Video game addiction is definitionally a controversial subject, given
that there’s disagreement over whether such a thing even exists. If we
separate the clinical concept from the colloquial usage of the term,
we’re more likely to be able to come to general agreement. Everyone has
known someone (assuming you haven’t been the someone) who, at one point
or another, spent way too much time buried in a game and way too little
engaged with the world around them.To get more news about
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Most recently, discussions on video game addiction and inappropriate
player retention techniques have focused on issues like the use of
microtransactions and loot crates. Players have a variety of concerns
surrounding these issues, including the use of gambling mechanics to
generate revenue and increase customer engagement. The question of
whether MMORPGs are overly addictive is the sort of topic that was being
debated more widely about a decade ago.
It felt nearly retro to see the headline “World of Warcraft Changed
Video Games and Wrecked Lives” go by at Vice. It’s a topic with some
personal resonance for me. The article describes what happened to
several people who describe themselves or their loved ones as World of
Warcraft addicts who played and engaged with the game to a much greater
degree than was healthy.Multiple people Vice spoke to identified World
of Warcraft as offering a supportive community for various identity
issues or life struggles they were going through at the time, even if
they often felt that their own relationship with the game had
fundamentally been an unhappy one. This dovetails with my own thinking.
While I never allowed World of Warcraft to take over my own life, I
played a great deal of the game during some tumultuous and difficult
years. I participated in the PvP grind that the Vice article discusses
and wear my “Commander” tag to this day. I saw people become
colloquially “addicted” to WoW, in the sense that WoW became central to
their lives. It’s not that everybody quits their job and becomes a
full-time player, so much as being able to count on people to show up
around 6 PM and hang around until 10-11 PM, 5-7 nights a week.
Vice’s article hints at part of the reason why this happens:
community. Players in WoW self-sort themselves into guilds for the
purposes of raiding endgame dungeons and (more rarely) for PvP. It’s not
uncommon, at this point, for long-time WoW players to have real-world
friendships that have transcended the game. While I am not in regular
contact with the vast majority of people I played WoW with, I remain
friends with a double-digit group of people that I met solely as a
result of our mutual travels through Azeroth.
But WoW didn’t just offer a community. It offers a chance to succeed
publicly, to be recognized for that achievement, and to feel as though
you are making a positive contribution to something larger than
yourself. Leading a group of 25-40 people through a series of
choreographed fights while they variously alt-tab, argue, bio break,
check Thottbot, check YouTube, get distracted, make food, kill random
trash, and occasionally kill bosses felt like an achievement at the end
of the night, especially if you’d refrained from throttling the guild
leader after he speculated that we should just give all the caster DPS
loot to mages by default in the middle of a raid.
The Wall