World Of Warcraft ‘more addictive than crack cocaine’ as teenager suffers convulsions after 24-hour-long game | Mail Online
An internet computer game has been condemned as being as addictive as cocaine after a teenager who played it 24 hours non-stop had convulsions.
World of Warcraft has been hugely successful in capturing the imagination of players by drawing them into a virtual universe of battles and quests.
However, it is at the centre of a growing problem of computer game addiction.
Why do people always have to go crazy over the top with their analogies or similes or whatever they are? What a ridiculous statement to say World of Warcraft addiction is similar to cocaine addiction. World of Warcraft is much more like maybe sugar or coffee in its addictive qualities.
- World of Warcraft kind of seeps into your life rather than giving you an immediate but short lived high.
- World of Warcraft is much cheaper than cocaine. What? Maybe 3 or 4 trips to Starbucks a month max.
- World of Warcraft does not immediately delve you into illegal activity. Well ok maybe if you decide to take the quick and easy way out and buy gold or powerleveling or even a whole account off eBay or something like that.
- World of Warcraft is not typically life threatening. Not immediately anyway. Perhaps years of sedentary free time might have an impact, but still…
- Word of Warcraft makes you international friends. To get that out of cocaine, you probably have to start dealing.
- World of Warcraft does not impair your ability to drive or operate heavy machinery. Not unless your muscles atrophy to a crazy level at least.
- World of Warcraft addiction does not make your nose bleed.
- You’ll never burn your face off with World of Warcraft addiction like Richard Prior did.
- World of Warcraft never familiarizes you with needles and self injection.
- World of Warcraft is much more prevalent. I doubt cocaine can claim 11 million accounts world wide.
So there you have it. World of Warcraft may be be addictive, but not like cocaine. No, not at all. People are just nuts when then come up with stuff like the above. You’ll have to excuse me now. I have to log in…
Well it turned into a virtually World of Warcraft weekend for me. Why? Because I had other things absorbing my time and interest. Did I feel a little guilty for not playing? Oh yeah, for sure. There were “the shoulds” creeping in every now and then which is so silly but a sure sign of addiction I think. But as I said last time, why should I feel compelled to play if I have other things I want to do or even worse, simply don’t feel like playing? (gasp!)
Today I want to introduce the role of guilds in World of Warcraft addiction. I belong to an absolutely fabulous guild on my main server. (server Farstriders, faction Alliance, guild Ex Cinis Cineris, main Character Sayas though Dhume has been seeing more play time of late) Ex Cinis Cineris is a huge “social” guild of 500+ characters representing 200+ players. By social, this guild means exactly that: the guild is more about friendships and socializing than it is raiding, leveling, roleplaying, pvping, etc. That makes it the perfect guild for someone like me in that I can log in any time and have someone to chat with or at least “eavesdrop” on in guild chat. It doesn’t matter if my character is in all greens and they are all purples or whether I’m logged on as a level 13 and they are playing a level 80. On those occasions when I need help, someone is almost always available and willing to help, but by and large I’m left to do my own thing. Not ignored, but certainly not pressured.
That’s one way a guild can be really bad: You feel as though you are letting the others down if you aren’t logged on often enough or aren’t available for your raid role, etc. I know when my daughter was dating a major WoW geek, he’d have to explain or make excuses to his guild as to why he wasn’t available for thus and such. Bad enough that his new love interest was a bloodelf palidan! Sometimes in smaller guilds it even takes on the air of necessity. In my guild, if I weren’t online, there would probably be 3 or 4 other priests that could fill in for me. But I’ve been in many guilds where I might be the only priest of a certain level, spec, or skill set.
Even without that sort of pressure though, there is another. I simply feel like I’m being flakey with my friends. One weekend I’m on all the time. Next I might hardly be on at all. You’ll notice on the guild forums that some of our members feel compelled to post messages explaining or forewarning of absences. In my guild, its largely me making me feel guilty of flakiness. But I know there are guilds where you would get the boot after only a few weeks unexplained absence.
So I think of guilds as both a good thing and a bad thing when it comes to World of Warcraft addiction. Its wonderful to be noticed and welcomed every time you log on. But it can become a bad thing that fuels addictive tendencies if it reaches the point where you feel compelled to log on because of your guild.
So since starting this blogging stuff, I really haven’t had much of a chance to play World of Warcraft. Should bother me, huh? Strangely though it doesn’t. The only way it does at all is if I get caught up in the “shoulds.” You know all those things that you should be doing at any point in time. But why in the world would you let something like World of Warcraft into the realm of shoulds? To me that smacks of addiction.
Last night I did play for a few hours. But you know how I spent the better half of that time? Doing my auction house routine. Now for me, the auction house is how I make my money. Others do dailies or farm but I do auctioneering. I do pretty well at it and of course there is always that next big purchase looming out there that has me feeling like I should be doing my auction routine. But the thing is it takes time. Why should I feel compelled to spend what time I do choose to play on tasks if I don’t feel like tasking?
One other note: I relearned an old lesson yesterday. When leveling multiple characters, there is often no need to go through the same areas over and over again. Right now, I’m (belatedly) leveling a death knight and following the typical path through Hellfire, just lightly touching Zangarmarsh (because I didn’t like it the first time around) before heading over to Terrokar where I was languishing doing a series of quests that were for largely too easy for me.
Well along came a friend and with his help I ran all the Burning Crusade northern areas picking up the flightpoints along the way. Most of the areas I’d never hardly seen with Sayas. Now I’m thinking Dhume, my death knight is going to spend what time he has left in the Outlands in Area 52 and Netherstorm. Then when heading over to Northrend, I’ll do the same thing and hit areas I didn’t get to with Sayas on his way to 80. I figure I should be able to see fresh content with at least three characters this way. Then you figure the difference between Alliance and Horde perspectives and there is plenty new stuff for me to see before the new expansion hits a couple years from now.
So I’ve been reading a little around the internet on the topic of World of Warcraft addiction and I’m amazed at how harsh and drastic most of it is. It makes me think I need to backtrack and repurpose before I’ve barely started.
myworldofwarcraftaddiction.com will NOT be an extremist, ban warcraft, twelve steps to freedom kind of thing as long as I have anything to do with it or until I have a major change of heart. I now currently play World of Warcraft and I have been addicted. I have made it through the addiction to the point where I can now play in moderation. That’s not to say I don’t struggle with the urge to play rather than typing this blog. Sure I do! But I am able function within the parameters I set for myself. I am in control of my play time (most of the time) rather than it being in control of me.
Do you know what I think it is? I think that World of Warcraft is not yet recognized as a legitimate hobby. Maybe I could broaden that statement to be true of the whole video game scene. We and what for some of us is our passion are somehow looked down upon as some sort of ill adjusted segment of society. But what about the guy that is gone all summer long with his softball team or again, the guy that watches umpteen football games every week all season long? My wife is a “theater addict.” When she is involved in a play, we hardly see her for weeks at a time. How about the golfer that spends hours a week playing or practicing? What about the expensive green fees, often the travel on exotic golf vacations, the money spent on sport specific equipment and attire?
See? All these other things are seen as legitimate hobbies while our hobby is looked at as this huge waste of time… dangerous addiction. I think in part what needs to happen is that we need to start advocating for what some refer to as our hobby. I’m reminded of the bumper sticker that says, “Skateboarding is not a crime.” Well neither is playing World of Warcraft gosh darn it!
So now that being said, let me swing back the other way. World of Warcraft is most definitely addictive and for those who simply can not come to terms with its addictive nature the best course of action very well might be complete and total abstinence. But for many of us, finding that place of balance is the key. For instance, I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that I may never again be a raid worthy equipped player and therefore I might not ever see some of the end game content. Can I still have fun playing given that? Absolutely!
As I read those extreme, anti World of Warcraft sites, I was tempted to challenge them here. But that would be following a rabbit trail. I’ll leave it to others to take that on. Here we’ll talk about how to have fun in World of Warcraft without it completely taking over your life.
addiction – Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Main Entry: ad·dic·tion
Pronunciation: \ə-ˈdik-shən, a-\
Function: noun
Date: 1599
1: the quality or state of being addicted
2: compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal ; broadly : persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful
OK so there we have a generally accepted definition of the term addiction. Notice how it only suggests addiction to physical substances and ignores completely the area of psychological addiction. I think as much as anything that shows the definition hails back to a time before such things as video games were even a popular thing. Still things like gambling addiction have been around forever. I think World of Warcraft addiction has more in common with gambling addiction than heroin addiction in many ways.
Now that we have a standard definition, lets take a moment to look at World of Warcraft and come up with a list of ten indicators that you might be suffering from World of Warcraft addiction:
- You lose interest in other activities you previously enjoyed.
- You start the with the best of intentions to “get something done” and “only check auctions” early in the morning only to discover that the sun is now setting and you are still logged in playing.
- You become irritated when someone interrupts your playing even if you’re not doing anything particularly intense.
- You lose track of things like eating or sleeping.
- You make excuses to miss work or other activities in order to spend more time playing.
- When someone comes in the room to talk to you or you get a phone call, you keep trying to play while holding your conversation.
- In game occurrences have a huge impact on your mood for good or for bad.
- You realize in mid conversation that you’ve nothing to talk about other than World of Warcraft.
- You constantly interject in game references into real world conversations even though you know the other person doesn’t follow or isn’t interested.
- When you are not playing, you are still reading about or involved with World of Warcraft in some way.
Do you recognize yourself or someone you care about in the list above? Good! Believe it or not recognition is a fantastically huge first step. I think far more people suffer in guilty silence or in all out denial or defensiveness about this particular addiction. But there is hope. You can reach the point where you enjoy World of Warcraft while avoiding any or all of the above. Stick around and we’ll start exploring how to check yourself and other related topics as well.
Full time WoW addict
I’m guessing i will slowly get more fun out of playing Wow now i start to see it like a game again instead of a second job.
What an interesting post to run into on the eve of launching this site. Welcome to world of warcraft addiction. What’s this blog going to be about? Well the long and short of it is that it will be about my personal struggles (as well as guest contributions) in maintaining balance in life while playing World of Warcraft. Will I be advocating complete and total abstinance? Not necessarily. Yes, my personal World of Warcraft addiction was such that I had to take an extended vacation away from the game. (More on that later.) I’ll also readily admit that as someone prone to obsessive/compulsive behavior, I need to check myself constantly in order to stay on the tightrope. I’m sure there are many that are better off to stay away from the game completely. But primarily I’ll be targetting those that realize the game can be enjoyable and rewarding when taken in moderation. Its this moderation which will be my main focus.
So what is World of Warcraft anyway? It is currently the most popular of a genre of computer video games known as mmorpgs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games.) To give you some idea of its impact, the latest figures I read claimed the game has over eleven million subscribers world wide. Often times games of this type begin to wane in popularity with time but World of Warcraft passed its fourth anniversary November 23rd, 2008 and is still increasing in popularity.
What makes it so addicting and popular? Well, we’ll delve into this topic much more as time goes by. Its difficult to capsulize in just a few words. World of Warcraft emerses you in an alternate universe. In it, you escape your real life problems and challenges for a time and have the freedom to recreate yourself replete with a new reputation, a new status, a new set of quantifiable goals and achievements, and not least important, a new set of friends who are often times much more supportive than the real life variety.
I’ve played the game since its final beta test phase only to wait eagerly for the released version to hit the shelves weeks after the beta test shut down. It was during those earliest times of commercial release that I was most addicted. For a time there I was indeed a big shot in Azeroth (The World of Warcraft world.) and all but disappeared in the real world.
Mostly I would like to give others trapped in Azeroth hope that there is an alternative to completely stepping away from the game or completely losing yourself to World of Warcraft addiction. Again, I welcome you to follow along, to participate in any way that benefits you as we delve into the topic of World of Warcraft addiction.
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