Luckily, Jaffe found refuge and eventual salvation with On-Line Gamers Anonymous ( www.olganon.org ), one of several online self-help groups that have sprung up to deal with the fallout from electronic entertainment they call heroinware. Its forums are swollen with refugees of various online worlds, all with harrowing stories of runaway gaming habits, lives ruined, friends lost, marriages broken.

And Doom is addictive as well as violent. Jay Wilbur says that a writer at Byte magazine coined the named heroin-ware for Doom.

Mr. WILBUR: He analogized us to drug dealers. We'll give you the first one. Here, you know, try this one. If you like it, you know, come back. We've got some more you. You got to pay now.

Doom, like Castle Wolfenstein, is shareware, sort of: that is, you can download the first installment from most BBSes and run it for free. Register that, and you'll get more episodes. (Call it "heroinware"—the first dose is free….)