But even for players who care only about finding the next powerful weapon or piece of armor, an essential reward for those efforts is the esteem and respect (or envy and fear) of other users.

''These hard-core players are the leaders, they are the ones that other players look up to, they are what other players want to be,'' Thomas Johnsen, the official Anarchy Online community manager for Funcom, the Oslo-based company that runs the game, said in a telephone interview. ''That makes the hard-core players very important, not so much as role models but as measuring sticks for other players.''

In that sense, these games are really only about the relationships among the people who play them. In some way they are like The Sims -- the ''Seinfeld'' of video games -- where the goal is simply to manage a character's everyday suburban existence. In The Sims, however, human relationships are simulated by software. In a massively multiplayer game, where thousands of people can simultaneously occupy a common (if vast) virtual environment, those relationships are real. That may be one reason that The Sims itself has spawned a massively multiplayer offshoot, The Sims Online.

''I think for almost anyone who goes very far into a game like this, the original reason for playing goes away, and it becomes a way to replace parts of your life that you don't have in real life,'' said Oskar Asbrink, 28, a music producer in Stockholm who is known in Anarchy Online as Wolfe, president of Storm, the most powerful player organization in the game. ''For many people, it is a way to establish yourself in a community and become prominent for people who might not be able to do that in real life. In the game, anyone can be the boss, the leader, become popular.''

Thedeacon is certainly well known. ''Some would say he is famous,'' Mr. Johnsen said. ''Others would say infamous.''

Perhaps most important, he is ubiquitous, and not just because he often plays more than 40 hours a week. The message boards at forums.anarchyonline.com are a major element of the game community, and Thedeacon has posted more than 3,000 messages since February 2002. At least as important, he is at once self-consciously outrageous and ultimately harmless, a sort of transgalactic RuPaul. Both in the game and on the message boards, Thedeacon often adopts a patois of inner-city slang and hacker dialect. He demands sexual favors from mutants of all species and requests that, in particular, mutant females of the nanomage persuasion provide him their feet.

Most players find his antics amusing. Thedeacon is a member of Storm, and as Mr. Asbrink put it, ''We can kind of do anything in the game, and as long as Thedeacon comes along to liven things up, it is more fun for almost everyone. He has that natural entertainer's personality.''