Hunched at a computer in his darkened basement, basking in the blue glow of the screen, he settles in for another night of navigating his level 73 Orc across the land of Azeroth. He’s distracted at work and hasn’t seen his friends in weeks, but damn it if he’s not going to get that Orc to Level 80. Relationships are unimportant, sleep is for the weak, and any meal that takes more time to prepare than a frozen pizza is just not worth the effort.

Right? Maybe not.

In the past five years, World of Warcraft has quickly become the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, with more than eight million users worldwide. But the stereotype many hold about the typical World of Warcraft gamer may not be real at all. Forget everything you learned about World of Warcraft from South Park. The reality of this unreal world may be more positive than you think.

“People spend countless hours playing and they don’t eat and they neglect their children, relationships fall apart,” says Moses Wolfenstein, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate, laughing about the common impression people have of those who play the game. “Yeah, these things do happen. But they’re not common.”

According to both players and researchers of the game, World of Warcraft provides players with real life social benefits. (Yes, that’s right – real life.)

Wolfenstein, whose dissertation research focuses on leadership and learning opportunities in the game, likens the online community in World of Warcraft to an online dating site.

In the game, he says, it’s entirely possible to meet “people who you would never meet by going out to a bar, or people who might be like you but who just don’t happen to be in your social network, so you just wouldn’t have an opportunity to connect with them.”

Launched in 2004, the first edition of the game, which is now known as “vanilla WoW,” offered 60 levels of gameplay on two different continents in the world of Azeroth.

The first expansion pack, “The Burning Crusade,” opened up a new continent and another ten levels of game play. The second expansion pack, “Wrath of the Lich King,” opened yet another continent and advanced the game to level 80, with increasingly difficult challenges for players to overcome. According to Blizzard Entertainment Inc., the creators of the game, “Wrath of the Lich King” sold 2.8 million copies on the first day of its release.

“When you’re hanging out with five or 10 people online and you’re slaying dragons and fighting the forces of the undead and whatnot, it’s kind of this really nice juxtaposition of this outlandish fantasy activity and this soft social space,” Wolfenstein says.

Much of World of Warcraft revolves around combat, whether it’s destroying monsters, fighting other players or participating in a 25-player raid to take control of a dungeon from its evil master.

However, the violent nature of the game is offset by its strikingly beautiful visuals. Each of the four continents in Azeroth include different zones, each with its own distinct landscape and climate. As they move through each zone, players can climb over snow-covered mountains or meander through rainforests and under glimmering pink and purple trees that don’t look at all like they belong in what WoW player and researcher Barbara Z. Johnson calls a “fantasy Tolkien-esque hack-slash game.”

“In the dead of winter, I actually just like going into some of the regions and walking around because they’re beautiful,” says Johnson, a graduate teaching assistant in the education department at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

The zones, or regions, also change with the season, and each change brings another festive seasonal event for players in the world to enjoy. In addition to seasonal celebrations like BrewFest and Winter Vale, Johnson describes a carnival that occurs in Azeroth several times a year.