"I vowed to quit, and I would do so in such a melodramatic way that I convinced my editors here at The Escapist that the results would be worth documenting. I wouldn't simply do as so many before me had, click the uninstall button and privately put the whole ordeal behind me.

"I would kill my characters."

Sean Sands quits playing WoW, and goes out with a bang.

"I decided I needed to see what my fellow classmates were saying about this tragedy, so I went snooping around the usual internet haunts. Not finding much (the news was still fresh), I Googled Mark's name and stumbled upon an online profile of his. He was, apparently, a frequent MMOG player, partaking in World of Warcraft and several others, not to mention his high frag ratio for Counter-Strike and others like it. It was a whole side of him I hadn't known or seen."

Tom Rhodes explores the digital life as epitaph, and a window to an unlived life.

"Yokoi's next big hit came to him as he rode home one evening on the bullet train. The exhausted engineer noticed the gentleman next to him fiddling with an LCD calculator. Yokoi watched, fascinated, as the bored man punched buttons in idle boredom. Suddenly, Yokoi wondered if weary commuters, looking to pass the time, might be interested in a portable gaming device. Thus was the Nintendo Game and Watch born."

Lara Crigger profiles the elusive creator of the Nintendo Gameboy.

"Of course, Fansy wasn't just a Bard; he was a level five Bard. According to the hard-coded game mechanics, he wasn't yet eligible for PvP combat, but monsters didn't care about player level. ... It was glorious. I was invulnerable and could kill anyone. It was a great feeling. I giggled the entire time and rolled around in my underwear. That's how God must feel when he kills people.'"

Alan Au speaks to Fansy the Famous Bard, the player who broke EverQuest.