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How Warcraft Really Does Wreck Lives
An anonymous reader writes "There's a great blog post about how World of Warcraft can ruin lives, it's written by a person that was for a long time a member of the largest council on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world." This is a story that is very familiar to a lot of folks. I know people who are actively wrecking their lives and risking their jobs by playing too much of a video game.
He played for 70 days out of a year. That's "only" 19.something percent. If you're the sort to only need 4 or 5 hours sleep a night you could easily fit that in beside a pretty normal life (9 - 5 job, a light social life, chores, etc). If giving 1/5th of your day over to a hobby is a sign that your life has been devoured then you need to sort out your priorities. Everyone should dedicate that much time at least to stuff they enjoy. Perhaps it's a bit narrowminded to concentrate on a single activity, but it's better than spending all that time at the office or wasted in a bar*.
* Ok, maybe the bar is ok..
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Wow, like IRC (and a lot of the rest of the internet) is not just destructive. It *can* be a handy sandbox that prepares people for real life.
I played WoW for about a year, running a major guild. What did I learn?
That I'm good at self depreciating humour.
That I can get people to follow me by being the first one to stand up and provide direction.
That leading people is more about knowing where you are going than how you are going to get there.
How to negotiate peace between two people who have genuinely lost sight of what's important.
Which of those skills have turned out to be useful in my current career? 100% of them. I stand up every day knowing that basically the people I work with are no different to the people I played with, that saying something is better than saying nothing, and that if I get fired hell at least I can enjoy my unemployment hunting for epics with some old friends. It's the same confidence that people who lead sports teams at school get... and now it's available to geeks.
I might point out that being acclimatised to 70 hour working weeks and doing the same boring crap over and over also helps in the real world. Being able to have two priorities and still getting everything done with really limited time isn't exactly bad practice either.
Would I hire ex gamers? Probably. It depends if they have used their time to do something valuable, like learning how to build their confidence, lead, motivate and get along with others - and that's hard to demonstrate.
Like everything else - knowing when you have learned as much as you can and it's time to move on is a big part of determining if online games will be a constructive or destructive thing for you.
Beep beep.
People with very little to do and have addictive personalities are prone to get addicted to anything -- WoW or otherwise. For every major addict that ruins his life, there are dozens that enjoy it responsibly. If WoW weren't around, they'd be addicted to something else -- another game, collecting stamps, stalking people, etc. Addictive personalities have existed for a long, long time.
For my boyfriend & I, we use it as an inexpensive form of entertainment. We raid, but nothing insanely hardcore. 2 nights a week, usually. Other couples watch TV, we play WoW. You can't really beat $15/month ($30 for two) for some quality entertainment.
Whichever way you look at it, people have a choice.
"What the science shows, he says, is that the brain of an addict is fundamentally different from that of a non-addict. Initially, when a person uses hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, the chemistry of the brain is not much affected, and the decision to take the drugs remains voluntary. But at a certain point, he says, a "metaphorical switch in the brain" gets thrown, and the individual moves into a state of addiction characterized by compulsive drug use."
Some drugs--tabacco and meth, for example--are far more aggressive than others in altering brain chemistry in ways that make the choice to quit harder. And some people are far more susceptible than others. But there is no doubt whatsoever that addiction is a perfectly ordinary physiological phenomenon, no different from any other crippling physical disorder, and it affects some people severely enough that they no more have a choice to quit and than a parapelegic has a choice to walk. They literally lack the physiological capacity to do so.
This does not mean that all people are so affected--like any other disease, additions have different effects on different people. Some people get smallpox and live. Others die. No one thinks that anyone has a choice about it.
In the case of addiction, some people's capacity to choose is physiologically limited to the point where they lack the ability to quit on their own, just like some polio patients lack the ability to breathe on their own. I don't see anyone saying, "Whichever way you look at it, polio patients have a choice."
The article I've linked above includes disenting voices, but no one is saying that the brains of addicts aren't fundamentally altered by drug use. They are arguing over what the policy implications of that are, based on some pretty clearly delineated, and extremely stupid, ideological biases on both sides. And non-drug-related things, like compulsive game-playing and compulsive gambling may or may not involve similar physiological changes, but there is no doubt that sometimes people do not have a choice, however much you might want to believe otherwise.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.