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First-Person Account Of Video Game Addiction
The Evil Couch writes "Jive Magazine, an entertainment magazine based in Atlanta, has just released a feature article that the editor has spent over a year investigating on gaming addiction. Starting from being on the outside of the gaming community, she has gone from being a somewhat normal person, to being one of the higher level characters in Anarchy Online. 'People have worse entertainment addictions than playing computer games. If I am going to be addicted to something, I would choose online gaming over drugs, bowling, gambling, television, or being a baseball fanatic easily. I don't have to wear ugly shoes, lose my hard earned money or do the wave next to someone I don't know and that just about makes it a no-brainer for me. It IS after all just a video game, like Neal describes in his great novel, Snow Crash. It is just another amusement park.' Sounds like a happy ending to me."
chmod 000 -R /usr/bin/games /usr/local/games
It worked for me.
And in our upcoming story about heroin addiction, we'll have an interactive special feature where you can enter your zip code and find the location for the dealer nearest you!
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
While I agree that games are "better" being addicted to than most drugs (coffee, anyone?) I really can't agree with the conclusion of this article. Gaming addiction can be expensive as hell (especially if you're on dial-up and pay per minute, as we do in Sweden). I had a brush with this sort of behaviour when my brother was playing Ultima Online every day for about half a year -- although he eventually just got tired of it. Any activity which holds you from interactive with other people for a very long time is quite harmful to you, even if you don't actually *like* people.
and I am a Slashdotaholic.
pfft.
Get Firefox!
Question is, when're they going to start legislating games? I mean, if Evercrack and MUDs are the "hard" games, then what about so-called gateway games? Are they going to make Pacman illegal because it can lead to more severe game abuse? And they do have anecdotal evidence that video gaming can lead to violence and other crimes. Who knows, people might start committing armed robbery because they can't afford the next Evercrack expansion.
The above is not a comment on the "War on Drugs." If you take it as such, you're a low-down good-for-nothing hippie crack dealer terrorist who is against democracy and everything else the US stands for.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
This coming from a guy whose username is "Scotch". Sounds like an addict to me!
I play alot of videogames, so its not that foreign to me ... But MUD addiction seems to center around some serious pathologies (and I supppose alot of other non-chemical addictions). It's always the same kind of person who is attracted to MUDs, dark, depressed theatre geeks who need to escape reality. Anybody who you can walk up to and say, "Hey how you doin today?" and they reply "Great! I found the key of zathros today." has serious problems not related to videogames :) In the end I just gave up on her
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What does tape have to do with addiction?
XML causes global warming.
This girl I was interested in spent easily 12-18 hours/day playing muds.
So did I. But our computer rooms weren't open longer. I'm so happy I didn't study at the Uni of Warwick in the UK, where they were open 24/7. I knew a guy there who slept in his car for a year. Many people didn't leave the labs for days (can sleep on three or four chairs). Etc.
One of the worst of them eventually married some American woman, and last I heard, was working for Microsoft.
So let that be a warning!
(hi guys, I'm sure some of you will read this :-))
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Happened to one of my college buddies too. When they kicked him out, he screamed "They can't do this to me! I'm a wizard!"
It's funny... as past history. Not such a giggle at the time, as I remember.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I've never been into MMORPG, but I have had some marathon sessions with Sim City and Civilization and any good FPS. My trick to setting an alarm for myself is to ignore my bladder for as long as I can. Having created a competing need that escalates in realtime, I have an unavoidable time limit: going to the bathroom == turn the game off. At some point "just one more turn" no longer outweighs "I'm about to piss myself".
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I remember that. And afterwards, didn't they take out their kidneys and sell them?
-Dave
Considering NineNine has posted 1575 comments on Slashdot, you may have a point =)
--
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
from the article: Three years ago at a nightclub I bumped into an old friend of mine who went by the nickname "Iggy". I was really amazed to see him because no one had seen nor heard from Iggy in over a year. Many of his friends had all wondered what happened to him.
Man, that is so 100% what happens to me about every two weeks. My answer is not "everquest", it's "girlfriend".
How we know is more important than what we know.