Some friends of mine play World of Warcraft and it is something in which they really get invested. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 6 years or so, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a computer game people play online with millions of other people around the world.

Players make characters of all kinds and take them into the game to all sorts of things – I won’t expound upon them here, but if you’re curious, visit the official website. Doing things earns points called Experience Points (XP). Amass enough XP and the character earning them “levels up” in tiers and gets more powerful as well as gains access to more abilities. The game currently has 80 of these levels, so it can take a fair bit of time to get to this far.
For a quick shortcut for what the game world is like, start at Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, add more fantastic races of beings like humanoid cows with an American Indian bend, toss in a tiny bit of steampunk for what passes as high-technology. The lore upon which WoW is built upon is not the same as Lord of the Rings of course, with other computer games and books fleshing the story out to provide a rich background.
Some players role-play (RP) as part of their play and pretend to be part of the game world as a significant character. There are some servers dedicated to this play style so those who don’t wish to devote their time to this can choose not to. Take Player-vs-Player (PvP) Realms (the in-game term for server) for example. WoW is a massive war between two factions and on PvP Realms, the game greatly rewards players of opposite factions killing each other . As such, this can lead to a very competitive game experience. All’s fair in love and Warcraft (hurr!).
My friends are kind of in the middle. They play the game to get ahead and they don’t RP, but they do consume the lore and get involved in the hero characters’ stories. I still believe they take it a little more seriously than is practical though. I was told a story about how, due to a dramatic turn in the storyline of the evolving game world, they believed they wasted 75 levels of development and thought the game would permanently kill their character. They told me they literally wept and felt despair – not for the fact their character might be killed forever, but that it was completely justifiable for the game to do so because the twist of the story was about a massive betrayal my friend’s character was wrapped up in.
I don’t mean to betray my friends’ trust here. I love them, but damn. I play WoW myself, but when a dialog pops up with a quest description, I skip all the text and read the reward section. Then, just like all the other hundreds of quests I’ve started, I just hit ‘Accept Quest.’