>Although WoW is a much better game than Farmville, with a substantially different business model, their tactics are fundamentally the same: use your social obligations to keep you clicking. Exploit your friendships, sense of reciprocity, and the joy of being part of a group with shared goals. Turn it all from something commendable to something frivolous that serves mainly to increase the game developer's profits.
This put into words something I've been thinking about for a while, but struggled to articulate. There's something wrong when we start doing this to friendships.
Is playing a social game where you interact with other people any different than going out to a club or bar? Joining a bowling league? A cycling group? A health club where you go to regular group exercise classes?
The meme that video games are inherently evil needs to go away. Why is it socially acceptable to join many clubs and spend time with those people all the time but not "people on the Internet"? Like the Internet is somewhere only people that can't make "real friends" go..
Addiction to anything is bad but playing WoW or any other online game doesn't mean you're automatically "a loser" in the rest of your life -- and I don't mean just casually playing. There are people in all of the top guilds achieving high ranked world kills on new content that are also successful in other areas of their life.
And you say this because you know people "addicted to WoW" but you don't know people "addicted to bowling"? Two million people playing in competitive bowling leagues each week across America. WoW has nowhere near two million competitive players. I don't have statistics for the number of casual bowlers but I'll bet you a lunch that more people spend $15/month bowling than playing WoW.
Do you think it is any different on the social obligation side for somebody to show up for a raid in WoW versus showing up for the league match? Is there a lower social obligation for the bowler to practice between matches than there is for a player in WoW to prep for that raid?
Competitive social MMOs are the recreational sports leagues of this generation.
What, the same social pressures don't apply in other team sports? Try to play any sport at a high level and miss a few trainings because you'd rather read a book at home. You'll get bad looks the first time, yelled at the second time and kicked out the third time.
(I'm not saying WoW is a sport, just to pre-empt a diversion in that direction).
What is morally superior about exercising an hour a day over playing WoW an hour a day, provided the lack of exercise doesn't make one dangerously obese or similar? Yet all rants like this one are based on that premise - 'I used to be such a loser, now I work out, I'm so much better than those WoW losers'. Usually from former players, too; just like former smokers are the most obnoxious about how awesome they are for quitting, the former WoW players seem to know something about self-righteousness, too.
Anyway, like anything, it's about moderation. If you play a couple of hours a week and don't let it take over your life, there's nothing wrong with it. I asked my girlfriend to set up the 'parental control' feature on my account, so I only got to play 4 hours a week. If anything, WoW at least lets you do that; I have yet to see the first skateboard or piano that has a lock like that, and there are many people who 'waste' (in the article's definition, not mine) much more than 4 hours a week on those.
I didn't realize that about using the "parental" control. Great example of a commitment device! And that's what I really mean about the difference between WoW and most other hobbies and social activities: WoW sucks you in in a way that makes you regret the amount of time you spend on it. I sometimes have the same problem with Hacker News, hence this: http://beeminder.com/d/hn
This is brilliant. I think people here can rail against addictions to WoW while lurking/posting on HN for hours a day. It's all part of the same addiction for points/prestige/social validation.
"Posting all these years to get higher karma, reading the source articles, reading the comments, for what? To help another person who thinks they have an innovative startup idea? They're all just going to get bought by Google anyway. Life is meaningless!
And people keep using that word. There is no proof videogames are addicting, and no serious study on the subject has been able to show that such a thing as "videogame addiction" exists.
I'm not of the opinion that video games are inherently evil but to say the social experience you get from playing a video game is some how equivalent to that of meeting people face to face is simply wrong.
The key difference being body language. So much of successful human interaction comes from non verbal cues and if you're someone for whom that doesn't come naturally then socializing in WoW is not going to provide you the same benefit as in person interaction period.
This is partially true but irrelevant. People don't join a club so they can experience body language. I assume they go so they can form a community and interact with people who share the same interest.
If visual contact was essential for forming significant relationships then the blind would be unable to make friends.
> People don't join a club so they can experience body language.
I think they do actually. Otherwise, why would people go through the trouble of meeting physically when they could do it on the Internet? It's not like people who meet in real life don't know about the Internet (I'm thinking of tech conferences, HN meetups, etc.) The physical experience is simply better.
People eat orange because they are hungary and orange taste sweet, in the process though they get vitamin C. Is the fact that they get vitamin C diminished by the fact that they only ate it because it tasted good?
Would orange flavored candy be a sufficient substitute here? I'd say no.
"Is playing a social game where you interact with other people any different than going out to a club or bar? Joining a bowling league? A cycling group? A health clubwhere you go to regular group exercise classes?"
The article makes the difference abundantly clear. This is what the writer learned by meeting the guild leader in real life:
"She was perfectly nice, and an excellent cook. But it was hard not to notice certain things - no matter how bad I felt for noticing them. It was hard not to notice she lived in a crappy apartment in a crappy neighborhood. It was hard not to notice she was fat. It was hard not to notice that despite her dreams of going back to school and becoming a paramedic, she just worked part-time at a local pizza joint."
It is that level of personal, real, gritty, disturbing, eye-opening raw detail that is often hidden behind an avatar.
Er... no. That's not it at all. I'm baffled how you could have read that into the quote.
The point is that World of Warcraft was taking all the time & energy that could have went into improving her life, and that she besides not on any sort of growth trajectory, may well have been getting worse - that she wasn't investing even the minimum necessary to keep her life (such as it was) viable.
This quote does raise an interesting point. Virtual settings are maybe better to get to know new people, because it doesn't matter if it is a he or she, if he is black, white, Hispanic, fat, muscular, it doesn't matter if they aren't dressed as nicely, it doesn't matter if they life in a dump or in a villa.
I know some stuck up people that wouldn't consider talking to someone without a bachelors degree. Since meeting some people from WoW in real life they changed their attitude.
These virtual settings allow everyone to meet people from all stages of life, people one would never meet otherwise. And this diversity makes life interesting.
I don't play WoW currently and haven't for over a year now but I did enjoy my time playing. I was accused of being an addict although I don't think I was - I just enjoyed playing and hanging out with people online.
It's funny reading this article and all the comments. IT's not so much about WoW vs being productive as diversions in general. I know people who spend most of their free time reading fiction. Isn't that just as bad? What about watching TV and movies? How about browsing the internet for hours on end? Yeah, maybe you learned something interesting, but unless you're going Jeopardy it probably won't really pay off.
Being productive for productivities sake is also an interesting view point. At what point do you decide to just enjoy your life by doing the things you enjoy rather than trying to "make it better". If you enjoy the journey then great - if not, do you arrive at a point where you are satisfied? Or do you continually struggle to reach some goal that is always just out of reach?
Yes - some people may feel trapped in a game like WoW. I think there are also many people who just enjoy the game and the experience and prioritize their life accordingly. Just because someone doesn't have the same aspirations as you doesn't make them a bad person. I'm sure if you ask most people they would like to be more successful - but few are willing to give up all distractions and diversions to achieve that.
Caveat: it's very easy to extend the criticism of WoW to life itself.
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!
What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."
But this isn't necessarily true for everyone.
Having said all that, I think WOW is more dangerous than heroin.
OH Come on! Life is not meaningless and maybe those people will NOT die anyway.
Maybe it's just because you didn't found out by now, what is important for you in live.
One example what changes life for ever is having kids. Seeing them grow, laugh and learn things is just amazing.
I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help.
Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.
But what's the point of immortality anyway? Life is just a meaningless sequence of cause-effect relationships. Immortality would mean being trapped by life, eventually you'll explore everything there is to explore in life and be drawn to explore death. The experience of death is more meaningful than life - it is true adventure. Taking a peek for yourself, seeing what's more. Life is pain, so immortality is an infinity of pain.
I can make these arguments all day. Immortality is not inherently meaningful.
"You believe we have souls. In that case, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you.
Current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't a possible adventure, it's nothing.
About the meaning of immortality, I recommend the Fun Theory sequence at lesswrong.com"
No I don't believe in souls. You are assuming beliefs that I don't have.
Nihilism does not require a belief in anything supernatural. I do believe that death is real, and therefore I believe that dying is something that happens to people. The point is that you can't prove in any objective way that death is less meaningful than life.
This is not really due to the nature of life and death, it is due to the nature of meaning itself.
OK, I was confused by the word "adventure". I assumed that if you said this, then "death" must be… something. I thought we were disagreeing on facts. And of course I can't prove that death is less "meaningful" than life: that's a moral judgement, not a factual belief.
There is a substantial difference between improving your physical life and your Avatar.
The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life.
And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something.
Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.
> I instantly felt sick ... It just made me want to throw up.
Interestingly I have the same torwards tobacco. There seems to be something, maybe in your sub-consciousness that wants to prevent you from going back there and it is so strong that it evokes reactions on a physical level.
If you are leveling in real life sometimes you wake up and see emptiness of this all. Sure, what you achieved in life provides comfort for your body but body is relatively easy to comfort if mind is happy.
If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life.
People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
Indeed - human mind is capable of creating many elaborate delusions.
Nihilism being the worst of them all. One has to recognize that indeed, there are no supreme values, that there is no guaranteed path to salvation. And that in spite of this terrible truth one must form his own set of values that guide him on a journey that doesn't really lead anywhere specific, but one must travel the journey else he becomes damned.
Do you think that Paris Hilton is happy? Do you think that the OP's guild leader is happy?
Man is a creature of creation, to be happy Man has to improve upon himself and the world, to create by definition one needs to have some values. Else we just become decadent and decadence does not breed happiness.
People in wow ARE creating. That's what makes it so addictive.
They are re-arranging the materials of the game to create something they desire.
This is the same procedure people use in real life - we rearrange matter and energy to create conditions we desire.
There is nothing inherently more meaningful in reality compared to fiction. All of these things are exactly as meaningful as individuals find them to be.
Some people value wow for itself and there is nothing wrong or incorrect about this. Does it scare you to recognize that there is no logical basis for action?
The basis is emotional. Meaning itself is a word we use to refer to that emotional experience that occurs when we begin to care about life. Some people find it in collecting stamps, some people find it in wow, some people find it in medicine, some find it in the game of being a corporate executive.
None is logically or inherently more meaningful than another. It all comes down to irrational human values.
I played wow - so I know pretty well whats going on there - at least in the game circa 2005/2006, before the additions of casual content.
Road to 60 was actually pretty fun - but once you hit 60 - thats when it really begins. If you want to mean something, you have to raid almost every single day for 4-6 hours - else you don't get a guild and there are no casual raiding guilds since content is so hard that you need to be well versed to get it done.
I'm well aware that one is playing wow because it makes sense emotionally not rationally - but there is difference between "positive emotional action" and "negative emotional action" (meaning, repetition - grind, peer pressure, job like schedules,...).
So I would argue that no, people in WOW are not creating, they are destroying the very fabric that creates society.
He is showing the flaws in the argument of the OP, which at the very least help concider that myabe the argument is flawed and thus the conclusion is wrong. That leads to valuable discussion, so it's getting upvoted.
Asking why "the fuck" he's getting upvotes, however, only leads to discussion about the discussion, which is a lot less interesting.
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!
Life isn't meaningless. Life is its own goal; doing well in life allows you to achieve happiness.
I didn't claim that it was meaningless. (I don't think that it is.) I don't really care about WoW. I was just responding to somebody's sad claim that "life is meaningless."
doing well in WoW allows you to achieve happiness
Doing well in WoW will not give you self esteem; it will not help you successfully deal with the real world (for example, providing for yourself materially and intellectually via a meaningful career). Successfully dealing with reality is a prerequisite of achieving an overall, lasting sense of happiness as a human being.
I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
I'm not here to write a dissertation to prove my original claim--that you can find happiness in life, and (relatedly) that it has meaning, but that is objectively true. If you haven't or won't put forth the intellectual effort to discover this for yourself, that is truly sad.
> I was just responding to somebody's sad claim that "life is meaningless."
Then you completely missed the point of what forensic wrote, because he did not claim that.
The problem with articles such as this, which is what both forensic and me addressed, is that a lot of people claim that time spent on video games is wasted, that time spent in any sort of rat race is bad, without any sort of backing for that claim. And if you don't back the argument you can flip it, which is what me and forensic did.
The author's statement amounted to: "WoW is meaningless for me and negatively impacts my life." forensic's statment amount to: "Well, who's to say life itself is any more meaningful?" My response is: "Wait a minute, I think it is meaningful." And I pointed out that you can achieve happiness in life (and by that I mean genuine self-esteem, not some temporary hedonistic pleasure like you get from playing a video game).
You're also wrong in that backing WAS offered for the claim that time spent on WoW is wasteful; the blogger talks about that a lot, e.g. how you end up just getting more gear so you can go to a bigger dungeon and get more gear, and how spending too much time on WoW blocks you from pursuing major goals in real life (like becoming a paramedic).
Meaning is probably the single most subjective concept that exists.
You can't tell someone else what is meaningful for them, which is what the OP is doing and you are implying.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field. That's the nature of humanity. We all find meaning in strange and unique ways.
The way we're using "meaning" in this discussion is improper, and I regret not pointing that out earlier. It's improper because the word is not (and cannot) be defined.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field.
I can't argue that because "meaningful" is not well-defined. However, I can make a related statement, as follows. Building a career in the real world is far more valuable to a person, as a human being, than building a "career" in WoW, because it allows a person to achieve real values in life--e.g. monetary wealth, respect from peers, self-sufficiency, and ultimately self-esteem and the genuine, pervasive kind of happiness that self-esteem makes possible. Wow does not allow one to achieve those values.
" monetary wealth, respect from peers, self-sufficiency, and ultimately self-esteem and the genuine, pervasive kind of happiness that self-esteem makes possible"
Why are these things valuable? If we define valuable as worth a lot of money, obviously they are. If we define it as extremely useful or important, then that's just a judgement call again, no?
You're making the point that in order to figure out what (if anything) is valuable, we need to have a standard of value, and you're absolutely right.
Now, there are lots of potential standards of value. e.g. "immediate pleasure" (hedonism); what's good for others (altruism); etc.
The proper standard of value is: what is good or bad for an individual's life, as a human being. So, that's how I'm defining "valuable" here.
Why is that the proper standard of value? Well, any deviation from that standard is going to be destructive to life, whereas following it will sustain life. Living successfully is a prerequisite (and the primary component) of happiness (in the fullest sense of the word--i.e. a non-contradictory enjoyment of being alive and all that that entails).
My statements here are not to be taken as standing on their own. There are lots of questions to ask. (A basic one would be: How can you claim to actually know anything, in the first place?.) I'm not going to try to present the full philosophical justification (i.e. present and validate an entire philosophical system), but it's out there if you look.
Why? The fact that they play WoW obsessively could mean that they find more meaning in it than in real-life activity, or it could also mean that they're addicts who regret the time they spend playing WoW, but feel a compulsion to play it anyway. It's not evident to me whether WoW addicts fall in the former or latter category.
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!
Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts.
As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead.
And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse.
What's the point of saving someone's life when they are just going to get old and die?
("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
Meaning? There's an existential discussion or two buried in there somewhere.
Which leads into existence, and whether all of us are merely a figment of the viewer's imagination.
And the point of saving someone's life? That discussion can go anywhere from existential to darwinian to whether you'll choose bluepill or redpill.
As for one trigger of these sorts of introspections, burnout can happen in EMS and medicine in general, and other environments that cope with chaos and death, too. Getting burnt is not fun, regardless of whether EMS was the trigger, or working in a high-stress startup, or whatever.
I wasted a heap of time on WoW as a teenager, certainly I could't seen myself doing that now but looking back I can't say I have bad memories of those years. Could have I been doing something more productive? Probably. But would have it gave me the same level of enjoyment? Questionable.
It's easy to extend to life at a macro level, but it breaks down pretty quickly.
First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard).
More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation.
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.
It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.
I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining.
Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money.
What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers.
Voila! Emergent user-generated content!
For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!
I agree with your general sentiment. I think the distinction should not be between WoW and real life, but between real skills and fake skills, between real progression and fake progression, and who is controlling the experience.
In WoW, your character has several skills, stats, and abilities that define it. You choose which ones to work on, how to shape your character, and then you put in the time to make that happen. But what about your skills? You are not getting stronger or better at wielding a two-handed weapon. You are getting better at playing WoW, you are improving your hand-eye coordination, you are bettering your combat-driven teamwork abilities, and you are getting better at determination: being patient and working towards a goal.
The problem comes in the illusion of progression. Your character improves almost continuously, building its skills to a point where it is better than all the other characters. Eventually your character reaches a ceiling, but you can always create another character with different skills and do it all again. But you stop progressing much sooner. Early on, your ability to play WoW tapers off to a suitably-high level such that the real gain is in improving your character. You master the conventions of in-game communication. You develop a routine and diligently set to work improving your characters without question. You stop progressing.
But what happens when you reach that ceiling, when you become the best? In WoW and many other video games, the game ceases to be fun when you are as powerful as possible. Since someone else owns the experience, you are stuck waiting for them to tell you what to do with your newfound abilities. This is why I regret the time I sank into becoming an Expert guitar player on Rock Band. When your playing abilities max out, the game becomes a chore, even if you don't realize it. The best rhythm game players spend their time playing the same songs over and over again in an effort to play them flawlessly. The game ceases to be a game.
In "real life," if you manage to "max out" a "real skill," you can actually do something else, anything you want, with it. Rather than hope that song that I love comes out on Rock Band so that I can put my hundreds of hours to work playing it, I could have spent hundreds of hours playing real guitar and be able to play any song. If I sink a lot of time into becoming a great comedian, I can hit the road, make people all of the place laugh, and make money doing it. If I spend time improving my health and fitness, I can run marathons, play competitive sports, or become a vigilante hero. The choice is entirely up to me.
That's what it boils down to. Is your leveling work tying you to a system where you can't control the direction you're heading in? In play, in art, in work, and in life, make sure that the skills you're improving are flexible in a way that allows you to apply them in any way you wish. Otherwise, you're just playing someone else's game.
Note: I used quotes around "real life" and "real skill" because I'm cheating by defining them somewhat circularly. A "real skill" is a skill that can be applied in many different ways, limited only by creativity. "Real life" is the arena in which you practice and execute those real skills.
You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful.
But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well.
Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill.
(I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.)
"I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.
Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.
Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.
>There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.
What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?
This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again.
After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive.
This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
> What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?
Then they weren't really dead.
> This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Maybe if you're using an outdated definition of death. By death I mean brain death, from which there is no recovery by definition ("the irreversible end of all brain activity").
The cessation of breathing etc. is no longer a useful definition of "death" precisely because of the "coming back to life" you describe:
> Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
The dead things are not "you" in any useful sense of the word. Yes I know it's the same atoms, but "you" are not just your atoms. "You" are an emergent pattern of thoughts and memories, which cannot begin to emerge until your brain develops.
Sure, you can take the cosmological approach that we are all connected, all things are one etc., but in practice, once your definition of "you" no longer distinguishes "you" from "not you", it's no longer a useful word.
> Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Sure, I clearly stated it was just my opinion. All opinions have roots in genes and experiences. But the experience of arguing with you has thus far failed to change my opinion, it's merely persuaded me that you use very different definitions for words than I do ;)
As someone who has played and stopped WoW for significant times over the past years. I think the article has some valid points about the addictiveness of WoW, on the other hand I feel that the choice between "real" work and WoW as presented here is a false dichotomy. "Real" work and WoW are not mutually exclusive.
The writer says he started playing he has spend his time working out. I started swimming for 40 minutes each day while playing WoW, a habit I continue now that I stopped.
He also states what if you spend the time you invest in WoW into achieving your goals. But you can't just work 24/7. I spend 8 hours a day doing research and hacking at the university, when I get home I just don't have the focus left in me to code or study. In the past I spend this time playing WoW, right now I spend this time reading fiction or hanging in front of the TV.
Now probably there are people who lose themselves entirely to the game and can't bring up the discipline to also work on their goals, but as everything in life, its really just about balancing yourself.
PS - I actually found myself being more productive during my WoW playing times then during my non-playing times. Reason? If I needed to do something I would not allow myself to log in until it was done. WoW was more addictive then procrastinating so I'd just knuckle down and do it. Now if I need to do something I find myself reading HN instead of just doing it...
Reminds me of this -- http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7873033/ (cartoon version of the theory of rational addiction) -- which you'll find especially funny if you hang out with economists much.
I haven't tried crack or heroin either but I wonder if they're more addictive than alcohol or tobacco or anything else that gives instant gratification. I tend to lean toward the addictive personality viewpoint.
For instance I know people who can open a bar of chocolate and eat just a square or two. If I open a bar it's all gone
Yes, but do you know people who can smoke crack a few times, and then forget it? Or take heroin a few times?
Yes, some personalities are more prone to addiction than others. But it's also true that some substances that give instant gratification are more addictive than others.
I wonder what, if Heroin was as freely available as alcohol or tobacco, its addiction rate would be like. It's my suspicion that drug addicts tend to come from the addictive personality subsection of the population
The issue with crack & heroin as I understand it is the magnitude/intensity of the instant gratification. Tobacco and alcohol are definitely addictive, but the gratification is weaker.
eeeeehhh. As a very avid WoW player of some years now, I would say WoW is something that can easily be something that holds your "life progress" or whatever you want to call it back, but it can also just as easily be played at a successful level (define that however you like) without that effect as well.
In the guild I'm in now and a guild I was in in the past I see both: players who are quite literally on welfare or unemployment and just play WoW and other games all day (colloquially "living the dream", mostly tongue-in-cheek), while others have what I would consider successful lives. One of our best priests works as some sort of company programmer or server maintainer/admin. Our best healing druid entered his first bodybuilding contest sometime in September of this year and plans on doing another next August iirc. Our guild/raid leader has an office 9-5 selling toys to retailers or something like that. Lots are in college, myself included. An old guild officer of mine was a Googler. A decent amount have wives/kids/gfs/main squeezes. etc.
I think the best argument of the post is the social obligations point. There are definitely some people who do "no-life" for the guild and such, but again, I think this is a some do some don't thing (as well as being limited to basically people in guild leadership situations). For every guild leader or officer I know who hasn't left a dead-end guild because of a feeling of obligations to the guild, I probably know twice as many officers who did left anyways, and 3-4x as many raiders who did as well. Anecdotally speaking, I left a guild where I was probably next in line to be guild/raid lead for a much better one, and am now debating doing some sort of ESL teach/travel program next year despite having been an officer in my new guild for roughly 6 months now.
I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing.
I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playing was so I would have a way to play with some longtime RL friends while they were living at U of I in champaign and urbana.
Intangibly I feel like I have learned a lot about how to communicate with people, particularly from a leadership position. Since communication over text or in ventrilo doesn't have all the physical queues of face to face interaction, you learn to speak with more clarity and precision as time goes on. I feel like it would be pretty easy to be a successful manager of some non-technical sector of work like retail based solely on what I've learned from being an officer in WoW now as well as being an officer in Runescape back when I was like 13-14.
Edit: PS. I forgot a big intangible: I've had a lot of fun playing over the past couple years.
>I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday.
It seems like it would be a good thing if guilds could be set up based on the geographic location of the players. If you had a reasonable chance of making "real life" friends, a lot of the objections to MMOs that aren't made to, say, a ski club or a bowling league, would go away.
I disagree. I think a lot of people that play with others geographically close to each other already know each other in some way and the reverse would not necessarily be the same. I mostly play with two "real life" friends, and most of the groupings of people I know in my guilds are couples, friends from college/home, coworkers, and similar. It's usually not "oh we know each other after we found out in-game that we're geographically close".
For every interesting person I have met in WoW, I've come across someone I can't even begin to describe...social misfit, awkward, creepy, misogynist, immature, stalker doesn't even begin to cover it. Whenever I find a random group of people to raid with, I am afraid to talk in vent/mumble because I don't want to give away the fact that my voice gives me away as being a very, very valley girl/California English spoken woman. The few times I slip and talk, some players didn't care but others split off into various assumptions, usually along the lines of my being incompetent by being female or "no way, she's a girl! (I'm going to harass her in whispers now!)". The few that didn't care and judged me based on my actual performance were the ones I ended up really appreciating being grouped with and that in turn were the ones that outright told me that they were sad to see me go before I changed servers a couple months ago. The ones that assumed I was dumb, well, I had an ignore list longer than my arm by the time I moved away. Moved away to a guild where I vetted the GM and his guild for his female-friendliness and zero tolerance to harassment first above all other concerns, including raiding. (And for what it's worth, I left my very first WoW guild because I couldn't stand even the smallest playful insults anymore. Starting with "you sure do get around" for getting an achievement for exploring a zone.)
So in an environment like that, I really hope that such a thing is never, ever, ever possible in-game and is something people do waaaaay far out of game on their own accord. Blizzard really scared a lot of people with their initial implementation of RealID and still kinda do despite all the privacy settings, and I would cancel my WoW account the day Blizzard ever considers putting in some kind of interface for geographical guild finding no matter how opt-out it is. I want to choose which basis I use to find friends in this game and I never want Blizzard to help me with that. I especially never ever want some dumbass 15 year old punk that hits on me to find out I live in Los Angeles, let alone what my real name is.
(And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone. Some people just don't learn to manage their in-game time very well and that is the fodder for all those horror stories, not the vast majority of people that do know how to stop playing a game.)
>I mostly play with two "real life" friends, and most of the groupings of people I know in my guilds are couples, friends from college/home, coworkers, and similar. It's usually not "oh we know each other after we found out in-game that we're geographically close".
Yeah, but that's partly because when you meet a random person online, odds are that they don't live near you because any two random internet denizens aren't likely to live near each other. The point of geolocation would be that you could feasibly meet if you wanted to.
I don't see what the problem would be with opt-outable geolocation. You could set your location to private, or don't enter it at all, and join a guild/clan/whatever that isn't local to a specific area.
A game or a guild that geolocated should also be harder on creeps, banning people who were creepy and not letting in 15 year olds in the first place if that's not who they wanted. It would be more like a real life social group. If you don't want to hang around with someone in real life, you don't, and if you're not in high school yourself, you probably don't socialize with 15 year old boys who aren't related to you. I understand your concerns but I think there are solutions to them, and there will always be alternatives for those who want to keep it strictly anonymous and online.
>And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone.
But there are still some things you're missing without face to face. And having a social life centered around electronic communication with people you don't know in real life is almost as stigmatized as WoW addiction anyway.
Sure, playing WoW lead to me getting a job at a startup (Rupture, which was later sold to EA) and moving to San Francisco. Considering I'm radically happier in my life now than I was previous to living here, I'd say it was quite helpful.
I'm not what you'd probably call a WoW 'addict' (never managed to get into the 4+ hours a day for longer than a couple weeks at a time before getting sick of it and quitting,) but I would consider the time that I've played WoW to be a net benefit to me..
I've played with a fair number of people who are in the same field as me, as well as with my own coworkers and managers, which has allowed me to get to know them pretty well and get pretty good job offers and consulting gigs.
But sure, if I had been spending every free moment on WoW, it likely wouldn't have been a worthwhile endeavor.. And for all I know, I would have done something better with the time put into it had I taken up a different hobby.
Yes, I know a ton of people that learned to program writing and hacking add-ons. WoW has a very powerful add-on system based on LUA. A number of folks that write those add-ons that make a great living doing so.
I heard and read about multiple marriages resulting from WoW. There are also a lot of people who have learned to program or make a decent side income with addons. One can also learn a lot about leadership and determination, since a lot of times you will fail horribly but you still continue (and have to keep everyone motivated). Another thing is communication. For example if you are with 24 other people inside a dungeon and you make a mistake, everyone will have lost 10 minutes or more. So you have to handle that and be honest that this was your fault.
Me personally? I actually got a free holiday in the Netherlands, since someone I know from the game invited me.
And of course don't underestimate the fun that can be had in the game. Oh and nearly forgot: I learned English. It's still far from perfect, but before I could barely read English...
i don't play WOW or any other MMOG. But I think that old saying that most things in moderation are good for you, seems to apply here as well. I have no concrete evidence to back this and I haven't defined 'most' or 'moderation' but I have noticed that most people understand this intuitively. Are there exceptions, maybe. Particularly, in this community of people, who spend all their time on one idea trying to make it successful. However, I could make the argument that doing it takes a toll on you and your relationships. Anyways, i can't argue it all that well, but it feels like a good rule of thumb.
I guess, but I don't really see how that pertains to the discussion unless you have some extra moral or philosophical objection to recreational drug use that you feel also applies to this video game.
Its a hobby. I think some people get sucked in and take it too far, but I also think the vast majority don't. I'm just offering a perspective from the "don't" category.
It's generally accepted that it's a good idea to avoid cocaine unless you're really sure that you can take it without getting addicted. Similarly, I think it should be generally accepted that it's a good idea to avoid WoW unless you're really sure you can play it without getting addicted.
I had a friend who literally forgot to go to work for two days because he was so busy preparing for a soccer match. Or I'm sure we all know a guy/gal who was/is drinking all too much.
My point is, you can take any hobby too far, it doesn't matter what it is. The interesting thing is, no one blames soccer or alcohol (most of the time it is some deeper issue thats the problem, not alcohol), but everyone is blaming WoW. The problem isn't WoW, the problem is the person who can't treat it as a hobby.
Some hobbies are more dangerous than others. I think it makes sense for us to discourage people from getting started on the more dangerous hobbies. Also, people do blame alcohol.
I play WoW for five years now. When I started, I used to be an occasional player. But when I hit level 60 (that was the highest level a few years ago) it was impossible to advance further without being in a regular raiding guild. So I started hardcoring: obligatory raids from 19:00 to 23:30, each evening, five evenings per week. Lower attendance was not tolerated. And gathering/grinding materials for potions/powerups afterwards, util 01:00 or so. This took place in a few months around the summer of 2006. The reward was worth it: access to all high-level content, epic items, and being member of the most succesful guild on the server. However, after a few months hardcoring like this, the game felt more and more like a boring job. One day I realized that with this playing style, I would quickly lose all interest in this game, which I didn't want, so I quit the guild (only hardcorers were allowed to stay in) and changed to a casual player, which I still am today.
I didn't want to quit altogether because there was so much more game content to check out (I enjoy the sights & sounds of WoW very much), and so many other classes to try. Up until then I played exclusively Holy Priest.
Blizzard must have somehow realized that players weren't able to get any further without hardcoring. The last years they have created more and more features for the casual player: the Dungeon Finder system, player-vs-player battlegrounds, cross-realm instances, other reward systems; all these have lessened the dependence on a guild.
I now sometimes fire up WoW, not everyday, and play a few hours. I still like it, after all these years (and 3 expansion packs).
I don't know how casual you are or how long it's been since you last played, but Blizzard flipped everything around for casual players not in a guild with Cataclysm. Those features you name are still there, but now they're next to rated BGs, guild achievements, and more features you can only really get while playing with a group of other players, i.e. a guild. Even basic non-raiding perks like 15 minute hearth and increased xp/rep gains are tied to guilds now.
I had an alt that wasn't in a guild or cared to raid that just recently joined the <reddit> guild because I really wanted those perks while being in a guild that didn't demand anything of me. I only raid a very strict max 3 hours 3 weekdays a week on my main toon in another guild and I refuse to tie myself down with raiding on a second one, and <reddit> is perfect for that...people are always online to play with, raids are always going on if I ever want to check them out, but I'm free to stay in the guild with zero commitment towards any time sink and I can solo all the content I want. You might want to check out joining a similarly large and open social guild for yours.
As an ex-hardcore player I'm amazed at how easy it is to have fun in Cataclysm now without even raiding. And it's actually enjoyable treating heroic instances as I used to treat progress raids - reading up on a fight at a time, watching videos, working towards gear through points but with absolutely no obligation or time commitment.
It's awesome - though the biggest change I've made is moving to the USA, where I absolutely cannot raid as the European guild I'm in raids during my workday. (And the latency).
Meh, quit gaming a while back but recently want to try it out again but more just to cool off as a "hobby."
I used to think games were evil and against productivity but no longer. I work a lot. I just want to chill out and relax some times and blow shit up. Maybe do a raid or two, so what?
It's no different then spending 3 hours watching a TV show on Netflix or something similar.
It just depends on how you want to spend your time. If it makes you happy, sure.
I think you need a real job before you can consider gaming a hobby though. Otherwise it can lead to a "full time life gig."
Girlfriend will also help make sure you're not wasting your time.
I'm lucky if I can squeeze out 8 hours a week on games. If that. There's weekends though that I have the whole day to myself and I prefer to play a game for a few hours than go to a club and get drunk.
"So, when World of Warcraft came out, I knew that it was very important that I avoid playing it, because it clearly was a game that I would get instantly addicted to."
I was also into MUDs big time while I was in school. That addiction was not all bad since I eventually got into the hacking-the-codebase side of it, which was in line with what I was studying. But as soon as I heard of it, I knew that WoW was bad news for me. It would become my MUD addiction on steroids.
Thankfully I've managed to stay away from it so far. But I'm not really that strong. Most of the credit goes to my aversion to having to pay a subscription fee to play it.
The problem for me with games like WoW, EQ and so on is that they aren't based enough on skills so to compensate you need to spend a lot of time in the game.
To contrast. In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills. Or StarCraft for that matter again skills based.
The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at. you can't just get powerleveled up the latter.
The skills stays with you, the same is not true in WoW.
Having seen a couple of friends dropping out of university for a year because of games like EverQuest and WoW my advice is:
Don't play games where it's the avatar that gains power. Only play games that makes you a better player.
I think you're mainly viewing WoW from the PvE (player-vs-environment) perspective. In PvP (player-vs-player), there is a system much like the one present in Starcraft II (except that there are no leagues, only ratings).
In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills.
If you spend years playing Quake/Starcraft, you will be good at it.
The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at
I don't see how that combats addiction. I played competitive Counter-Strike Source for some time, and the main thing that kept me going was just that feeling of competition, and wanting to become better.
WoW's addiction factor is different. It's more like "if I don't do X on day Y, I get behind other people" where in games like Quake/Starcraft, that just doesn't exist.
Exactly the point that I was going to make. Not all games are bad.
I played Quake 3 competitively for 7 years and I have seen a lot of players in the scene having success in different fields outside of computer games.
Games based on competitiveness and skills give you a good deal of insight on how to achieve things in real life.
As for most addicted WoW players, these people are just looking for instant gratification for just a little bit more than minimal effort. They want to achieve something and feel good about themselves and WoW pretty much offers the perfect combination of grind/reward, random surprise (items that drop) and a feeling of belonging.
I doubt that any of these people could stick to long term goals as soon as they stop playing WoW. They would just look for their next fix of quick gratification
Not only that, the skills gained in games like Quake (eye-hand coordination, reaction time, etc) transfer over to real-life. I think Quake is to WoW as psychedelics are to narcotics.
How do you avoid this trap? How do you prevent [subject] from hooking you into a shadow of what you really want? The answer is simple: don't [do it] blindly. Consider what it is you get out of [subject] . Nearly everything the [subject] provides can be found better and more real elsewhere.
Fattening foods? Alcohol abuse? Sex Addiction? oh, WoW.
This is written with the assumption that the reader cannot think for themselves and is quite insulting to anyone that reads past half of these subjective assertions.
"at the same time there was something disquieting about the fact that all these people were still around"
Sorry your friends didn't die, change all of their habits entirely, or live up to your random expectations of what constitutes too much and too little involvement in a computer game.
Seriously though, its been out how many years, and using plenty of comics and quotations to express this point, its taken you 18 months to regurgitate this same tired public service announcement? This is just trolling literate people that have thought about playing games in the last decade!
Here's my perspective as the friend of someone who became addicted to WoW:
I lost a potential programming buddy/co-founder. we used to collaborate on projects, but eventually WoW took up all his spare time. We both graduated with CS degrees, but he is now unemployable. He played WoW instead of working (he worked from home), and has never spent any time outside of work maintaining his skills. I say worked because he no longer works. Hasn't for the past 3 years. Right now he's into starcraft. It's frustrating to me that he and others I built relationships with in college have chosen this path.
What enables him? Why can he keep playing and not have to worry about paying rent or having enough money for food?
I play quite a lot of videogames, and I play wow, but I'm a grown-up, I have a job, I have a home, I buy my own food, I pay my mortgage, and if I fail at my job, I'll starve and lose my home and my ability to play videogames. Why hasn't your friend come to the same realization?
You picked home ownership and you pick food according to your income. If you fail at your job you will starve and loose your home because you entangled your burdens with your paycheck.
Perhaps his friend choses food and roof far cheaper then he could afford in order to have more time to spend freely not on paying for those.
I haven't ever played WoW - and I doubt I ever will, but I would have imagined that the skills gained as a 'guild leader' would be commutable to a lot of management level jobs?
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other."
Long version:
Compared to other kinds of entertainment (books, TV, sports, friends) -- World of Warcraft makes you think about it even when you don't play it. The longer you play the game, the more addicted you are, the more you think about all the things you're gonna do. That's how the game's designed.
You think about the game when you're not playing it. It's hard to really focus on something else if you're thinking about the game.
Does that sound familiar to you? If you're a hacker, if you are excited about computers, then it must. It's same with hacking and programming. It's the same principle. For example I tried a little Node.js magic the other night and the first thing I did in the morning was getting live comments to work. Then I found out there could be another cool feature, and so on. Excitement. That's what drives hackers. Call it addiction, whatever. Unlike, WoW, you're doing work, you're making money.
So please, don't be ever excited about WoW. You don't wanna waste your precious excitement thanks to which you make wonders with programming on WoW.
You can do both, but you can't be addicted to both. Which one will you choose?
From what I know, Patrick used to spend a lot of time playing WoW. It will be interesting to know what he actually got out of the game and what made him stop playing the game (assuming he has indeed stopped playing the game)
I used to play WoW about twenty hours per week at the cushy exexjob (35 hours of little work per week). It was fun, it gave me an English speaking social outlet when I had none, and the experience of managing a sixty+ member guild was great preparation for later (deadlines, communication, resolving conflicts, etc).
There was an event in my family: the details are private, but it caused me to reassess What I Wanted From Life. Better purple pixels figured rather low on the totem pole. I quit. A few days later I picked up a new hobby: see, there was this teacher who wanted to play bingo...
What WoW needs to do is start hooking in-game rewards to real-life rewards.
For example, a deal with 24 Hour Fitness where you need to attend for 30 days in a row to unlock some kind of sword. The biometric system at 24 Hour is now sophisticated enough to permit this kind of tracking [with your permission of course].
I'm completely serious. This is an inversion of the Zynga model in which real life money is exchanged for worthless virtual goods. It's more like worthless virtual goods are dangled as an incentive for real life improvement.
There's a lot further you can go with this concept (hooking it up to location based apps, for example), but if we're talking about a "game layer on the world", start with converting an unhealthy dependency into a healthy one.
I think people's participation would be much higher in such a program if the rewards were linked to an existing platform.
People have been trying to game-ify real life for years and its never gained much traction. I think this is because people have to sign up for something additional, and at that point (unless the program gains a lot of steam with a lot of people) there's not much tying individuals in.
Right, but that platform could just be "social bragging" through Facebook, other websites, and other methods entirely. It's as simple as showing off to your friends the cool things you're learning while encouraging them to do the same. Meanwhile, those same friends are able to observe the changes to you on a personal basis. It's inherently social and viral; I don't think it really needs to leverage an existing platform at all.
Sure, but WoW does already have a huge installed base.
That said, you could be the middleman and not ask permission from anyone. Just build a 24 Hour Fitness/WoW mashup. The 24 Hour Fitness end would be easy if you have a membership (basically just set up a screen scraper for your biometric login history).
For WoW, you might start off by buying a bunch of top swords and stuff from other players to seed it. I vaguely know that Blizzard doesn't like that sort of thing, so maybe you could instead seed it with donations of equipment from people who are going to delete their accounts because of lack of exercise.
At the beginning it'd be semi-manual, with difficult-to-obtain gear traded in person in the game. But I think that would get a lot of buzz on Twitter (and even the NYT) if promoted properly, and would get you a meeting with the Blizzard guys to make it a reality.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in doing something with this, I actually have a whole spec written up (one of 50 startup ideas that I can't actually attend to, what with the primary and all). Drop me a line at sramanujan1729 at gmail dot com if you want to chat.
"I'm going to mull this over and see what I can come up with."
This idea is kind of like having a math game: the majority of the population will not bother with it. The reason WOW is so popular is because it allows you to get away from your real life.
(long time lurker here.. this topic is too close to home to just lurk)
I'm working on a startup that is taking this concept and applying it to social gaming. We're calling ourselves "Zynga for Heath." We're normalizing activity data from public API's from exercise devices like Fitbit, Nike+, Map My Fitness, biometric devices, etc and assigning it an activity score. Basically, rewarding players for working out, parking farther away from the store, and even just walking around the shopping center. A huge goal for us is partnerships with companies like 24 hour fitness to reward their members in-game.
This score is then used in our game that will be running on Facebook/iOS to reward the player with points that they use to continue building up their fitness/sports world. Our normalization platform will give us the ability to create multiple types of games to appeal to more than just the existing social games that are out on Facebook.
We're very early into our development process, but would love to keep the Hacker News community posted, if interested.
Okay, that kicks ass. You got my email address; I can't wait to use the product.
1. You got on my good side when I saw young Arnie. That's awesome. I hope if you need permission you get it, because it would be a shame to lose him. I got an instant flashback to "Pumping Iron" and how charismatic and inspiring he is in that movie (despite being a dick.)
2. I got briefly annoyed at the initial screenshot. It's obviously a screenshot, but it contains instructions to close the locker door, and I just could not stop myself from spending thirty seconds trying to close the locker door even though I knew it wouldn't work. It's hard to explain, but I just had to try to close the locker door before I could move on. I bet some people will be legitimately confused, too. Screenshots are okay as long as they don't contain instructions telling you to interact with them!
3. Clicking through, looks cool, looks cool, being sold, and then BAM I'm completely sold on the screenshot that shows I can earn stuff for my friends and vice-versa. For many people it's a lot harder to let other people down than it is to let themselves down. I immediately thought of a certain friend who's a rather extreme case, but it applies to me, too. My first breakthrough in fitness, when I went from a wannabe exerciser to a guy who actually does work out a few times a week, was when I had a roommate who recruited me as her running partner. Social pressure, not wanting to send my friend out running alone when she was asking for my support, pulled me through a lot of tough times when I really, really didn't want to work out, and then when I moved out a year later I found I was, for the first time in my life, capable of pushing through those tough times by myself. I bet your product will accomplish the same thing for a lot of people -- you MUST do this!
I'll add my perspective to this as someone who was addicted to a similar game.
I started playing Everquest (EQ) soon after launch in 1999 and leveled pretty quickly hitting the max level cap at the time (50) not long before the first expansion came out. At the time played wi an American guild (I'm Australian) and the time difference stopped me doing things with them most of them time since I had a 9-5 job. My server split and I went with them. The new server was fairly desolate and I ended up getting booted from lack of participation. That, combined with how my class had been screwed by the expansion, caused me to quit.
But I ended up selling my stuff on eBay for ~$3500 so it wasn't all bad. But the story doesn't end there.
Atually anoeth factor was that I was moving to the UK for work. That first year the was one of the most productive of my life. I had no Internet access at home (2001), no TV and a fairly active social life. Due to living in a cheap area of London, renting a flat and subletting the rooms and the low rate of effective taxation of contractors I SAVED in excess of $100,000 that year.
After some drama with flatmates (subletting was financially beneficial but a hassle) I moved closer to work. Suddenlyinsread of an our commute each way I had a 5 minute walk. I got cable Internet and bought a PC and a TV.
I started playing EQ again. New server, new class, starting from scratch. I leveled quickly and went through a series of guilds. Raiding can be a huge timesink. This period was the most fun I had in an MMORPG ever.
Later that year I got laid off as in the aftermath of the telco bubble bursting the previous year (it was 2002 by now).
I'd always wanted to learn a foreign language soi moved to Germany and enrolled in intensive learning classes.
But I still kept up with EQ. I transferred servers to a high end guild. The guild was American so I ended up sleeping from 7pm to 1am, playing EQ from 1am to 8am, going to classes til 1pm and then playing til 6pm. I never really adjusted to sleeping at these times.
But I did go to classes. After they ended I stayed and was playing up to 16 hours a day. In the end I got kicked from the guild for doing something I shouldn't have, which was probably the best thing that could've happened.
Still I view that time now as a wasted opportunity. I did learn the language but not as well as I could have and I certainly take full advantage socially or even to see and do things there.
But not before I'd gone back to my old company (they were hiring again) and my weird schedule had brought me into conflict with a toxic project manager, ending that job only a month after it had started.
2002-03 was a pretty terrible time in the UK contractor market (39% unemployment amongst those who hadn't left the industry). It took months to find a new job. I'd also lost that "social" outlet of EQ so was pretty cut off. It was actually a fairly dark period for me.
I have played MMOGs since then but never to the same intensity and, frankly, I think the magic was gone. I'd seen it all before. Even now I think all these games are fairly formulaic with the same basic mechanics and psychological devices (compulsion loops, etc).
What I learnt about myself is that I'm fairly singleminded. This can be used advantageously as I'll dwel on a problem at work until I solve it. But if I have an unresolved issue personally it can, in a way, consume me--or at least consume my attention.
I do think I'd be better off without a TV or even without a home Internet connection. But I guess balance is my personal cross to bear.
Are these games dangerous? Possibly but I tend to thinkpretty much everything is dangerous to some people. Alcohol. Gambling. Trading. Even working out. It ultimately comes down to personal responsibility.
EDIT: One last thing I'll add: one problem with this kind of game is the longevity (timesink) nature. You see a similar (but much less severe) problem with tabletop RPGs. Because you invest so much time it increases your threshold for putting up with crap, basi...
Even now I think all these games are fairly formulaic with the same basic mechanics and psychological devices (compulsion loops, etc).
Basically, MMOGs are all like resort casinos. There's some spectacle and entertainment. The driving mechanic is the addictive variable schedule of reward.
I'd like to make a game where true exploration is the base mechanic. There would be no storyline, just exploration. All content would be either procedurally generated, created by the users, or evolved through genetic algorithms.
Such a "game" has been tried - Secondlife. And it's boring boring boring. Best give up these game things and find some real world hobby/job with a variable reward system. :-)
Better yet, add a bit of structure so that SecondLife resembles a popular MMOG genre. If done correctly, a small company can rake in the profits while the users busily create all the content.
The problem is not many people would play that game. Of those that do, not many would play for very long.
These games are formulaic because the formula works. I've thought of numerous things I would like to see done differently, but really the way they are done now are what get people to play them for so long. I've played some really great games, but I've never played any of them for nearly as long as I've played WoW.
You are actually describing what Darkfall is/was when i played the beta. The land is fixed but huge and basically all content is player created or dynamic. There is nearly no mobs anywhere but if you hang around a place for some time they will spawn if you are in the areas and if you kill them all they might go extinct in that zone. It's mostly a PVP game though with big focus on players interacting and fighting over zones. I haven't played since the beta since i am sort of tired of the whole genre but it seemed cool enough to play once a while.
>In the end I got kicked from the guild for doing something I shouldn't have, which was probably the best thing that could've happened.
Ok, now I'm curious. I'm just thinking with 16h/day you're fairly hardcore, guilds must be after ppl like you, no? Why the kick, if you care to elaborate?
My guild used a DKP (dragon kill point) system for loot distribution, which was fairly common. Basically you earnt points for showing up to raids. When items dropped whoever had the most points and wanted it got it, spending some number of points.
At one point an item was left to rot as no one wanted it.i came to the raid late and passed the corpse. I looked on it and saw the item. Now it was nothing I'd spend points on but I did want to experiment with it so I took it. Someone saw me and an officer who I didn't get along with kicked me from the guild. The guild leader was basically inscribe by that point so wouldn't overrule the officer and that was that.
So I was technically in the wrong but, like many things like this (in game and out), it wouldn't have mattered if I was in the in crowd but I wasn't so it was a valid excuse to get rid of me.
As for playing 16 hours, in the fueled I was in that was normal.
As for being in demand, it's a bit more complicated. Some classes are more desirable than others. I was primarily a rogue, which at this point in the game was largely useless in raids except for scouting and CR. The class balance shifted from expansion to expansion. The next expansion made rogues desirable again.
Plus I HATED the current expansion and had had my fill of raiding pretty much so I didn't pursue other guilds but it would've been toughg to find one with room for a rogue.
Bear in mind that raid sizes were limited. At that time it was 72 people for one expansion and 54 for the next so there was pressure to reduce guild size anyway.
Most guilds operated as close to 100% capacity without going (much) over as possible. To go lower was to be under strength. To go over was to force people to sit on the sidelines, which is no fun.
Personally I'm finding my interest in games is waining. A whole bunch of very impressive AAA games came out this year - in the past I would have played all of them, this year I only played Bad Company 2 and Halo Reach. I think I no longer have the time/energy to make that initial investment in a game, where you jump through a bunch of frustrating hoops until the fun starts and/or you feel immersed in the game world. However, I still enjoy the competition online - outsmarting other humans in a game of skill and strategy. So I play Bad Company 2 on Live frequently, but I don't pursue the social component of it (friendlists, clans etc). I'm not sure if I'll ever get bored of that.
And for that reason I avoid WoW like the plague: endless human competition, massive social aspect. Bound to be addictive (mind you, i'm not sure what you actually do in WoW gameplay. the adverts are all cutscenes)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] thread(And to add a shameless plug, my own article on akrasia: http://messymatters.com/akrasia )
This put into words something I've been thinking about for a while, but struggled to articulate. There's something wrong when we start doing this to friendships.
The meme that video games are inherently evil needs to go away. Why is it socially acceptable to join many clubs and spend time with those people all the time but not "people on the Internet"? Like the Internet is somewhere only people that can't make "real friends" go..
Addiction to anything is bad but playing WoW or any other online game doesn't mean you're automatically "a loser" in the rest of your life -- and I don't mean just casually playing. There are people in all of the top guilds achieving high ranked world kills on new content that are also successful in other areas of their life.
Do you think it is any different on the social obligation side for somebody to show up for a raid in WoW versus showing up for the league match? Is there a lower social obligation for the bowler to practice between matches than there is for a player in WoW to prep for that raid?
Competitive social MMOs are the recreational sports leagues of this generation.
(I'm not saying WoW is a sport, just to pre-empt a diversion in that direction).
What is morally superior about exercising an hour a day over playing WoW an hour a day, provided the lack of exercise doesn't make one dangerously obese or similar? Yet all rants like this one are based on that premise - 'I used to be such a loser, now I work out, I'm so much better than those WoW losers'. Usually from former players, too; just like former smokers are the most obnoxious about how awesome they are for quitting, the former WoW players seem to know something about self-righteousness, too.
Anyway, like anything, it's about moderation. If you play a couple of hours a week and don't let it take over your life, there's nothing wrong with it. I asked my girlfriend to set up the 'parental control' feature on my account, so I only got to play 4 hours a week. If anything, WoW at least lets you do that; I have yet to see the first skateboard or piano that has a lock like that, and there are many people who 'waste' (in the article's definition, not mine) much more than 4 hours a week on those.
"Posting all these years to get higher karma, reading the source articles, reading the comments, for what? To help another person who thinks they have an innovative startup idea? They're all just going to get bought by Google anyway. Life is meaningless!
The key difference being body language. So much of successful human interaction comes from non verbal cues and if you're someone for whom that doesn't come naturally then socializing in WoW is not going to provide you the same benefit as in person interaction period.
If visual contact was essential for forming significant relationships then the blind would be unable to make friends.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78553575@N00/321522242/
What can be learned by a blind person touching an avatar on a computer screen?
I think they do actually. Otherwise, why would people go through the trouble of meeting physically when they could do it on the Internet? It's not like people who meet in real life don't know about the Internet (I'm thinking of tech conferences, HN meetups, etc.) The physical experience is simply better.
Would orange flavored candy be a sufficient substitute here? I'd say no.
Maybe the blind are much less successful at making friends. What is your evidence to the contrary?
The article makes the difference abundantly clear. This is what the writer learned by meeting the guild leader in real life:
"She was perfectly nice, and an excellent cook. But it was hard not to notice certain things - no matter how bad I felt for noticing them. It was hard not to notice she lived in a crappy apartment in a crappy neighborhood. It was hard not to notice she was fat. It was hard not to notice that despite her dreams of going back to school and becoming a paramedic, she just worked part-time at a local pizza joint."
It is that level of personal, real, gritty, disturbing, eye-opening raw detail that is often hidden behind an avatar.
The point is that World of Warcraft was taking all the time & energy that could have went into improving her life, and that she besides not on any sort of growth trajectory, may well have been getting worse - that she wasn't investing even the minimum necessary to keep her life (such as it was) viable.
According to my worldview, it is preferable because it is real.
I know some stuck up people that wouldn't consider talking to someone without a bachelors degree. Since meeting some people from WoW in real life they changed their attitude.
These virtual settings allow everyone to meet people from all stages of life, people one would never meet otherwise. And this diversity makes life interesting.
It's funny reading this article and all the comments. IT's not so much about WoW vs being productive as diversions in general. I know people who spend most of their free time reading fiction. Isn't that just as bad? What about watching TV and movies? How about browsing the internet for hours on end? Yeah, maybe you learned something interesting, but unless you're going Jeopardy it probably won't really pay off.
Being productive for productivities sake is also an interesting view point. At what point do you decide to just enjoy your life by doing the things you enjoy rather than trying to "make it better". If you enjoy the journey then great - if not, do you arrive at a point where you are satisfied? Or do you continually struggle to reach some goal that is always just out of reach?
Yes - some people may feel trapped in a game like WoW. I think there are also many people who just enjoy the game and the experience and prioritize their life accordingly. Just because someone doesn't have the same aspirations as you doesn't make them a bad person. I'm sure if you ask most people they would like to be more successful - but few are willing to give up all distractions and diversions to achieve that.
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!
What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."
But this isn't necessarily true for everyone.
Having said all that, I think WOW is more dangerous than heroin.
I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help.
Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.
And your reasons can just as easily be turned around.
Why work hard to win at WoW? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever [sic] wanted to be lvl 80. etc.
If your 'argument' applies equally well to any position it is completely meaningless.
Oddly enough, not everyone agrees with that. Some of them are even working on that problem.
I can make these arguments all day. Immortality is not inherently meaningful.
However, current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't the next adventure, it's nothing.
About the meaning of immortality, you may want to read the Fun Theory sequence at http://lesswrong.com
"You believe we have souls. In that case, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. Current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't a possible adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, I recommend the Fun Theory sequence at lesswrong.com"
No I don't believe in souls. You are assuming beliefs that I don't have.
Nihilism does not require a belief in anything supernatural. I do believe that death is real, and therefore I believe that dying is something that happens to people. The point is that you can't prove in any objective way that death is less meaningful than life.
This is not really due to the nature of life and death, it is due to the nature of meaning itself.
The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life.
And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something.
Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.
Interestingly I have the same torwards tobacco. There seems to be something, maybe in your sub-consciousness that wants to prevent you from going back there and it is so strong that it evokes reactions on a physical level.
If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life.
People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
Nihilism being the worst of them all. One has to recognize that indeed, there are no supreme values, that there is no guaranteed path to salvation. And that in spite of this terrible truth one must form his own set of values that guide him on a journey that doesn't really lead anywhere specific, but one must travel the journey else he becomes damned.
Man is a creature of creation, to be happy Man has to improve upon himself and the world, to create by definition one needs to have some values. Else we just become decadent and decadence does not breed happiness.
They are re-arranging the materials of the game to create something they desire.
This is the same procedure people use in real life - we rearrange matter and energy to create conditions we desire.
There is nothing inherently more meaningful in reality compared to fiction. All of these things are exactly as meaningful as individuals find them to be.
Some people value wow for itself and there is nothing wrong or incorrect about this. Does it scare you to recognize that there is no logical basis for action?
The basis is emotional. Meaning itself is a word we use to refer to that emotional experience that occurs when we begin to care about life. Some people find it in collecting stamps, some people find it in wow, some people find it in medicine, some find it in the game of being a corporate executive.
None is logically or inherently more meaningful than another. It all comes down to irrational human values.
Road to 60 was actually pretty fun - but once you hit 60 - thats when it really begins. If you want to mean something, you have to raid almost every single day for 4-6 hours - else you don't get a guild and there are no casual raiding guilds since content is so hard that you need to be well versed to get it done.
I'm well aware that one is playing wow because it makes sense emotionally not rationally - but there is difference between "positive emotional action" and "negative emotional action" (meaning, repetition - grind, peer pressure, job like schedules,...).
So I would argue that no, people in WOW are not creating, they are destroying the very fabric that creates society.
Life isn't meaningless. Life is its own goal; doing well in life allows you to achieve happiness.
I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
The gist is that Farmville isn't fun. Perhaps the problem is that WoW doesn't allow you to achieve happiness.
I didn't claim that it was meaningless. (I don't think that it is.) I don't really care about WoW. I was just responding to somebody's sad claim that "life is meaningless."
doing well in WoW allows you to achieve happiness
Doing well in WoW will not give you self esteem; it will not help you successfully deal with the real world (for example, providing for yourself materially and intellectually via a meaningful career). Successfully dealing with reality is a prerequisite of achieving an overall, lasting sense of happiness as a human being.
I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
I'm not here to write a dissertation to prove my original claim--that you can find happiness in life, and (relatedly) that it has meaning, but that is objectively true. If you haven't or won't put forth the intellectual effort to discover this for yourself, that is truly sad.
Then you completely missed the point of what forensic wrote, because he did not claim that.
The problem with articles such as this, which is what both forensic and me addressed, is that a lot of people claim that time spent on video games is wasted, that time spent in any sort of rat race is bad, without any sort of backing for that claim. And if you don't back the argument you can flip it, which is what me and forensic did.
The author's statement amounted to: "WoW is meaningless for me and negatively impacts my life." forensic's statment amount to: "Well, who's to say life itself is any more meaningful?" My response is: "Wait a minute, I think it is meaningful." And I pointed out that you can achieve happiness in life (and by that I mean genuine self-esteem, not some temporary hedonistic pleasure like you get from playing a video game).
You're also wrong in that backing WAS offered for the claim that time spent on WoW is wasteful; the blogger talks about that a lot, e.g. how you end up just getting more gear so you can go to a bigger dungeon and get more gear, and how spending too much time on WoW blocks you from pursuing major goals in real life (like becoming a paramedic).
You can't tell someone else what is meaningful for them, which is what the OP is doing and you are implying.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field. That's the nature of humanity. We all find meaning in strange and unique ways.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field.
I can't argue that because "meaningful" is not well-defined. However, I can make a related statement, as follows. Building a career in the real world is far more valuable to a person, as a human being, than building a "career" in WoW, because it allows a person to achieve real values in life--e.g. monetary wealth, respect from peers, self-sufficiency, and ultimately self-esteem and the genuine, pervasive kind of happiness that self-esteem makes possible. Wow does not allow one to achieve those values.
Why are these things valuable? If we define valuable as worth a lot of money, obviously they are. If we define it as extremely useful or important, then that's just a judgement call again, no?
Now, there are lots of potential standards of value. e.g. "immediate pleasure" (hedonism); what's good for others (altruism); etc.
The proper standard of value is: what is good or bad for an individual's life, as a human being. So, that's how I'm defining "valuable" here.
Why is that the proper standard of value? Well, any deviation from that standard is going to be destructive to life, whereas following it will sustain life. Living successfully is a prerequisite (and the primary component) of happiness (in the fullest sense of the word--i.e. a non-contradictory enjoyment of being alive and all that that entails).
My statements here are not to be taken as standing on their own. There are lots of questions to ask. (A basic one would be: How can you claim to actually know anything, in the first place?.) I'm not going to try to present the full philosophical justification (i.e. present and validate an entire philosophical system), but it's out there if you look.
That's probably true of the vast majority of people, including addicted WoW players.
Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts.
As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead.
And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse.
edit: fixed some wording
("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
Which leads into existence, and whether all of us are merely a figment of the viewer's imagination.
And the point of saving someone's life? That discussion can go anywhere from existential to darwinian to whether you'll choose bluepill or redpill.
As for one trigger of these sorts of introspections, burnout can happen in EMS and medicine in general, and other environments that cope with chaos and death, too. Getting burnt is not fun, regardless of whether EMS was the trigger, or working in a high-stress startup, or whatever.
First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard).
More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation.
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.
It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.
I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining.
Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money.
What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers.
Voila! Emergent user-generated content!
For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!
In WoW, your character has several skills, stats, and abilities that define it. You choose which ones to work on, how to shape your character, and then you put in the time to make that happen. But what about your skills? You are not getting stronger or better at wielding a two-handed weapon. You are getting better at playing WoW, you are improving your hand-eye coordination, you are bettering your combat-driven teamwork abilities, and you are getting better at determination: being patient and working towards a goal.
The problem comes in the illusion of progression. Your character improves almost continuously, building its skills to a point where it is better than all the other characters. Eventually your character reaches a ceiling, but you can always create another character with different skills and do it all again. But you stop progressing much sooner. Early on, your ability to play WoW tapers off to a suitably-high level such that the real gain is in improving your character. You master the conventions of in-game communication. You develop a routine and diligently set to work improving your characters without question. You stop progressing.
But what happens when you reach that ceiling, when you become the best? In WoW and many other video games, the game ceases to be fun when you are as powerful as possible. Since someone else owns the experience, you are stuck waiting for them to tell you what to do with your newfound abilities. This is why I regret the time I sank into becoming an Expert guitar player on Rock Band. When your playing abilities max out, the game becomes a chore, even if you don't realize it. The best rhythm game players spend their time playing the same songs over and over again in an effort to play them flawlessly. The game ceases to be a game.
In "real life," if you manage to "max out" a "real skill," you can actually do something else, anything you want, with it. Rather than hope that song that I love comes out on Rock Band so that I can put my hundreds of hours to work playing it, I could have spent hundreds of hours playing real guitar and be able to play any song. If I sink a lot of time into becoming a great comedian, I can hit the road, make people all of the place laugh, and make money doing it. If I spend time improving my health and fitness, I can run marathons, play competitive sports, or become a vigilante hero. The choice is entirely up to me.
That's what it boils down to. Is your leveling work tying you to a system where you can't control the direction you're heading in? In play, in art, in work, and in life, make sure that the skills you're improving are flexible in a way that allows you to apply them in any way you wish. Otherwise, you're just playing someone else's game.
Note: I used quotes around "real life" and "real skill" because I'm cheating by defining them somewhat circularly. A "real skill" is a skill that can be applied in many different ways, limited only by creativity. "Real life" is the arena in which you practice and execute those real skills.
Sure, some people prefer the blue pill.
But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.
But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well.
Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill.
(I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.)
"I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.
Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.
Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.
What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?
This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again.
After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive.
This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Then they weren't really dead.
> This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Maybe if you're using an outdated definition of death. By death I mean brain death, from which there is no recovery by definition ("the irreversible end of all brain activity").
The cessation of breathing etc. is no longer a useful definition of "death" precisely because of the "coming back to life" you describe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Problems_of_definition
> Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
The dead things are not "you" in any useful sense of the word. Yes I know it's the same atoms, but "you" are not just your atoms. "You" are an emergent pattern of thoughts and memories, which cannot begin to emerge until your brain develops.
Sure, you can take the cosmological approach that we are all connected, all things are one etc., but in practice, once your definition of "you" no longer distinguishes "you" from "not you", it's no longer a useful word.
> Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Sure, I clearly stated it was just my opinion. All opinions have roots in genes and experiences. But the experience of arguing with you has thus far failed to change my opinion, it's merely persuaded me that you use very different definitions for words than I do ;)
My point is simply that death itself can hold just as much meaning as life because meaning is deeply subjective. No scientific fact changes this.
Tomorrow we may discover a way to raise the dead - to turn the people you currently define as irreversibly brain impaired into... living humans.
The ancients used to refer to the breathe of life, now you have to refer to a very controversial operational definition.
I contend that this has little effect on the subjective human experience of meaning and whether or not the human emotions find meaning in death.
The writer says he started playing he has spend his time working out. I started swimming for 40 minutes each day while playing WoW, a habit I continue now that I stopped.
He also states what if you spend the time you invest in WoW into achieving your goals. But you can't just work 24/7. I spend 8 hours a day doing research and hacking at the university, when I get home I just don't have the focus left in me to code or study. In the past I spend this time playing WoW, right now I spend this time reading fiction or hanging in front of the TV.
Now probably there are people who lose themselves entirely to the game and can't bring up the discipline to also work on their goals, but as everything in life, its really just about balancing yourself.
PS - I actually found myself being more productive during my WoW playing times then during my non-playing times. Reason? If I needed to do something I would not allow myself to log in until it was done. WoW was more addictive then procrastinating so I'd just knuckle down and do it. Now if I need to do something I find myself reading HN instead of just doing it...
Waterproof laptop?
Yes, some personalities are more prone to addiction than others. But it's also true that some substances that give instant gratification are more addictive than others.
I wonder what, if Heroin was as freely available as alcohol or tobacco, its addiction rate would be like. It's my suspicion that drug addicts tend to come from the addictive personality subsection of the population
In the guild I'm in now and a guild I was in in the past I see both: players who are quite literally on welfare or unemployment and just play WoW and other games all day (colloquially "living the dream", mostly tongue-in-cheek), while others have what I would consider successful lives. One of our best priests works as some sort of company programmer or server maintainer/admin. Our best healing druid entered his first bodybuilding contest sometime in September of this year and plans on doing another next August iirc. Our guild/raid leader has an office 9-5 selling toys to retailers or something like that. Lots are in college, myself included. An old guild officer of mine was a Googler. A decent amount have wives/kids/gfs/main squeezes. etc.
I think the best argument of the post is the social obligations point. There are definitely some people who do "no-life" for the guild and such, but again, I think this is a some do some don't thing (as well as being limited to basically people in guild leadership situations). For every guild leader or officer I know who hasn't left a dead-end guild because of a feeling of obligations to the guild, I probably know twice as many officers who did left anyways, and 3-4x as many raiders who did as well. Anecdotally speaking, I left a guild where I was probably next in line to be guild/raid lead for a much better one, and am now debating doing some sort of ESL teach/travel program next year despite having been an officer in my new guild for roughly 6 months now.
I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing.
I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playing was so I would have a way to play with some longtime RL friends while they were living at U of I in champaign and urbana.
Intangibly I feel like I have learned a lot about how to communicate with people, particularly from a leadership position. Since communication over text or in ventrilo doesn't have all the physical queues of face to face interaction, you learn to speak with more clarity and precision as time goes on. I feel like it would be pretty easy to be a successful manager of some non-technical sector of work like retail based solely on what I've learned from being an officer in WoW now as well as being an officer in Runescape back when I was like 13-14.
Edit: PS. I forgot a big intangible: I've had a lot of fun playing over the past couple years.
It seems like it would be a good thing if guilds could be set up based on the geographic location of the players. If you had a reasonable chance of making "real life" friends, a lot of the objections to MMOs that aren't made to, say, a ski club or a bowling league, would go away.
For every interesting person I have met in WoW, I've come across someone I can't even begin to describe...social misfit, awkward, creepy, misogynist, immature, stalker doesn't even begin to cover it. Whenever I find a random group of people to raid with, I am afraid to talk in vent/mumble because I don't want to give away the fact that my voice gives me away as being a very, very valley girl/California English spoken woman. The few times I slip and talk, some players didn't care but others split off into various assumptions, usually along the lines of my being incompetent by being female or "no way, she's a girl! (I'm going to harass her in whispers now!)". The few that didn't care and judged me based on my actual performance were the ones I ended up really appreciating being grouped with and that in turn were the ones that outright told me that they were sad to see me go before I changed servers a couple months ago. The ones that assumed I was dumb, well, I had an ignore list longer than my arm by the time I moved away. Moved away to a guild where I vetted the GM and his guild for his female-friendliness and zero tolerance to harassment first above all other concerns, including raiding. (And for what it's worth, I left my very first WoW guild because I couldn't stand even the smallest playful insults anymore. Starting with "you sure do get around" for getting an achievement for exploring a zone.)
So in an environment like that, I really hope that such a thing is never, ever, ever possible in-game and is something people do waaaaay far out of game on their own accord. Blizzard really scared a lot of people with their initial implementation of RealID and still kinda do despite all the privacy settings, and I would cancel my WoW account the day Blizzard ever considers putting in some kind of interface for geographical guild finding no matter how opt-out it is. I want to choose which basis I use to find friends in this game and I never want Blizzard to help me with that. I especially never ever want some dumbass 15 year old punk that hits on me to find out I live in Los Angeles, let alone what my real name is.
(And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone. Some people just don't learn to manage their in-game time very well and that is the fodder for all those horror stories, not the vast majority of people that do know how to stop playing a game.)
Yeah, but that's partly because when you meet a random person online, odds are that they don't live near you because any two random internet denizens aren't likely to live near each other. The point of geolocation would be that you could feasibly meet if you wanted to.
I don't see what the problem would be with opt-outable geolocation. You could set your location to private, or don't enter it at all, and join a guild/clan/whatever that isn't local to a specific area.
A game or a guild that geolocated should also be harder on creeps, banning people who were creepy and not letting in 15 year olds in the first place if that's not who they wanted. It would be more like a real life social group. If you don't want to hang around with someone in real life, you don't, and if you're not in high school yourself, you probably don't socialize with 15 year old boys who aren't related to you. I understand your concerns but I think there are solutions to them, and there will always be alternatives for those who want to keep it strictly anonymous and online.
>And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone.
But there are still some things you're missing without face to face. And having a social life centered around electronic communication with people you don't know in real life is almost as stigmatized as WoW addiction anyway.
However, she's made quite a few online friends that translated to real world friendships, and even met her husband in-game.
I guess that counts.
I've played with a fair number of people who are in the same field as me, as well as with my own coworkers and managers, which has allowed me to get to know them pretty well and get pretty good job offers and consulting gigs.
But sure, if I had been spending every free moment on WoW, it likely wouldn't have been a worthwhile endeavor.. And for all I know, I would have done something better with the time put into it had I taken up a different hobby.
Me personally? I actually got a free holiday in the Netherlands, since someone I know from the game invited me. And of course don't underestimate the fun that can be had in the game. Oh and nearly forgot: I learned English. It's still far from perfect, but before I could barely read English...
Its a hobby. I think some people get sucked in and take it too far, but I also think the vast majority don't. I'm just offering a perspective from the "don't" category.
My point is, you can take any hobby too far, it doesn't matter what it is. The interesting thing is, no one blames soccer or alcohol (most of the time it is some deeper issue thats the problem, not alcohol), but everyone is blaming WoW. The problem isn't WoW, the problem is the person who can't treat it as a hobby.
I didn't want to quit altogether because there was so much more game content to check out (I enjoy the sights & sounds of WoW very much), and so many other classes to try. Up until then I played exclusively Holy Priest.
Blizzard must have somehow realized that players weren't able to get any further without hardcoring. The last years they have created more and more features for the casual player: the Dungeon Finder system, player-vs-player battlegrounds, cross-realm instances, other reward systems; all these have lessened the dependence on a guild.
I now sometimes fire up WoW, not everyday, and play a few hours. I still like it, after all these years (and 3 expansion packs).
I had an alt that wasn't in a guild or cared to raid that just recently joined the <reddit> guild because I really wanted those perks while being in a guild that didn't demand anything of me. I only raid a very strict max 3 hours 3 weekdays a week on my main toon in another guild and I refuse to tie myself down with raiding on a second one, and <reddit> is perfect for that...people are always online to play with, raids are always going on if I ever want to check them out, but I'm free to stay in the guild with zero commitment towards any time sink and I can solo all the content I want. You might want to check out joining a similarly large and open social guild for yours.
It's awesome - though the biggest change I've made is moving to the USA, where I absolutely cannot raid as the European guild I'm in raids during my workday. (And the latency).
I used to think games were evil and against productivity but no longer. I work a lot. I just want to chill out and relax some times and blow shit up. Maybe do a raid or two, so what?
It's no different then spending 3 hours watching a TV show on Netflix or something similar.
It just depends on how you want to spend your time. If it makes you happy, sure.
I think you need a real job before you can consider gaming a hobby though. Otherwise it can lead to a "full time life gig."
Girlfriend will also help make sure you're not wasting your time.
I'm lucky if I can squeeze out 8 hours a week on games. If that. There's weekends though that I have the whole day to myself and I prefer to play a game for a few hours than go to a club and get drunk.
Yes, if you have the right kind of mind, WoW is a soul-sucking, life-destroying monster. Don't let it into your life.
"So, when World of Warcraft came out, I knew that it was very important that I avoid playing it, because it clearly was a game that I would get instantly addicted to."
I was also into MUDs big time while I was in school. That addiction was not all bad since I eventually got into the hacking-the-codebase side of it, which was in line with what I was studying. But as soon as I heard of it, I knew that WoW was bad news for me. It would become my MUD addiction on steroids.
Thankfully I've managed to stay away from it so far. But I'm not really that strong. Most of the credit goes to my aversion to having to pay a subscription fee to play it.
To contrast. In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills. Or StarCraft for that matter again skills based.
The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at. you can't just get powerleveled up the latter.
The skills stays with you, the same is not true in WoW.
Having seen a couple of friends dropping out of university for a year because of games like EverQuest and WoW my advice is:
Don't play games where it's the avatar that gains power. Only play games that makes you a better player.
In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills.
If you spend years playing Quake/Starcraft, you will be good at it.
The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at
I don't see how that combats addiction. I played competitive Counter-Strike Source for some time, and the main thing that kept me going was just that feeling of competition, and wanting to become better.
WoW's addiction factor is different. It's more like "if I don't do X on day Y, I get behind other people" where in games like Quake/Starcraft, that just doesn't exist.
I played Quake 3 competitively for 7 years and I have seen a lot of players in the scene having success in different fields outside of computer games.
Games based on competitiveness and skills give you a good deal of insight on how to achieve things in real life.
As for most addicted WoW players, these people are just looking for instant gratification for just a little bit more than minimal effort. They want to achieve something and feel good about themselves and WoW pretty much offers the perfect combination of grind/reward, random surprise (items that drop) and a feeling of belonging.
I doubt that any of these people could stick to long term goals as soon as they stop playing WoW. They would just look for their next fix of quick gratification
Fattening foods? Alcohol abuse? Sex Addiction? oh, WoW.
This is written with the assumption that the reader cannot think for themselves and is quite insulting to anyone that reads past half of these subjective assertions.
"at the same time there was something disquieting about the fact that all these people were still around"
Sorry your friends didn't die, change all of their habits entirely, or live up to your random expectations of what constitutes too much and too little involvement in a computer game.
Seriously though, its been out how many years, and using plenty of comics and quotations to express this point, its taken you 18 months to regurgitate this same tired public service announcement? This is just trolling literate people that have thought about playing games in the last decade!
I lost a potential programming buddy/co-founder. we used to collaborate on projects, but eventually WoW took up all his spare time. We both graduated with CS degrees, but he is now unemployable. He played WoW instead of working (he worked from home), and has never spent any time outside of work maintaining his skills. I say worked because he no longer works. Hasn't for the past 3 years. Right now he's into starcraft. It's frustrating to me that he and others I built relationships with in college have chosen this path.
I play quite a lot of videogames, and I play wow, but I'm a grown-up, I have a job, I have a home, I buy my own food, I pay my mortgage, and if I fail at my job, I'll starve and lose my home and my ability to play videogames. Why hasn't your friend come to the same realization?
Perhaps his friend choses food and roof far cheaper then he could afford in order to have more time to spend freely not on paying for those.
Is this a fair assumption?
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"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other."
Long version:
Compared to other kinds of entertainment (books, TV, sports, friends) -- World of Warcraft makes you think about it even when you don't play it. The longer you play the game, the more addicted you are, the more you think about all the things you're gonna do. That's how the game's designed.
You think about the game when you're not playing it. It's hard to really focus on something else if you're thinking about the game.
Does that sound familiar to you? If you're a hacker, if you are excited about computers, then it must. It's same with hacking and programming. It's the same principle. For example I tried a little Node.js magic the other night and the first thing I did in the morning was getting live comments to work. Then I found out there could be another cool feature, and so on. Excitement. That's what drives hackers. Call it addiction, whatever. Unlike, WoW, you're doing work, you're making money.
So please, don't be ever excited about WoW. You don't wanna waste your precious excitement thanks to which you make wonders with programming on WoW.
You can do both, but you can't be addicted to both. Which one will you choose?
From what I know, Patrick used to spend a lot of time playing WoW. It will be interesting to know what he actually got out of the game and what made him stop playing the game (assuming he has indeed stopped playing the game)
There was an event in my family: the details are private, but it caused me to reassess What I Wanted From Life. Better purple pixels figured rather low on the totem pole. I quit. A few days later I picked up a new hobby: see, there was this teacher who wanted to play bingo...
For example, a deal with 24 Hour Fitness where you need to attend for 30 days in a row to unlock some kind of sword. The biometric system at 24 Hour is now sophisticated enough to permit this kind of tracking [with your permission of course].
I'm completely serious. This is an inversion of the Zynga model in which real life money is exchanged for worthless virtual goods. It's more like worthless virtual goods are dangled as an incentive for real life improvement.
There's a lot further you can go with this concept (hooking it up to location based apps, for example), but if we're talking about a "game layer on the world", start with converting an unhealthy dependency into a healthy one.
Hmm... I think it could also work well as a Facebook app.
I'm going to mull this over and see what I can come up with. This could really drive society to improve itself in all kinds of ways.
People have been trying to game-ify real life for years and its never gained much traction. I think this is because people have to sign up for something additional, and at that point (unless the program gains a lot of steam with a lot of people) there's not much tying individuals in.
That said, you could be the middleman and not ask permission from anyone. Just build a 24 Hour Fitness/WoW mashup. The 24 Hour Fitness end would be easy if you have a membership (basically just set up a screen scraper for your biometric login history).
For WoW, you might start off by buying a bunch of top swords and stuff from other players to seed it. I vaguely know that Blizzard doesn't like that sort of thing, so maybe you could instead seed it with donations of equipment from people who are going to delete their accounts because of lack of exercise.
At the beginning it'd be semi-manual, with difficult-to-obtain gear traded in person in the game. But I think that would get a lot of buzz on Twitter (and even the NYT) if promoted properly, and would get you a meeting with the Blizzard guys to make it a reality.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in doing something with this, I actually have a whole spec written up (one of 50 startup ideas that I can't actually attend to, what with the primary and all). Drop me a line at sramanujan1729 at gmail dot com if you want to chat.
This idea is kind of like having a math game: the majority of the population will not bother with it. The reason WOW is so popular is because it allows you to get away from your real life.
http://fora.tv/2010/07/27/Jesse_Schell_Visions_of_the_Gamepo...
http://xkcd.com/189/
I'm working on a startup that is taking this concept and applying it to social gaming. We're calling ourselves "Zynga for Heath." We're normalizing activity data from public API's from exercise devices like Fitbit, Nike+, Map My Fitness, biometric devices, etc and assigning it an activity score. Basically, rewarding players for working out, parking farther away from the store, and even just walking around the shopping center. A huge goal for us is partnerships with companies like 24 hour fitness to reward their members in-game.
This score is then used in our game that will be running on Facebook/iOS to reward the player with points that they use to continue building up their fitness/sports world. Our normalization platform will give us the ability to create multiple types of games to appeal to more than just the existing social games that are out on Facebook.
We're very early into our development process, but would love to keep the Hacker News community posted, if interested.
Our info site is http://www.neufit.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_t...
There was another Ted TV talk that it reminded me of too, but I couldn't remember what it was.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
1. You got on my good side when I saw young Arnie. That's awesome. I hope if you need permission you get it, because it would be a shame to lose him. I got an instant flashback to "Pumping Iron" and how charismatic and inspiring he is in that movie (despite being a dick.)
2. I got briefly annoyed at the initial screenshot. It's obviously a screenshot, but it contains instructions to close the locker door, and I just could not stop myself from spending thirty seconds trying to close the locker door even though I knew it wouldn't work. It's hard to explain, but I just had to try to close the locker door before I could move on. I bet some people will be legitimately confused, too. Screenshots are okay as long as they don't contain instructions telling you to interact with them!
3. Clicking through, looks cool, looks cool, being sold, and then BAM I'm completely sold on the screenshot that shows I can earn stuff for my friends and vice-versa. For many people it's a lot harder to let other people down than it is to let themselves down. I immediately thought of a certain friend who's a rather extreme case, but it applies to me, too. My first breakthrough in fitness, when I went from a wannabe exerciser to a guy who actually does work out a few times a week, was when I had a roommate who recruited me as her running partner. Social pressure, not wanting to send my friend out running alone when she was asking for my support, pulled me through a lot of tough times when I really, really didn't want to work out, and then when I moved out a year later I found I was, for the first time in my life, capable of pushing through those tough times by myself. I bet your product will accomplish the same thing for a lot of people -- you MUST do this!
I started playing Everquest (EQ) soon after launch in 1999 and leveled pretty quickly hitting the max level cap at the time (50) not long before the first expansion came out. At the time played wi an American guild (I'm Australian) and the time difference stopped me doing things with them most of them time since I had a 9-5 job. My server split and I went with them. The new server was fairly desolate and I ended up getting booted from lack of participation. That, combined with how my class had been screwed by the expansion, caused me to quit.
But I ended up selling my stuff on eBay for ~$3500 so it wasn't all bad. But the story doesn't end there.
Atually anoeth factor was that I was moving to the UK for work. That first year the was one of the most productive of my life. I had no Internet access at home (2001), no TV and a fairly active social life. Due to living in a cheap area of London, renting a flat and subletting the rooms and the low rate of effective taxation of contractors I SAVED in excess of $100,000 that year.
After some drama with flatmates (subletting was financially beneficial but a hassle) I moved closer to work. Suddenlyinsread of an our commute each way I had a 5 minute walk. I got cable Internet and bought a PC and a TV.
I started playing EQ again. New server, new class, starting from scratch. I leveled quickly and went through a series of guilds. Raiding can be a huge timesink. This period was the most fun I had in an MMORPG ever.
Later that year I got laid off as in the aftermath of the telco bubble bursting the previous year (it was 2002 by now).
I'd always wanted to learn a foreign language soi moved to Germany and enrolled in intensive learning classes.
But I still kept up with EQ. I transferred servers to a high end guild. The guild was American so I ended up sleeping from 7pm to 1am, playing EQ from 1am to 8am, going to classes til 1pm and then playing til 6pm. I never really adjusted to sleeping at these times.
But I did go to classes. After they ended I stayed and was playing up to 16 hours a day. In the end I got kicked from the guild for doing something I shouldn't have, which was probably the best thing that could've happened.
Still I view that time now as a wasted opportunity. I did learn the language but not as well as I could have and I certainly take full advantage socially or even to see and do things there.
But not before I'd gone back to my old company (they were hiring again) and my weird schedule had brought me into conflict with a toxic project manager, ending that job only a month after it had started.
2002-03 was a pretty terrible time in the UK contractor market (39% unemployment amongst those who hadn't left the industry). It took months to find a new job. I'd also lost that "social" outlet of EQ so was pretty cut off. It was actually a fairly dark period for me.
I have played MMOGs since then but never to the same intensity and, frankly, I think the magic was gone. I'd seen it all before. Even now I think all these games are fairly formulaic with the same basic mechanics and psychological devices (compulsion loops, etc).
What I learnt about myself is that I'm fairly singleminded. This can be used advantageously as I'll dwel on a problem at work until I solve it. But if I have an unresolved issue personally it can, in a way, consume me--or at least consume my attention.
I do think I'd be better off without a TV or even without a home Internet connection. But I guess balance is my personal cross to bear.
Are these games dangerous? Possibly but I tend to thinkpretty much everything is dangerous to some people. Alcohol. Gambling. Trading. Even working out. It ultimately comes down to personal responsibility.
EDIT: One last thing I'll add: one problem with this kind of game is the longevity (timesink) nature. You see a similar (but much less severe) problem with tabletop RPGs. Because you invest so much time it increases your threshold for putting up with crap, basi...
Basically, MMOGs are all like resort casinos. There's some spectacle and entertainment. The driving mechanic is the addictive variable schedule of reward.
I'd like to make a game where true exploration is the base mechanic. There would be no storyline, just exploration. All content would be either procedurally generated, created by the users, or evolved through genetic algorithms.
These games are formulaic because the formula works. I've thought of numerous things I would like to see done differently, but really the way they are done now are what get people to play them for so long. I've played some really great games, but I've never played any of them for nearly as long as I've played WoW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis
It's a facinating game.
Not all bad news, then. Was she pretty? :p
Ok, now I'm curious. I'm just thinking with 16h/day you're fairly hardcore, guilds must be after ppl like you, no? Why the kick, if you care to elaborate?
At one point an item was left to rot as no one wanted it.i came to the raid late and passed the corpse. I looked on it and saw the item. Now it was nothing I'd spend points on but I did want to experiment with it so I took it. Someone saw me and an officer who I didn't get along with kicked me from the guild. The guild leader was basically inscribe by that point so wouldn't overrule the officer and that was that.
So I was technically in the wrong but, like many things like this (in game and out), it wouldn't have mattered if I was in the in crowd but I wasn't so it was a valid excuse to get rid of me.
As for playing 16 hours, in the fueled I was in that was normal.
As for being in demand, it's a bit more complicated. Some classes are more desirable than others. I was primarily a rogue, which at this point in the game was largely useless in raids except for scouting and CR. The class balance shifted from expansion to expansion. The next expansion made rogues desirable again.
Plus I HATED the current expansion and had had my fill of raiding pretty much so I didn't pursue other guilds but it would've been toughg to find one with room for a rogue.
Bear in mind that raid sizes were limited. At that time it was 72 people for one expansion and 54 for the next so there was pressure to reduce guild size anyway.
Most guilds operated as close to 100% capacity without going (much) over as possible. To go lower was to be under strength. To go over was to force people to sit on the sidelines, which is no fun.
Too far from NYC to join you, but I recommend trying meetup.com:
http://board-games.meetup.com/cities/us/ny/new_york/
http://ifat-glassman.blogspot.com/2009/11/work-games-and-sel...
Personally I'm finding my interest in games is waining. A whole bunch of very impressive AAA games came out this year - in the past I would have played all of them, this year I only played Bad Company 2 and Halo Reach. I think I no longer have the time/energy to make that initial investment in a game, where you jump through a bunch of frustrating hoops until the fun starts and/or you feel immersed in the game world. However, I still enjoy the competition online - outsmarting other humans in a game of skill and strategy. So I play Bad Company 2 on Live frequently, but I don't pursue the social component of it (friendlists, clans etc). I'm not sure if I'll ever get bored of that.
And for that reason I avoid WoW like the plague: endless human competition, massive social aspect. Bound to be addictive (mind you, i'm not sure what you actually do in WoW gameplay. the adverts are all cutscenes)