Surrounded by hundreds of people at the bottom of the ocean, Pitt senior Charles Hughes tried to… Surrounded by hundreds of people at the bottom of the ocean, Pitt senior Charles Hughes tried to pick up a shell for about 15 minutes. He died three times in the process.

The shell was not real — it was constructed from pixels. Hughes, an industrial engineering major, sat safe and dry in his chair the entire time. It was his avatar, a humanoid bull called a Tauren, that floated lifelessly in the water each time, waiting for its soul to return to its body.

The clacks of the keyboard and click of the mouse filled Hughes’ bedroom as he and his friends worked their way through World of Warcraft, the world’s largest multiplayer online role-playing game.

In World of Warcraft, players create their own character in a real-time fantasy world — magic spells and all — with thousands of other players on each server. Characters level up and improve their abilities, allowing players to take on more difficult challenges that include human opponents and computer-controlled monsters. The game often encourages and even requires cooperation with other players, as many of the game’s achievements are impossible alone.

According to its manufacturer, Blizzard Entertainment, the game was released almost six years ago and just passed 12 million subscribers a few months ago. At midnight on Monday on the West Coast, Blizzard launched its newest expansion, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. So for Hughes and everyone else who bought their games at midnight on the East Coast, that meant a three-hour wait to begin playing. That was after Hughes had lined up two hours early in the 20 degree night, amidst wind and snow.

He described himself — while standing outside of the GameStop on Forbes Avenue in a parka — as something between a casual and hardcore player.

“I’ve put my hours in,” he said. “But I’ll slow down depending on the time of year and schoolwork.”

Once the game launched, it took another half an hour for Hughes and his friends — including his brother — to log on to the game and get organized.

Out of his friends, Hughes was the first to sign  on his server, one of more than 100 game worlds populated by thousands of players each.

His armor-clad Tauren warrior, named Morningstare, lumbered around the fantasy world of Azeroth while hundreds of other players streamed by him in the city.

Trying to pass some time, Hughes took a quest — an optional task for players — that involved picking flowers.

“Great. Nobody is in except this one guy named Chuck who’s running around picking flowers,” his friend Wally Khuze — whom Hughes knows only through WoW — said over their voice chat.

In another few minutes the group made its way over to a boat loaded with hundreds of players that seemed as if it would take them to an entirely new zone.

Once there, half a dozen tentacles reared up over the boat, threatening to pull it down into the ocean. If players didn’t jump from the boat at the right time, the Kraken, a sea monster, threw them into another zone to take the boat and try again.

The success of the game has turned it into a cultural phenomenon — garnering an appearance on “South Park” — and raised concerns about safety and addiction for some of its players.

“When I say addiction, I mean it in the colloquial sense,” said Bonnie Nardi, an anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine, who has studied social interactions in the game for the past five years. “Addiction is a medical condition, and whether that exists for some, we don’t know yet.”

In her experience with playing and studying the game, people who are playing too much are generally able to correct it for themselves.

Hughes — still intently playing just after 5 a.m. — agreed.

“Its all about knowing your limitations,” he said. “If you do it too much or do it when you shouldn’t, then it’s a problem.”

He said he stopped playing for more than a week before the release. He had run all of the instances — parts of the game world with bosses and other challenges — and didn’t have much interest in player-versus-player competition.

But before heading to GameStop Monday night, Hughes picked up an energy drink so he could settle down for the long haul with his new game.

A little after 4 a.m., the group moved into instances. Hughes, used to tanking — or playing a protector role in the game — in the highest level instances of the last game, was slowed down by the cautious pace of the dungeon.

“It’s about this time people start waking up and I need to pay attention to the outside world,” Khuze said.

Hughes wanted to play all night Monday, and into Tuesday. He said he’d be able to balance it.

Nardi, who also wrote the book “My Life as a Night Elf Priest” about her time playing the game, said that players’ guilds — semi-permanent organizations of players — will usually push other members to make sure their life is in order before playing the game.

Sometimes players aren’t able to keep their lives in one piece, though. David Bickford, a Community College of Allegheny County computer science major, hadn’t played for more than two months before Monday night.

A few years earlier, when still in his native Rochester, N.Y., he said he let the game get out of hand and he had to leave school. He chose to quit WoW for about six months after that.

After rejoining, he met his current girlfriend, CMU computer science and math major Vicki Cheung. The pair stood together, off to the side of the 50-person crowd inside the small GameStop.

“On one side, it’s very bad and addictive,” he said. “But on the other, it’s kind of good.”

The social aspect of the game helped draw in Bickford. He tanked for his guild three to five times a week.

Interactions between the players, especially in established guilds, often become more permanent, he said. He has friends whom he has followed from server to server that he has never met in real life.

Because of that, he doesn’t believe in the stereotype of the antisocial gamer.

“There can’t be 12 million people who are stereotypical nerds. But then again, if you look around here …” he said before stopping.

Most of the crowd stayed in small groups, chatting quietly or watching the plasma television with a countdown to the release.

Paul Beaver, an Oakland resident, lined up first on Monday night. He said he played partially because of the social aspect.

“Honestly, its a glorified chat room that lets you kill stuff and pick up shiny things,” he said.