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It’s 2 in the morning, and I’m hours past my deadline. I had no excuse; I had all the materials for the story – the interviews, the research and finally, the game that’s been taking over my life.

World of Warcraft, commonly referred to as WoW, is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game – an MMORPG, generally referred to as MMOG. MMOGs are games such as WoW and EverQuest where players interact in a persistent online environment that exists even after they log off.

According to studies, WoW is the largest MMOG on the market today. As of September 2006, there were more than 7 million active subscribers around the world. According to MMOGChart.com, a Web site that tracks the growth of MMOGs, WoW takes 52.9 percent of the market share.

The numbers, even for a computer game, are incredible. All over the world, from Australia to the United States, players flock to the digital realm of Azeroth in droves. Many are students avoiding studying for that big midterm the next day, but even more are adults with responsibilities, families and jobs. All, however, play WoW – a game that demands, by its very nature, an incredibly large spectrum of people from all walks of life to work together.

I started playing WoW long before I was assigned to write about it. I managed to get my hand on a copy from a friend, ostensibly only to play during the free first month included out of the box (WoW includes a monthly subscription fee), see what all my friends were raving about, and then quickly quit just in time for school. In hindsight, that was a lofty goal.

Within a week, I was logging at least three hours a day playing my first character, a human warrior called “Cmdrstarbuck,” modeled after the delicately butch features of my favorite sci-fi heroine. She had short blond hair, blue eyes and a sword that could cut through hordes of, well, Horde – the “evil,” savage enemy, played by gamers just like me. She was, to put it succinctly, everything I was not.

It was empowering, but the problem was, I couldn’t stop playing. Summer became fall quarter and fall quarter became a desperate struggle to juggle classes, work and what little social life I had.

It’s hard to ignore the horror stories of students dropping out of class because they played WoW all day, of others losing key scholarships and returning home. Like most stories, they exist in that hazy realm of “I have a friend who has a friend who ... ,” but that doesn’t mean the risk isn’t very, very real.

“One of our friends, Matt, had problems. He was the best mage on the server, but he played way more than any of us. He had problems staying in school,” said Edward Herman, a fourth-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student and level 60 Undead Warlock.

For one UCLA student, the longer she played, the lower her grades became.

“Quitting cold turkey became the only option for my boyfriend and me. I didn’t like the direction my GPA was going,” said Jaymie Lao, a fourth-year linguistics student and a former level 52 Night Elf Priest.

“The problem with the nature of the game, that there’s endless progression, there’s never really an end. There’s always bigger monsters to kill, better loot,” said Douglas Rosenberg, a fifth-year computer science student, former Daily Bruin editor and level 60 Night Elf Druid. “(But) if there’s something you’re doing that you really don’t like, you’re going to find something else to do, be it Warcraft or any other activity.”

However, WoW is hardly the lonely nerd mecca many might believe it is.

Contrary to popular belief, it is nearly impossible to play WoW without interacting with other people. There is no true solitary experience in an MMOG, and with the way WoW is set up, the best “loot” – better weapons and armor – can only be attained while working with other people.

While a level of anonymity exists, many players first start playing WoW through recommendations from friends or loved ones. For Herman, WoW offered a chance to hang out with friends from back home.

“(My friends) are scattered all over and it’s nice to be able to hang out with them online. Since I don’t really get a chance to see them, playing the game lets me keep in touch with them,” Herman said.

Making a pact to level up their characters together, Herman and his friends have played WoW since the beginning of the game back in November 2004 and continue to play today.

Having a group of friends dedicated to helping each other out, ironically, may be the most potent weapon in the game.

These groups of players working together can get large, especially with the option of creating “guilds,” large, player-run organizations in the game dedicated to everything from helping new players (“n00bz”) to slaying dragons.

The battles, like the subject matter, can become epic in scope, and the more people, the better. For many players, these guilds become a sort of second family and an opportunity to become friends with people they may never have met otherwise.

“My friend found his current girlfriend for over a year through WoW completely by accident. I never thought any of us would find someone through the game because I always thought it was weird,” Herman said. “But she’s very nice and it was cool.”

In the stereotypically male-dominated world of video games, it’s easy to assume the real person on the other end of a character is a man. After an uncomfortable encounter with an insistent Dwarf Hunter, I started to pretend I was a guy behind my curvaceous female avatar.

As I was playing, I befriended a female priest character; I would kill the monsters for her, she’d heal me, and we’d both share the loot. We grouped together for over three weeks believing each other’s finely crafted lie until a run-in on voice chat revealed our unexpectedly “girly” voices.

It was a weird moment of disconnect, realizing we were both girls pretending to be guys pretending to be girls. Speaking with her later, I found out that she had hidden her identity for many of the same reasons as me, and I was left wondering just how many girls like us tried to avoid harassment in much the same way.

This is changing, however. With the sheer scope of WoW’s player base, a new, changing face of gaming is emerging.

In the recent “Active Gamer Benchmark” study done by Nielsen, it was revealed that two-thirds of online gamers are female. While including online games such as those found on Yahoo! and other casual game sites, the statistic also includes the recent surge of the MMOG market.

For WoW, the number of female players hovers somewhere around one-third, and compared to previous MMOGs on the market before, the chance of the player behind that hot Night Elf Druid being an actual woman has become progressively higher. In fact, it could be anyone.

“I think you’d be surprised the people who you wouldn’t think play, play. Some are parents with children, others are doctors and professionals. It’s a little surreal,” Lao said. “You play with these people every day, and the next thing you know, you’ve built a sort of friendship.”