Gamespot is running a piece looking at a UK study which may indicate serious addiction problems among a large number of Massively Multiplayer gamers. The study, conducted at Nottingham Trent, showed that almost 12% of a 7,000 person study group showed symptoms of serious addiction, as laid down by the World Health Organization. From the article: "The survey was filled in by a self-selected sample comprising mainly of males with an average age of 21, and was concerned principally with the potential for addiction to online gaming. [Director of the International Gaming Research Unit Mark] Griffiths said, 'I'm sure if we'd done this survey looking at non-online players, looking at gamers that play on stand-alone systems, my guess is that the prevalence of addiction-like symptoms would have been much less prevalent.' According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction."
Seriously. If you want to look at the "symptoms", being an MMOG addict is more like joining a cult: you've got all these new friends, you've got to learn all these new things... instead of knowing verse 3.14, you need to know the cleric's level 44 spells. OMFG, you don't have Celestial Healing? [att.ne.jp]
But in our cult, you get to kill dragons, not wait for a judgement day that just never seems to come (next year maybe!). Yes, you lose touch with family like a real cult-- guildies will even scorn you for leaving for family time ("WTF, you're logging? Come on, we've been planning this raid all week. We need your DPS, dude.").
In our cult, we don't go door to door spouting crazy nonsense that would get our asses kicked if people didn't feel so bad for us. We stay indoors, like good crazy people should.
And like a real cult, the other members may feel real sadness and loss when you have to "disconnect". "What do you mean FlowerGirl quit cause of RL issues? But she... but she... she was our recruitment officer, and she laughed at my jokes:("
Moving to China makes sense. You don't want those old folks in Korea whipping your ass online and offline with their Whippersnapper Cane (120+ damage) when you talk smack.
yes, ofcourse we show "symptoms" of addiction, my question is what does the WHO say about the number of these symptoms that we need to show before we are clasified as addicted, and howmany people showed those signs.
Yes I've played Oblivion. Maybe it could become addictive if it were an online game with no clear end. But I seriously doubt Oblivion will ever incite players to spend thousands of hours (and up to 100+ hours a week for weeks on end) playing at the expense of family, work, sleep, and other essential things. That's the kind of behavior brought on by MMOs such as EQ and WoW that causes people to call them addictive. I myself just quit WoW after spending about 2000 hours in the game over the last 15 months - a
Whatever man, I have no desire to convince you of anything. I have a friend who plays Oblivion just to look at the beautiful graphics. He'll take his horse up a mountain to a waterfall and sit under a tree and watch the sunset.
I was wowed by its beautiful graphics, and visually-sensory based immersive world.. but I quickly found that i cared nothing for the characters around me and my own character, unlike the baldurs gate series which i am revisiting. Just read the dialogues in the first game - we hardly ever get that level of writing in games. Mostly, crpgs are dumbed down for the broad market and the mtv attention-span.
My addition also lies in interesting narration. A discourse i feel part of - with characters i can relate
Yes, you're right. Some of the story safety restrictions in Oblivion piss me off. I tell a guy he's without honor, he tells me to go away or he'll kick my ass, can I challenge him to a duel? no. Can I start hacking into him? sure, but he won't die, he'll only go "unconcious" because he's needed for another quest. Gah. But, like all games, you have to accept the limitations of the media.
One addiction is as bad as another. The suggestion that people who play bingo are less "addicted" than people who play "wow" is simply wrong. Many people just seem to have a natural propensity towards addiction. For many, this is easily controlled by substituting one stimulus for another. For some however, the desire to continue with a specific behaviour is overwhelming, and not easily supplanted.
This can be said of smoking / drinking / golfing / driving / mmorpg'ing / etc.
The suggestion that people who play bingo are less "addicted" than people who play "wow" is simply wrong.
Yeah, the difference is that bingo is only in session at certain times, but you can log into WoW anytime, so people addicted to bingo display their symptoms less often.
I work in a casino with bingo and we definitely have diehards who would rather miss a family occasion (if any of them even lived near family - lots of our players retired in the general area) than miss bingo. They show up with their
I had to quit playing WoW because that's all I did with my free time. I was in a serious raiding guild, and filling out my tier 2 set and getting ready for Naxx was all I seemed to care about. One morning, I woke up from a dream about killing Onyxia, and I decided that was too much. I got out of bed, deleted the WoW from my hard drive, and canceled my account. My wife was pleased as punch. But now, everything in my life seems so much duller now. I have taken to playing ATITD since it is too boring to become an obsession. Perhaps I should take up heroin? *shrugs* But, I do have to say that unlike many addictions, WoW was fun until the end. But, I no longer think WoW == RL.
Sure, you played the hell out of it. I myself played the hell out of WoW, and may again at some point in the future, but my life got in the way.
If you stop, cold turkey, you're not addicted. I love games, I love MMO's...I've played a dozen. I stay up all hours, I play hardcore.
I went through a period between contracting jobs after WoW came out where I played 60+ hours a week, and that lasted all the way up to the day I started the next job, then dropped to maybe 8 hours a week. I kinda wished I could play more, but I had other things I had to do.
So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way. It's just stupid. These studies vary so wildly in their results, I can't help but think that they're completely full of it.
>So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way.
You're right. Addiction doesn't work that way. You're not one of the "1 in 9" that the study found addicted to MMOs. People who get addicted to MMOs will actually experience withdrawal symptoms if they do quit cold turkey. Perhaps one of the best ways to tell if you're addicted yourself is to consider what you think about when you're NOT playing. If the game is all you can think ab
I don't consider "wanting" to do something other than work to be a sign of addiction...Now if I blew off work in order to play/drink/smoke, then hell yes, addiction.
Addictions aren't manageable, by definition. They take over all aspects of your life. Just because you blow off a social function so you can play a game, that means nothing. It's when you blow off something that actually matters, whose blowing off has stark consequences, that you need to think about addiction.
Addictions aren't manageable, by definition. They take over all aspects of your life.
Just a minor quibble with your argument - there are such things as high functioning addicts. Typically in such a case the person is able to pull themselves together enough of the time to function more or less like a normal person, but they are unable to quit. I've known at least one high functioning alcoholic (who later hit a downward spiral, but the alcoholism went back before that). I'd say that such cases show addicti
Agree. I know a certain opiate addict who has not only maintained his addiction at a (relatively) steady level for several years, but has in that time moved up from an entry level job into operations management and successfully raised two children and kept his wife completely oblivious to his habit.
Addiction is not nearly as cut and dry as some would think.
I was in much the same position after I graduated college but before getting a job. Yes, I exhibited enough symptoms that I could have been diagnosed as being addicted to a MMO. I had full control over my ability to play or not; but interestingly enough, unless you make the decision to stop, that ability is irrelevant when it comes to diagnosing addiction. Up until I cut back my play time (I got a job), I was, technically, addicted. After getting a job, the presence of another time-consuming activity in m
If the game is all you can think about, and you find yourself irritated that you're unable to play because you're "tied down" by things like social functions, work, sleeping, etc you're probably addicted.
No, that's a sign of obsession. Obsession can be bad, it can even be a part of addiction, but it isn't addiction. Obsession can also be something that you're just a lot more intersted in than whatever else you are doing. Did I think about WoW almost constantly when I was playing it the most? Yes. But s
Eh, I pretty much had the same thing. Except the triggering event was a bunch of Guild Drama(tm) that made me realize that the people I'm raiding with... really don't give a shit about me, beyond my Dark Iron gear, Quel'Serrar and raid attendance. Deleted everything, tossed the non-bound stuff and cash to one of the few decent people in the guild, and haven't looked back. I tried the ATITD thing for a weekend, before I realized how monumentally boring it is. Yes, I want to click 3000 times to make bricks
I know for some people it's not the fact that there is "no end" but rather they enjoy the online friendships they create and log in just to talk to their online friends. I know I've logged in just to ask a friend how their surgery went, if they had their baby yet, how their day at work was, etc and not even step foot out of the main city area.
Some people just use MMO's as a glorified chat client too with leveling as a side part of it.
"According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction."
I agree that the quote doesn't tell the whole story. Online games are more addictive because they're less boring than playing the AI. They also fulfill a social need. I know I like playing an FPS after work occasionally because I get to chat with generally like-minded people (and shooting people is
These "gaming addiction" studies are getting annoying.
Addictions that involve the taking of a substance are one thing. Quite a different thing are pseudo-addictions that are merely "addictions to enjoyment" without any artificial chemical agent.
We are ALL "addicted" (in a sense) to enjoyment or pleasure or happiness or whatever turns us on --- we are always trying to maximize these things, at the expense of those that we do not enjoy. "Addiction" to our pleasures is the normal human condition.
The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.
Pot is not known to be physically addictive, but you get addicted to the "Fun" and the mindset. Many addictions are that way--gambling, exercise, etc. As I had it explained to me once--mental addictions are actually physical addictions to chemicals your brain creates when it's happy or wants to be happy (Dopamine), and this is the mechanism of most (all?) addictive drugs as well--they manipulate your dopamine receptors.
That said, I'm getting sick of people using any sort of addiction as an excuse.
I'm sure there are some people who are addicted in the classical sense as they go through withdrawl when they stop playing, play so much that it destroys their life, etc. However it seems anyone who plays lots of games is considered an addict by these peopel. I'm sure in their book I was a World of Warcraft addict. I played with a raid guild so I played about 4-5 hours a night, at least 4 nights a week. Now notice I said played, so what happened? Some lengthy treatment program to beak an addiction? No, I go
The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.
Unless you think that the part of us that gets addicted to gaming is somehow dictated by something other than biological processes, gaming addiction clearly is a medical condition. In fact, you'll find many studies to confirm that just about every form of addiction has a similar impact on neuro
This all goes back to using vague terms to label people as "bad".
I can't see the article, so I'll ask: do they have specifics? Are we simply judging by the amount of time? If so, who are we to judge how people spend their time?
Or are they basing it on real things, like losing jobs, flunking schools, etc? If 1 in 9 wow players have either lost a job or flunked out of school in the past year, that's a pretty ugly stat.
According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.
While this may be true to some extent, I myself (and, I am sure, other players as well) DO feel a good deal of satisfaction whilst playing an online game, such as WoW. One could argue that a good MMORPG can and will create a feeling of satisfaction upon attaining important in-game goals, and draw
While I can't read the article probably because it was slashdotted, the quote above looks like typical media exageration. If you want a study on "addiction" to MMO's to be taken seriously, you might want to classify it on several different levels:
1) Destructiveness of the addiction 2) Severity of Withdrawal 3) Prevalence of addiction in general
Saying 11% of player are addicted to MMOs means nothing without quantifying what you consider "addiction". It's also meaningless without considering the side effects of addiction. 100% of people are "addicted" to oxygen, but that's not a very useful claim since there's no quantifyable affect of that "addiction". The severity of the withdrawal is important to consider, because a destructive addiction that is very hard to drop is more dangerous than one that is easily quit, like MMOs. Lastly, before you go all hog wild about how 11% of MMO players are addicted, I'd like to some useful background material like how many bingo players are addicted to bingo, how many musicians are addicted to music, how many quilters are addicted to quilting, and how many hockey players are addicted to hockey. After all are they amateur atheletes or are they just addicts waiting for their next exercise fix?
Many people have a tendency to invest a lot of time in individual pursuits for a while, whether it be atheletics, school, work, sex, or TV. The question with these studies is always going to be are the people addicted, or just enjoying themselves and socializing with friends online?
I was in the closed beta and open beta. I remember having LAN parties that summer with some other friends who were in the closed and open as well...plainsrunning, the kodo stomp bug, the whole bit... FANTASTICALLY wonderful time. Then release day. Each of us got a copy. For that entire weekend, it was all we did.
Time goes by.
I've created a multitude of chars, I have made hundreds of in-game friends, I have made hundreds of in-game enemies...I have hosted and been hosted at many many RP events...I have laughed with excitment at finally getting that drop, and cried when a good friend in my main's guild died. I have quit for 2 weeks, only to return to it. I have quit for two months, only to return to it. I have been at the point of playing only 8 hours a week. I have been at the point of playing 8 hours a day (with a full time job and a family mind you)
I have experienced every angle and part of WoW. About 6 months ago, I slowly weened myself away from it. I had realized I had missed out on a large volume of games as a result of WoW. I am as we speak going through all the amazing xbox ps2 and gamecube games that I missed...even a dreamcast game or two that I never got around to finishing.
I do not regret a single minute spent playing WoW. Some of my most fond and cherished gaming memories (and even a couple in-general life memories) came as a result of my WoW addiction...an addiction which I shall never be over nor one that I ever wish to be free from. There is not a single day that I do not think about playing it again.
Some day, I will double-click on that icon again. Some day, I will thrust myself back into that amazing and fantastic world. Some day, the extensions of my concious and soul shall live again.
Until that day arrives, keep a space around the campfire for me. I have a hilarious story involving a kodo, a troll, and a dwarf's kid sister.
Seems like the host is hosed; however, I did find an interesting article on WebMD about gaming addiction found here [webmd.com].
An interesting note FTA:
According to the Center for On-Line Addiction, warning signs for video game addiction include:
* Playing for increasing amounts of time
* Thinking about gaming during other activities
* Gaming to escape from real-life problems, anxiety, or depression
* Lying to friends and family to conceal gaming
* Feeling irritable when trying to cut down on
It seems to me like there are all sorts of studies talking about how X% of people are addicted to this, or Y% of people are addicted to that. it also doesn't surprise me that there is some amount of addictive behavior exhibited by MMO players.
Articles like this always seem to oversimplify addiction though. A lot of the articles on gaming and information addiction seem to just go for the "OMG Technology is Teh Bad!!!eleventyone111!" fear mongering luddite angle, but other times it seems like people are ju
According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.
While that is somewhat correct, isn't the insidious feature of most MMORPG's the continuous low level satisfiers? Instead of being addicted to the need to "finish" something, players are addicted to the constant high of accomplishment due to the "ding" factor?
According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.
Oh, is that why? Is it really? You mean the lack of an end is somehow enticing for people? It compells them to play indefinately? What you're saying is that something without an end never ends? Well I suppose that makes sense.. Thank you. Thank you for your brilliant insight into why things tha
Not really a problem for me or any other Eve players I know, simply because there is no sense of level building by EXP like in other RPGs; you train skills, and the skills train until they're done whether you log in or not. Also, they keep your character / property intact for a very long time if you cancel the account (I once went over 6mo. without internet and still had all my stuff when I came back). Taking a break is no problem...set a long skill to train and forget about it. The only penalty for not
I think that most of the allure to MMOs is that you are playing with other real people, of course if you compare MMO results to an offline game there is going to be a staggering difference.
Why do people get "addicted" to MMOs? I think it is because of the interaction with other people. Someone joins a guild, they play with other people frequently, they become friends with people in their guild. Now they aren't just playing a video game, they are playing a video game WITH FRIENDS.
I play MMOs quite a bit and played World of Warcraft for over a year. When my RL friends stopped playing the game became boring to me because I was no longer playing with friends. I might have a looser type of addiction to MMOs as I can't wait for the next one to come out so that I can play it with my friends. I also tend to quit MMOs maybe a month or 2 after my friends stop playing because I do befriend some of my guildmates. I find myself logging onto the game and checking my friends list; if no one is on then I quit the game, if someone is on then I talk to them and play.
Other people, the people you would consider hardcore addicts, might not have many RL friends so the people in their guilds become good friends, maybe even best friends and talking nearly every day. These people will continue to play as long as their internet friends are playing and if their internet friends are in the same low-friend-count situation then they will keep playing which leads to a group of people whose playing habits become dependent of each other. Since one person will only quit if the other quits, and visa versa, no one ever quits. Perhaps when an unforeseen event occurs, such as a person losing internet access or their computer breaking, then one person is forced to stop playing and the dependent counterpart person decides to stop playing because his friend is no longer playing.
I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game. They are addicted to something that the game can give them: a friend, fame, or anonymity.
I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game.
There are lots of people who pour incredible amounts of time into MMOs doing solitary activities like crafting or harvesting. It's not just the community, it's maxing out your character and draining it of all its content. I had friends who would play SNES RPGs for 100+ hours until they had beaten it in every way possible with
A big cause of cigarette addiction is psychological. People can get through two weeks (after which, most of the physical dependency is gone) and still pick it up again because of the pyschological factors.
Just because it's not physical addiction doesn't mean it's not an addiction; they are just weak-willed.
I Can Quit Anytime... (Score:2, Funny)
Not an addiction, more like a cult (Score:4, Insightful)
But in our cult, you get to kill dragons, not wait for a judgement day that just never seems to come (next year maybe!). Yes, you lose touch with family like a real cult-- guildies will even scorn you for leaving for family time ("WTF, you're logging? Come on, we've been planning this raid all week. We need your DPS, dude.").
In our cult, we don't go door to door spouting crazy nonsense that would get our asses kicked if people didn't feel so bad for us. We stay indoors, like good crazy people should.
And like a real cult, the other members may feel real sadness and loss when you have to "disconnect". "What do you mean FlowerGirl quit cause of RL issues? But she... but she... she was our recruitment officer, and she laughed at my jokes :("
Parent
I'm not addicted... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
can't RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
yes, ofcourse we show "symptoms" of addiction, my question is what does the WHO say about the number of these symptoms that we need to show before we are clasified as addicted, and howmany people showed those signs.
Meh, can't say more with out TFA beign up
Have you played Oblivion? (Score:2)
Isn't it like 1 in 9 drinkers who are alcoholics too?
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My addition also lies in interesting narration. A discourse i feel part of - with characters i can relate
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Follow on study... (Score:5, Funny)
Wish I could read the article.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Many people just seem to have a natural propensity towards addiction. For many, this is easily controlled by substituting one stimulus for another. For some however, the desire to continue with a specific behaviour is overwhelming, and not easily supplanted.
This can be said of smoking / drinking / golfing / driving / mmorpg'ing / etc.
Identifying an addiction in someone
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Yeah, the difference is that bingo is only in session at certain times, but you can log into WoW anytime, so people addicted to bingo display their symptoms less often.
I work in a casino with bingo and we definitely have diehards who would rather miss a family occasion (if any of them even lived near family - lots of our players retired in the general area) than miss bingo. They show up with their
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/ sex
Line starts over here --->
I was (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I was (Score:4, Insightful)
If you stop, cold turkey, you're not addicted. I love games, I love MMO's...I've played a dozen. I stay up all hours, I play hardcore.
I went through a period between contracting jobs after WoW came out where I played 60+ hours a week, and that lasted all the way up to the day I started the next job, then dropped to maybe 8 hours a week. I kinda wished I could play more, but I had other things I had to do.
So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way. It's just stupid. These studies vary so wildly in their results, I can't help but think that they're completely full of it.
Parent
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You're right. Addiction doesn't work that way. You're not one of the "1 in 9" that the study found addicted to MMOs. People who get addicted to MMOs will actually experience withdrawal symptoms if they do quit cold turkey. Perhaps one of the best ways to tell if you're addicted yourself is to consider what you think about when you're NOT playing. If the game is all you can think ab
Re:I was (Score:5, Insightful)
Addictions aren't manageable, by definition. They take over all aspects of your life. Just because you blow off a social function so you can play a game, that means nothing. It's when you blow off something that actually matters, whose blowing off has stark consequences, that you need to think about addiction.
Parent
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Just a minor quibble with your argument - there are such things as high functioning addicts. Typically in such a case the person is able to pull themselves together enough of the time to function more or less like a normal person, but they are unable to quit. I've known at least one high functioning alcoholic (who later hit a downward spiral, but the alcoholism went back before that). I'd say that such cases show addicti
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Up until I cut back my play time (I got a job), I was, technically, addicted. After getting a job, the presence of another time-consuming activity in m
Addiction vs Obsession. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's a sign of obsession. Obsession can be bad, it can even be a part of addiction, but it isn't addiction. Obsession can also be something that you're just a lot more intersted in than whatever else you are doing. Did I think about WoW almost constantly when I was playing it the most? Yes. But s
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Eh, I pretty much had the same thing. Except the triggering event was a bunch of Guild Drama(tm) that made me realize that the people I'm raiding with... really don't give a shit about me, beyond my Dark Iron gear, Quel'Serrar and raid attendance. Deleted everything, tossed the non-bound stuff and cash to one of the few decent people in the guild, and haven't looked back.
I tried the ATITD thing for a weekend, before I realized how monumentally boring it is. Yes, I want to click 3000 times to make bricks
BRB (Score:2)
Not necessarily a problem but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people just use MMO's as a glorified chat client too with leveling as a side part of it.
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I agree that the quote doesn't tell the whole story. Online games are more addictive because they're less boring than playing the AI. They also fulfill a social need. I know I like playing an FPS after work occasionally because I get to chat with generally like-minded people (and shooting people is
Does this mean... (Score:2)
Another Stat (Score:5, Funny)
99% of world is addicted to enjoyment (Score:4, Insightful)
Addictions that involve the taking of a substance are one thing. Quite a different thing are pseudo-addictions that are merely "addictions to enjoyment" without any artificial chemical agent.
We are ALL "addicted" (in a sense) to enjoyment or pleasure or happiness or whatever turns us on --- we are always trying to maximize these things, at the expense of those that we do not enjoy. "Addiction" to our pleasures is the normal human condition.
The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.
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As I had it explained to me once--mental addictions are actually physical addictions to chemicals your brain creates when it's happy or wants to be happy (Dopamine), and this is the mechanism of most (all?) addictive drugs as well--they manipulate your dopamine receptors.
That said, I'm getting sick of people using any sort of addiction as an excuse.
How many r
Also they tend to over state it (Score:2)
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Unless you think that the part of us that gets addicted to gaming is somehow dictated by something other than biological processes, gaming addiction clearly is a medical condition. In fact, you'll find many studies to confirm that just about every form of addiction has a similar impact on neuro
What is an addict? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't see the article, so I'll ask: do they have specifics? Are we simply judging by the amount of time? If so, who are we to judge how people spend their time?
Or are they basing it on real things, like losing jobs, flunking schools, etc? If 1 in 9 wow players have either lost a job or flunked out of school in the past year, that's a pretty ugly stat.
-Jeff
Slashdot editors murderous vampires? (Score:2)
Feeling of satisfaction, huh? (Score:2)
While this may be true to some extent, I myself (and, I am sure, other players as well) DO feel a good deal of satisfaction whilst playing an online game, such as WoW. One could argue that a good MMORPG can and will create a feeling of satisfaction upon attaining important in-game goals, and draw
Sensationalist! (Score:4, Informative)
1) Destructiveness of the addiction
2) Severity of Withdrawal
3) Prevalence of addiction in general
Saying 11% of player are addicted to MMOs means nothing without quantifying what you consider "addiction". It's also meaningless without considering the side effects of addiction. 100% of people are "addicted" to oxygen, but that's not a very useful claim since there's no quantifyable affect of that "addiction". The severity of the withdrawal is important to consider, because a destructive addiction that is very hard to drop is more dangerous than one that is easily quit, like MMOs. Lastly, before you go all hog wild about how 11% of MMO players are addicted, I'd like to some useful background material like how many bingo players are addicted to bingo, how many musicians are addicted to music, how many quilters are addicted to quilting, and how many hockey players are addicted to hockey. After all are they amateur atheletes or are they just addicts waiting for their next exercise fix?
Many people have a tendency to invest a lot of time in individual pursuits for a while, whether it be atheletics, school, work, sex, or TV. The question with these studies is always going to be are the people addicted, or just enjoying themselves and socializing with friends online?
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When does an "addiction" become just a new way of life?
WoW vet here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Time goes by.
I've created a multitude of chars, I have made hundreds of in-game friends, I have made hundreds of in-game enemies...I have hosted and been hosted at many many RP events...I have laughed with excitment at finally getting that drop, and cried when a good friend in my main's guild died. I have quit for 2 weeks, only to return to it. I have quit for two months, only to return to it. I have been at the point of playing only 8 hours a week. I have been at the point of playing 8 hours a day (with a full time job and a family mind you)
I have experienced every angle and part of WoW. About 6 months ago, I slowly weened myself away from it. I had realized I had missed out on a large volume of games as a result of WoW. I am as we speak going through all the amazing xbox ps2 and gamecube games that I missed...even a dreamcast game or two that I never got around to finishing.
I do not regret a single minute spent playing WoW. Some of my most fond and cherished gaming memories (and even a couple in-general life memories) came as a result of my WoW addiction...an addiction which I shall never be over nor one that I ever wish to be free from. There is not a single day that I do not think about playing it again.
Some day, I will double-click on that icon again. Some day, I will thrust myself back into that amazing and fantastic world. Some day, the extensions of my concious and soul shall live again.
Until that day arrives, keep a space around the campfire for me. I have a hilarious story involving a kodo, a troll, and a dwarf's kid sister.
Article (Score:2, Informative)
An interesting note FTA:
Addiction is very complex (Score:2)
Articles like this always seem to oversimplify addiction though. A lot of the articles on gaming and information addiction seem to just go for the "OMG Technology is Teh Bad!!!eleventyone111!" fear mongering luddite angle, but other times it seems like people are ju
Satisfaction (Score:2)
It just goes on and on and on? (Score:2)
Oh, is that why? Is it really? You mean the lack of an end is somehow enticing for people? It compells them to play indefinately? What you're saying is that something without an end never ends? Well I suppose that makes sense.. Thank you. Thank you for your brilliant insight into why things tha
Eve Online (Score:2)
They need to look deeper. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do people get "addicted" to MMOs? I think it is because of the interaction with other people. Someone joins a guild, they play with other people frequently, they become friends with people in their guild. Now they aren't just playing a video game, they are playing a video game WITH FRIENDS.
I play MMOs quite a bit and played World of Warcraft for over a year. When my RL friends stopped playing the game became boring to me because I was no longer playing with friends. I might have a looser type of addiction to MMOs as I can't wait for the next one to come out so that I can play it with my friends. I also tend to quit MMOs maybe a month or 2 after my friends stop playing because I do befriend some of my guildmates. I find myself logging onto the game and checking my friends list; if no one is on then I quit the game, if someone is on then I talk to them and play.
Other people, the people you would consider hardcore addicts, might not have many RL friends so the people in their guilds become good friends, maybe even best friends and talking nearly every day. These people will continue to play as long as their internet friends are playing and if their internet friends are in the same low-friend-count situation then they will keep playing which leads to a group of people whose playing habits become dependent of each other. Since one person will only quit if the other quits, and visa versa, no one ever quits. Perhaps when an unforeseen event occurs, such as a person losing internet access or their computer breaking, then one person is forced to stop playing and the dependent counterpart person decides to stop playing because his friend is no longer playing.
I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game. They are addicted to something that the game can give them: a friend, fame, or anonymity.
Re: (Score:2)
There are lots of people who pour incredible amounts of time into MMOs doing solitary activities like crafting or harvesting. It's not just the community, it's maxing out your character and draining it of all its content. I had friends who would play SNES RPGs for 100+ hours until they had beaten it in every way possible with
Hmmm (Score:2)
Re:So...? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because it's not physical addiction doesn't mean it's not an addiction; they are just weak-willed.