How To Help a Friend With an MMO Addiction?

sammydee writes "I have a friend who is addicted to an MMO (Pirates of the Burning Sea). On a typical day, he will wake up around 9am, browse the forums for a bit, then go online and stay online all day, playing until about 3am the following morning, taking only toilet breaks and stopping to eat ready-meals. While the rest of the house works hard revising for exams, this friend will be playing his MMO instead. Now, I am pretty confident that this comprises an unhealthy addiction; unfortunately, I have no idea what to do about it. Any attempt to physically prevent him from playing the game would most likely result in an outburst of anger and possibly physical violence. Attempts at telling him he has a problem have been met with derision and angry retorts. Slashdotters, what would you do to help out a friend in this situation? Perhaps you are a reformed addict yourself — if so, how did you break out of the habit? Or maybe I should just leave well enough alone and allow him to continue? Any thoughts are gratefully received."

Comments

You can;t save someone from their self.

[Anonymous Coward]

I learned that with my regular old drug junkie friends.

That is retarded

[Sycraft-fu]

For one, all the MMO companies I've ever encountered have plenty of records of what has happened with an account. That was if something goes wrong, they can restore it. If it gets hacked, they'll just roll it back to where it was before then. So the company will fix the problem and he'll just get to keep going. Now if you keep doing it, you WILL get caught. That's how criminals, and make no mistake that's what you'd be, get caught: They keep doing it. Each time there's more chance you slip up, each time there's more patterns to look for.

In this case you'd get found out fairly quickly because those involved would realize the only way someone could keep getting his password is to have physical access to his computer.

So this is an excellent way to not fix the problem, and to land your ass in jail. Hacking can be a very serious offense if they want it to be.

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[Rip Dick]

A girlfriend will want to evaluate his character, tell her friends, make him want to go out on dates and shit like that... and if all is good, will "perform".

You're doing it wrong.

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[jelizondo]

And not only from games. A friend of mine, a successful accountant almost died some months ago from a clot, formed in her legs from sitting too may hours.

What ever else you are doing, get up and walk some every hour or so

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[wisty]

Poker machines and MMO are very similar. The both have similar audio visual stimulus, the same payoff / reward systems. They are both engineered to be addictive. Psychologists will be divided over whether that counts as an addiction, but it's certainly a problem.

There are lots of resources for gambling, see The Gambling Addiction Patient Workbook By Robert R. Perkinson, or the Gambling Anonymous website. Or just google it.

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[matty500]

If that were really true, it wouldn't explain the massive research that demonstrates that compulsive gambling can be even more addictive than many drugs...

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[Mr_eX9]

Your lines in the sand don't really make a difference--he can still ruin his life by playing the game too much.

Girlfriend is not enough!

[StCredZero]

I have a girlfriend, and no, it's not enough to get you out of an MMO addiction. It can be added incentive. Usually, you have to wait until it starts hurting their job and their wallet. If that doesn't do it, good luck!

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[Vintermann]

Meh, I'll just have to waste the mod points I've used in this discussion, to clear up this misunderstanding.

Addiction and withdrawal symptoms are quite independent.

Even for drugs, s.c. physical addiction isn't very serious in itself. People get physically addicted to morphine in hospitals all the time, but they will accept the withdrawal pains, and will be no more likely to become morphine addicts than other people (there are studies on this, which is why morphine-based painkillers are still used.)

Some of the nastiest street drugs have very little actual physical addictiveness.

It's psychological addiction that matters, for drugs as for anything else. Addicted people like doing what they do. And it's not based on a single chemical in the brain, as some people assume, because although both WoW and doing drugs may increase your dopamine levels, you can't just easily switch from one addiction to another.

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[ta bu shi da yu]

It's amazing what people with rate as +1 informative these days.

Re:It's Called S.E.X

[bjourne]

terrible isn't it?