When Diablo 4 launched last month—the latest in a 26-year-old RPG franchise where players click on demons until they explode like loot piñatas—fans of the game started prepping like a natural disaster was headed for their homes.
They meal-prepped, traded ideas for the energy drinks and stretch routines to try between dungeons, and shared tips for how to sustain their mortal bodies through long gaming sessions. It was a lesson in community care. But it also resurfaced a phrase that’s just as chilling as Lilith’s return: “poop sock.”
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“Many of us are about to embark on a dangerous journey. Barely moving, not hydrating and staring at a screen for hours and hours. Please remember to drink water and move around! I try to set a timer so I can exercise, hydrate and refocus my vision,” one conscientious gamer wrote in the Diablo 4 subreddit.
“Large Hydroflask, lots of Cheez-Its, and a poopsock,” someone replied.
Poopsocking, in case you’re too blissfully innocent to deduce, refers to the practice of playing a video game so compulsively you don’t even want to waste time to go to the bathroom, and therefore just poop in a sock while continuing to game. But has poopsocking ever been more than an urban legend?
Most non-gamers I’ve said the phrase to in the last few days while writing this blog have understood immediately what “poopsocking” meant, and begged me not to say anything else. But if you’re still unclear on what’s going on here, the first official definition of the phrase was put on Urban Dictionary in 2003: “An item used to hide poop from mommy (Typically stored under the bed). Don’t let her find it.”
To poopsock, as a verb, is to grind the game in the most hardcore, uninterrupted, obsessive way. Poopsocks can be nouns—”I’m pretty sure poopsocks are welcome here,” one Diablo 4 player said in the official Discord chat for the game, for example. It can also be descriptive of a style of gameplay itself: “the last 10 levels being some dumb poopsock contest is just silly to me,” another Discord player wrote after release, referring to the incredible amount of time it takes to level in the late game. “The tenth of a percentage of the player base that engages with that grind can bite me.”
Poopsocking didn’t start with Diablo, but Blizzard’s beloved franchises and poopsocking have a long relationship—it was likely World of Warcraft players who began the meme, as one of the most popular games that kept people playing for hours and days, even to the detriment of their own health. Massively multiplayer role-playing games can require hours of uninterrupted attention for dedicated, high level players, after all. In 2008, Blizzard reportedly warned WoW players to take breaks when a teenager collapsed while playing a new expansion pack for too long without food or water.
Whether it’s “addictive” or not, Blizzard hit upon a formula that many games try to replicate, and that social media companies and casinos all have in common: the perfect timing of rewards that keep people sitting in front of screens. For Diablo, that comes down to the game doling out loot at the right times, in a system known as “intermittent reward/reinforcement,” which has been shown to produce dopamine similar to how actual drugs would.
Know Your Meme says that “the idea of a ‘poop sock’ existed prior to the existence of the internet,” but provides no source for that chilling claim. If you have any leads as to why people would have uttered the phrase “poop sock” prior to 1983, please get in touch.
Part of the lure and lore of the Diablo series is that getting too close to it will result in bottomless addiction and self-destruction. With every new Diablo game that comes out, games journalists write about being afraid to even go near it.
“Diablo Immortal and games like it are nothing short of a blight on the industry, and should probably come with a warning label,” Windows Central wrote about the mobile game that came out last year.
“Why is it that when we have ten minutes here or thirty minutes there, we go to medieval war in the land of Tristram? Why have relationships suffered? Why have jobs gone unmanned and why have gamers everywhere sold their soul to Blizzard just to fight the devil?” Complex wrote when Diablo 3 came out in 2012.
We have not seen any evidence that people are literally poopsocking, and realistically it doesn’t make sense for basic hygiene and logistical reasons: it would take two hands to hold open the sock, leaving none on the game and defeating the point. More practical (but no less disgusting) options exist.
But you never know. So I asked the mods of the r/Diablo subreddit if they’d ever encountered a case of people literally pooping in a sock, and not just using it as shorthand for intense grinding.
“As with most fandoms, you get quite a spectrum of obsession,” one mod told me. Most of the mods have been in Diablo communities in one form or another for more than a decade, they told me—if it happened, it’d be reasonable to assume that they’d know about it. “We’ve seen a lot of weird shit (pun maybe intended?) but I don’t think any of us have ever come across or seen anyone talking about poopsocking in a serious fashion,” the moderator said. “It’s been meme’d about time to time during game launches, but nothing so crazy as to think the user was being serious about it.”
Even if gamers aren’t holding open socks and shitting in them, extended gaming sessions have long concerned healthcare professionals and researchers. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of studies and news articles on “gaming addiction” in the last 30 years—whether it’s real, whether it qualifies as a true addiction, its effects on young people, and much of it sensationalist. Researchers have been debating the definition of “addiction” when it comes to non-substance compulsions for decades, especially in the internet era. One small 2011 study found that excessive WoW gamers chose to play “despite the negative long-term consequences in social or work domains of life.” Poopsocking probably counts, but it’s not mentioned in the literature.
Poopsocking is most likely just a mental state, or a spiritual line not to be crossed. To meal prep for one’s health and nourishment in service of protecting the people of Sanctuary against Lilith’s bloodthirsty return is good and noble. But to become too engrossed—to poopsock—is to lose one’s soul entirely.
