your friends and your controllers. Groups of friends can now play video games without any of them leaving the comfort of their own homes.

At first, I was apprehensive. The idea of playing a video game was about as appealing to me as licking Stephen King (translation: not at all). I uploaded the software onto my computer anyway, thinking it couldn’t hurt to try. Once you have the software installed, you still have to subscribe, which costs about $15 a month. I signed up, thinking I would cancel right away—that I would play a couple of times and then forget all about it.

Next, I had to decide on my character. There are so many choices to make in games now! No longer do you have to resign yourself to the fact that you are a vertically-challenged Italian plumber in overalls. You can choose your character’s race, gender, name, body shape, hair color, eyes, nose, piercings and more. I ended up with an Alliance warrior dwarf named Joelle. She’s real cute, with pigtails, a button nose and breeder’s hips. I can make her do things like dance or laugh by typing a slash in front of a command. Type “/cluck,” for example, and she’ll make noises like a chicken. (Such things should be as easy in real life. “/Get me a cookie.”)

Part of what you do in World of Warcraft is go on quests. You speak with quest givers, alliance representatives made distinguishable by the large, yellow exclamation marks over their heads, and they send you to do things like kill wolves and bring back their skins, gather herbs for potions or retrieve items from the bottom of a lake. The more quests you complete, the more you receive, and the higher you rise in levels. The higher your level, the harder the quests, and the more you rely on other players. You also get stuff you need on quests, such as food and armor, either from looting the things you kill or as a reward for completing your task.

The first few times I played, I was horrible. There was so much happening at once. I could not get the hang of moving Joelle around. It’s not like Nintendo, where you have a controller. You have to move your character with the use of a mouse or keypad. So, Joelle ran into walls and trees. She plummeted from ravines and bridges. She fell into everything imaginable—rivers, lava streams, holes, ditches. I did a terrible job of defending her; she was forever getting her butt kicked. As you navigate this online world, moving your character too close to something dangerous—say, a wild boar or a zombie—will cause it to attack you without provocation. Mind your manners, zombies.   

After a few attempts, having gotten no higher than level four, I abandoned the game and went back to reading books. I half-heartedly tried to cancel my subscription a couple of times, but was thwarted by a crying monster who walked out on the cancellation page and sobbed openly at the idea of me leaving. Yes, a creature in a video game made me feel guilty. So, World of Warcraft sat untouched on my computer for months—until a few weeks ago. I don’t remember the specifics, but, for some reason, I decided to turn it on. Second time’s the charm, apparently. This time I was really into it.

At first, I didn’t mention to my friends that I was playing again. I didn’t want them to know how slow I was going. But as I got the hang of it, I started playing all the time, finishing quest after quest, advancing rapidly in levels. The game brings a great sense of accomplishment. You go around collecting things, finishing quests, completing jobs. It’s more than I do in real life. I may not have gotten around to cleaning the cat puke off the kitchen floor yet, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t kill the hell out of some orcs. Plus, you can learn different skills, such as fishing or cooking, that help your character make useful things. Joelle loves to cook. She makes a mean crispy spider surprise.

I also like that I can play at any time of day. I know, the same is true for television and books, but I don’t own a TV, and I’ve reached that age where if I try to read past 10 p.m., I just fall asleep. But, with a video game, there is just enough happening to keep me conscious. I can’t be falling asleep and letting Murlocs sneak up on me! I can also set the game so that Joelle fights things automatically, so, while she’s wailing on a beast, I can read a couple sentences in a book. I polish off a couple chapters a night this way.

There’s also something in the game called the Auction House, where you can sell items you’ve made or collected to other players and make money. I check it obsessively, as though it were eBay. I find myself at work, wondering if the snapped spider limbs I put up for sale the night before have sold yet.

Ooh, and I got a pet! I looted a troll on a pirate ship and got a Siamese cat. “I got a kitty!” I squealed to my real cat Bella, who yawned and gave me the finger. The video game cat acts just like Bella. Joelle can be fighting a ferocious bear, and the cat stands beside her and yawns as if she’s never been so bored.

I still haven’t gotten over the fact that a lot of the characters I see running around in the game are manned by actual people in the real world. (WoW has 7 million subscribers.) A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were on a quest with a group of people we didn’t know, when one of them suddenly typed “I gotta go, guys, my mom needs to check her e-mail.” I realized “Holy smokes! This high level druid night elf is probably a 12-year-kid!”

I believe how people’s characters behave online is indicative of how they act in real life. Sometimes, you encounter people who are real friendly and will give you suggestions or help you with a quest. Other times, you meet people who just want to challenge you to a duel and type abusive things when you won’t fight them.

Worst of all are the people with high level Horde characters who make sport of killing all the low level Alliance. But it’s almost as amusing as it is annoying. The cry will go up that an enemy is in the area and characters just scatter. If you’re not lucky enough to get out of the way, they’ll kill you with a single blow. When your character dies in the game, you become a ghost and have to run back from the graveyard to your body and resurrect yourself.

Members of the Horde like to do something called “corpse camping,” where they wait for you to resurrect and then kill you over and over until you get help or log off. Last week, Joelle was being camped, and I called my friends to help me. They flew in their high level characters, and all these lower levels came running out from where they were hiding, like Munchkins greeting Dorothy.

My boyfriend has had to lay out rules about how often I can bring up the game in conversation. I’ve begun relating it to things in real life, and I get very cranky when I can’t play. On my day off a couple weeks ago, the WoW server was shut down for emergency maintenance, and I had a fit. Don’t these people know I had planned to spend all day playing?

I get home from work these days and turn on my computer right away. The next thing I know, it’s 3 a.m. and even Bella, her midnight crazies long since passed, is looking at me like, “Dude, go to bed.” A friend of mine recently explained that World of Warcraft is an obsession, not an addiction, because addictions affect your quality of life. I must not be addicted if I still manage to feed myself, go to work and remember to wear pants. There are just so many more quests to go on, so many more levels to advance to, and so many other characters I could try out … Why is it so drafty?

/Help me.