WoW Addiction?

According to blizzard, the company responsible for the globally life consuming game that is World of Warcraft, there are currently over 9 million active subscribers to the game world wide (including myself) and its affects on the people that play the game are widely know. The majority of people belonging to the older generation will consider the act of playing computer games like wow for hours on end every day to be abit abnormal and probably unhealthy. The concept of wow addiction has come into the medias eye a number of times. I live in Australia where a prominent current affairs program aired on national television a case study of an individual that was apparently addicted world of warcraft. Being on television they made this guy look like a real loser, when he tried to tell the reporter that he had met real people online through the game and made friends with a few of them, many of us avid wow players will understand what he means. He probably met these people through a guild in the game and had run raids and spoke to many of them on third party communication software like ventrillo or teamspeak. However, to many older viewers it may look like this kid is making friends with small animated characters created by the game developer. Obviously if this were true the kid probably does need some help, but to the people that know whats really going on, this doesn't seem abnormal at all. Offcourse there are also a number of other reported cases of more extreme cases related to wow. this extract taken from www.theinquirer.net

"GAMES COMPANY Blizzard is facing a lawsuit from Chinese parents who claim that its fantasy game World of Warcraft killed their son.

According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, the 13 year old boy jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game.

The parents are backed by the anti-Internet addiction advocate Zhang Chunliang who has got 63 parents whose children have also allegedly suffered from online gaming addiction and plans to file a class-action suit.

Many Chinese parents contend that their children spend hours gaming in Internet cafes at the risk of their health, work, and school."

Incidents like these can be worrying to many people, but what about the people that play wow? we may simply brush these alagations off thinking "its not blizzards fault if some kids happen to be morons and kill themselves" or we might take these issues a little more seriously and question our own ability to stay away from the game, are we really addicted??

If you really look at the game and maybe compare it to other games available, wow is really a very simple game completing questing and gaining XP for them involves very repetitive and menial tasks like "kill this many murlocs" or "gather X number of seeds". Throughout ones wow career from lvl1 to lvl 70 hundreds of these quests are repeated over and over again, thinking about the game this way questions why so many people around the world enjoying spending their free time doing such boring repetitive things over and over again. If in real life we were made to do similar tasks im sure the majority of us would not enjoy it. What i think wow does to make people come back and grind xp this way over and over again, is that it taps into human natures need to progress, to become better and stronger. Alot of the time a player will not even enjoy the time they spend in wow, i for one know the pains of honor grinding, repeating the same thing in Alterac Valley over and over again. I hate this and yet i spend hours of my life grinding away at it so that i eventually can get a few pieces of imaginary clothing that will make my wowself that much better. But even though i hate grinding honor it still feels great to have achieved something even if it is only in a game. It is normal for humans to want to progress in their life but it is also much harder to fill this need in real life, it takes much more time and much more effort, but in wow these needs can be fulfilled with less time and less effort. Maybe having wow to fulfill our needs in this way has satisfied us enough to not bother with progressing in real life? Maybe thats why we have cases of people that have taken the game to the extreme where they really don't have any life outside wow. Has wow consumed me? i would like to think it hasn't, but addicts never admit they have a problem...

Recording My Thaughts

So i was at work today when i considered how much time i spend at work doing nothing and how the majority of my time spent at work is spent thinking about random things that may or may not be worth putting down in this blog.

You see im a lifeguard at a local swimming pool, it has 2 large pools a slide and a smaller diving pool thats used primarily for bombies, its a pretty big place and for the most part of the day my job is to stand around one of these pools making sure nobody does anything stupid and in the rarest of cases jump in to pull someone out. Now this seems like a very cruisey job and you'd be right, it is! but its also crazy boring, in an average 8 hour shift i might spend about 3hours talking to other lifeguards or doing some menial task. The other 5 hours of my shift i stand around and im left to my thoughts as my primary form of entertainment while the time very slowly passes by. During this time i have had many strange and wonderful thoughts pop in my head and this is why i decided to start this blog. I cant be sure how long this is gonna last and i dont even know if ill keep posting after i put this post up but we'll see what happens.

One thing i need to mention now is that yes, im abit of a nerd and yes i play computer games. One of the games i play mostly is of course World Of Warcraft. For the last 2 or 3 years of my life this game has very much consumed me, along with a number of my closest friends. I would like to think that im not addicted to the game, that "i could stop if i wanted to, i just don't want to" but i've tried to stop once before and that only lasted about a month before i was right back into it again. The reason why i mention this is because i'd like to warn you that if i do continue this blog, it is highly likely that i will be talking about this this game for the majority of my posts. Hopefully i put this game behind me one day but for now, wow has wrapped it self around my life and it wont let go.