Slashdot Mirror
Therapists Log On To WoW To Counsel Addicts
eldavojohn writes "So, you can't find the time to leave the World of Warcraft to seek help for your World of Warcraft addiction? Sounds reasonable. Well, addiction therapists are coming to meet you so you don't have to quit playing as they counsel you and your addiction. From the leader of this initiative, Dr. Graham: 'We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it's already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn't be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players. Of course one problem we're going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they're probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.' Send in the level 5 counselor and let the games begin!"
What happens when the therapists become addicted?
I'll take "The Rapists log on to WoW" for $400, Trebek.
I am officially gone from
"Blizzard Entertainment was unavailable for comment at the time of publication."
/ignore that will result from an unsolicited therapy session attempt?
I'd guess they might not be thrilled with an organized effort directed at making people stop giving them money, taking place on their own servers no less. I wonder how they'll be making contact with these players. The kind of players they want to talk to is hardly the kind that will seek out counceling on their own. How will they know who to contact, will they count on friends to connect them? How will they get past the (probably) inevitable
I meet my therapist at the bar every afternoon for drinks at happy hour.
Drakkenmensch [whisper]: Well doctor, I guess that this game fills for me a void in my life that ooops tank is about to pull Deconstructor wwwwwwww223333333sssww33333
You've got a good point. I mean, a true addict isn't going to listen to some level 2 noob chatting with them from the barrens! Come back when you're level 90 in tier 7 dragonraid gear and we'll talk!
a death knight, a warlock and a therapist are in a bar ...
I know quite a few clinical psychologists who won't participate in over-the-phone counseling except in cases of emergency because they feel that there is a staggering amount of information lost from the interaction due to the inability to perceive body language, eye-contact, or focus. I've staffed a hotline during an internship and a large part of the training was in dealing with those short-comings and it was universally recognized that it was not an optimal situation, but in the case where it was either talk to them on the phone or nothing, the phone is obviously preferable.
On top of that, it's notoriously difficult to convey any kind of emotional content or tone online or through text. I can't imagine any kind of reasonable therapeutic interaction taking place... "Hey, let's talk about how you feel compelled to only grind humanoid mobs..." "LOL FAG FEELINGS R 4 NUBS!" "..." "MeloveuGOLD most happiness! Many loves! Give you 10% CRAZY EXTRA FUN FUN GOLD gogogo now to wendygold.crom now!!!" Humor aside, I suppose it would be possible to talk over ventrillo or other voice methods, but even so, there would be so many distractions it'd be ridiculous.
If someone truly is addicted to WoW to the point where they are literally unable to tear themselves away from the game long enough to go to a therapy session in real life (and I would say the number of people in this situation is vanishingly small, approaching zero), then yes, this might be preferable, but as it is, it just sounds like something done to capitalize on the popularity of the game. It is, I suppose, an interesting thing to try this new avenue to test the efficacy, but I'm very strongly doubting that it'll be terribly effective.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This is a dumb idea, and I do not believe that any legitimate therapists would come up with it. In order for a person to get help, they must take the first step. Contrary to what we often see in movies, a person who is not willing to take the first step to help themselves will not solve their problems. If an addict will not leave their addiction to seek help, then they are not seriously looking for help, and nothing can be done for them until they recognize their problem and take the first step.
What I've been thinking is how can I declare myself to be a pyschiatrist so as to buy a level 80 in T7 gear and write it off as a business expense...
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
I hate that I can read that without thinking about it.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
I have to say that any addiction counselor with even a modicum of knowledge in their chosen field would know going into this that it's bollocks.
The fact is that you don't approach people who have a problem while they are in active addiction. Doing this is the equivalent of going to a bar to have a chat with an alcoholic. Beyond even that, no amount of pestering someone with an addiction is going to make them quit or even HELP them to quit. They simply have to come to the point that they personally are ready to take action and then you just have to make sure that the information on where they can go to get help is widely disseminated in order to ease that transition for them.
One thing that I'm not totally clear on here: Are these counselors responding to actual requests for aid or are they just hanging out and yelling to everyone that they're selling their wares? "I'll give you 10k to talk to me about your addiction...or at least be in my raid."
If they're just hanging out unsolicited and looking for people who want to talk about their problem...well it's good for them to BE there if someone wants to talk about it, sort of the way that you can pick up the phone and call an AA central office in your area when you feel that you may need help with THAT addiction, but I still don't feel that this is the best use of their time.
Maybe it would have been better for them to pressure Blizzard into including some kind of service for this. Where if someone feels that they need help with their addiction they can link to it through the Blizzard website or maybe even contact a counselor in-game. A bunch of counselors walking around unsolicited asking people if they'd like to talk about addiction though? That's a little too much like the Jehovah Witnesses for my tastes.
Don't try that on a PvP server, bucko!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Well Mr. Bloodhoof Ragescar, it would appear that our time is up for this week."
Trade window opens
"That will be 100 Gold please..."
sudo apt-get lost
Just remember folks, if you do have a friend in WoW who is showing signs of heavy WoW addiction, there is a fairly simple way for you to help them.
Make them your 25 man raid leader.
This always seems to (fairly quickly) reduce the amount of time that they player in question is online playing WoW.
Talk of addiction to MMOs long-predates WoW. Another reply to your comment has already made the "Evercrack" point.
My own beliefs on the issue are a bit of a middle ground. I believe MMO addiction does exist, but I do think it's far rarer than is genuinely supposed. The problem is that a lot of people who've never really been into computers have always had trouble distinguishing between gaming as a hobby and an addiction to gaming.
I'm a fairly heavy gaming hobbyist. Always have been, ever since the mid 1980s. In recent years, I've played two MMOs, Final Fantasy XI and WoW, and played them quite extensively, but I don't think I've ever been addicted. With FFXI, I played it fairly heavily for about two and a half years, then my interest in it just started to wane. At the most extreme peak, I was logging into the game five, sometimes six days a weel. Then suddenly, I couldn't really be bothered before. I dropped to playing twice a week, then once a week, then just logging in every couple of weeks. My account's not been touched now for over a year.
With World of Warcraft, I started playing it a couple of months after I stopped playing FFXI. I started off fairly casually - maybe one night during the week and a few hours on a Saturday. Then I dinged 80, started raiding and ended up back to a 5 or 6 days per week play cycle. Then my enthusiasm waned somewhat. Unlike with FFXI, I haven't stopped playing. As a matter of fact, I raid with a fairly decent raiding guild (Ulduar 25, including a couple of hard modes, on farm, for those who know what that means). So I log in to raid 3 nights a week and spend a bit of time on a Saturday morning making the gold I'll need to fund my raiding. The rest of the week, I do other stuff, both on and off the computer, during my leisure time. I've been playing fairly stably at this level for around 12 months now. Sure, there was a brief spike in my play-time when Wrath of the Lich King hit, but that was over after about 3 weeks.
The real reason I know I'm not addicted is that every year, I spend a couple of weeks away from home. I don't see my parents very often (they live at the other end of the country), but to make up with this, I go on holiday with them every year. And while I'm away, I have no WoW and only fairly limited net access. And it doesn't bother me.
However, there are cases I've seen at first hand of people who've become hopelessly addicted. When I was a student, a friend of mine failed his second year exams and crashed and burned out because of an addiction to Planetarion (basically multiplayer Excel). There's also a guy in my WoW guild who is logged in 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but he's the exception rather than the rule.
I think as a general rule, if you have a personality that tends towards addiction, and no over-riding factors in your life (such as a job, or a family to support) that constrain the time you can spend in game, MMO addiction is probably something you'd want to be aware of. For everybody else, however, the risk is very slight.
My Abnormal Psych teacher tells a story about a man she used give therapy to. He had invented his own elaborate sci-fi fantasy world that he spent most of his time pretending to live in. He couldn't open up to her, since she wasn't part of that world. What finally had to happen is that she had him give her a rank in his fantasy's galactic empire or whatever.
The point she was making was that, if you want someone to open up to you, you can't question their reality.
Property is theft.