World of Warcraft - Just say 'No'

World of Warcraft is a MMORPG or Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  People pay a fee to play online characters of multiple races and classes in a Midieval fantasy genre RPG. 

There is much to discuss about this gaming addiction.  Much like a nasty fatty pepperoni pizza...we'll need to tackle this point one greasy slice at a time.  Personally I can only handle 3 pieces right now...

Effort and Reward
     This is a big one.  There are many intermingled fun bits about Wow.  Game play is intermingled with long long times of absolute tedium.  In Cataclysm, Wow introduced a new 'Profession'...which are things your character can do to help him or a group out and to make money.  Usual professions are Alchemy, Mining, Enchanting...etc.   The new profession that Cat. introduced is called 'Archaeology'.  This profession allows you to uncover relics of the past; some marginally interesting.  Very few of them have interesting effects.  In the beginning Archaeology is fun.  You continually are driven forward by what 'might be' in the next find page.  Oh...Yeah...you don't just dig up a relic.  You dig up multiple fragments over multiple dig-sites for some piece of crap you wouldn't even bother looting off a lowbie...to see if the next page is something special.  Don't be surprised if you find the same crap 3 times in a row.  Eventually...you will find something good.  The fun that you felt at the beginning has been transplanted by mind-numbing boredom with the hours and hours spent wasting time travelling between dig sites and digging up the same crap.  Eventually you find something and, if you are honest with yourself, you will realize you spent actual time of your life that you could have done something real with to chase after some innane trinket in a fantasy world. 

Build a fucking coffee table...imagine a fantasy character and give him a cool fantasy trinket for fuck sakes.  This system of boredom and reward tricks the mind and robs you of motivation.  Also if you don't have enough clear rewards in your real life, it can be addictive.  Blizzard understands this...they nurture it.  Just walk away.

Ascension in the fantasy world = becoming a douchebag in the real one
     Be warned...these links are of the uglier side of gaming addiction (Spaz Douchebag Not pretty)
This is what happens when your rewards in life are illusionary.  That is not to say everyone who plays WoW is compromising their real world experience...however, what I have seen...most do.  Much like the real world, the World of Warcraft isn't always fair.  Many players thrive, in the game, on the ability to affect others in a negative way... because it gives them a sense of power.  This can be most compelling if, in your personal life, you feel that you have a very limited amount of it.  You can actually find entire groups of kids who feed on each other's desire to do this (and by 'Kids' I mean of all ages). 

     The more you accomplish in the game contrasting your 'real world' accomplishments, the more the game draws you in.  Like any addiction, use of the substance promotes using the substance and you have to use more and more of it to feel better...while your real world experience increasingly suffers.

The lure of becoming an asocial sociopath
     In the real world there are checks and balances for our behavior.  Developing adults need boundaries and a well defined understanding of action and reaction in the real world.  Rebellion is part of the process of growth because it teaches us that, in all things that we do, responsibility ultimately comes back to us. 

     We have children that are literally grown into the addiction of gaming.  'It's a good babysitter' we tell ourselves.  Well look at what they do in some of these games.  Massive violence.  Absolute power.  The games are mostly about killing...specifically 'the kids' killing something...and mostly someone else.  Now if your kids were to spend 5 hours a day imagining killing people in various graphic ways...it would be really time to call the doctor.  Well that is the fantasy world but so are the games.  I'm not saying that the kids won't know the difference between the graphic violence in their fantasy world and the real one.  What I'm saying is that the desensitization towards violence can carry over into the real world in the form of the complete lack of natural human empathy.  That can have a drastic effect but in much more subtle ways such as relationships.   We're making a generation of geeks.

    Enter the game.  etcetera...etcetera