Internet-based 'EverQuest' Takes its Toll on Family Life.

CHEATED on? You're in good company.

Left in the lurch for someone with more money? Hey, it happens.

Sure, it hurts being lied to, locked out or just flat dumped. But you can take comfort in knowing you're one of many who have been through the same thing. Heck, there are probably at least two songs on the radio right now that describe your situation exactly.

But what if you lose your lover to a video game?

That's what happened to Manda Erickson, a 24-year-old mother from Chippewa Falls, Wis. She says her fiance, the father of her 7-month-old daughter, has abandoned her for a popular Net-connected game called "EverQuest."

Is she exaggerating? You decide. She says her fiance stays logged into the fantasy role-playing game for as many as 20 hours a day, leaving her and her daughter alone at the dinner table and everywhere else. He was in the delivery room for the girl's birth, of course. But he brought along a laptop computer so he could help a less-experienced player kill something called "Dorn."

"My fiance and I have no relationship," Erickson writes. "I speak, he grunts. I ask him to do something, I do it myself. I want to go back to work, but I do not trust him alone with our daughter, simply because when I am here she will be crying and he will not do anything about it."

She may feel alone, but only in real life. Online, sad to say, she's got plenty of company.

There's Mel, a 31-year-old Seattle resident who's convinced that her live-in boyfriend cares more about "EverQuest" than he does about her. And Dee, 20, who cries herself to sleep while her boyfriend spends his nights jacked into the same game. And Gidel, who moved from Europe to the United States to spend time with someone she met playing the game herself. She returned home after he refused to move their relationship offline.

"Four days ago I asked him to choose between me and 'EQ,'" she wrote. "He has been on 'EQ' ever since.

They call themselves "EverQuest" widows. When they can find a few free minutes at the computer, they get together in online discussion groups to swap stories and marvel at the strange circumstances that led them into a relationship with a video-game zombie.

"My fiance has never had any other addictions," Erickson wrote. "Before 'EQ,' he was hardly on the computer at all."

The story is the same for others among the 250,000 people who pay $9.95 a month to play "EverQuest," a massive online fantasy similar to "Asheron's Call" and "Ultima Online." Players direct elves, gnomes and other customized characters through fantasy lives in a sprawling online world they share with tens of thousands of people at a time.

Like most addictions, you can't win at "EverQuest" -- you just buy in deeper and deeper. There's no ultimate battle in which you kill something, trumpets play and you get on with your life. Rather, the goal is simply to build a good "life," gaining experience, buying equipment and keeping a step ahead of everyone else who's trying to do the same thing. That takes time -- and lots of it.

Fans of such games praise their social aspect, and with good reason. They create a unique environment where people can meet like-minded souls and share entertaining experiences. Someone without any friends or family could live some semblance of a full life by simply tooling around "EverQuest's" Norrath as a half-elf cleric, healing the ill and completing quests.

But for someone who has friends and family, the fantasy world of "EverQuest" -- or "EverCrack," as some widows call it -can cause serious problems.

Recently, the widows were passing around copies of a wire story from Tampa describing the death of a 9-month-old boy. Prosecutors said the boy's father squeezed the boy to keep him quiet, then locked him in a closet for more than 24 hours so he could keep playing "EverQuest." The boy died of a punctured heart; the man was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Obviously, anyone who'd abuse a child has problems no video game alone could have caused. And there are plenty of people who manage to play "EverQuest" and other such games in moderation, balancing their online quests with their offline lives.

But when people start giving more and more of their lives to a video game, they'd be wise to consider what -- and whom -- they're leaving behind.

To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [e-mail] or write to him do Tribune Media Services, Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.