I can stop any time I want!

Assuming that my Tier 2,000.000 helm drops tonight, then my life will be complete.

Cocaine

"As far as we know, there hasn't been any reported incidents of children doing a line of [Arcane Powder] off a hooker's ass."

I would just like to report that I have, in fact, done just that. And might I say that it was the greatest experience of my life. Now... back to WoW...

breaking addiction

[If only there had been some sort of authority to look over the boy. {who)... raised him for 15 years, brought the computer, and payed (sic) for his WoW account every month].

It's easy to say this if you havn't parented a teem-ager or fought addiction. Addiction subverts the addict's consciousness for the purpose of getting more of their WoW-drug-of-choice. People are pretty crafty when they're really motivated.

You can try to cut off his access at home, but can you quit your job, go without sleep and stand guard 24/7? Can you follow him to friends' houses? Sit with him in school? You have to think about it as if the addiction really was to crack cocaine. Except computers are everywhere and they're not illegal.

My kids have only a mild case, for which I'm grateful.

Dedicated, hard-working, intelligent engineers work long hours and earn big money trying to make the WoW experience as compelling and self-reinforcing as possible. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are setting out to create addiction. They learn and study the techniques of creating addiction, though they call it something else. It's how WoW and all the other online games make money.

You may claim that WoW is only entertainment, like a good book (ok, like a comic book with a weak plot and 1-dimensional characters). And it is. But the medium permits an infinitely long comic book that puts you and your peeps in the action. The only limit to how much you can consume is how long you can stay awake. It breaks the limits imposed by more traditional media that act to prevent overconsumption.

I predict that within 10 years we will regulate this medium to limit consumption for public safety. Sounds Orwellian, I know, but if we keep getting better at making the gaming experience self-reinforcing, we won't have a choice.

Engineers *can* do their job too well.

'rents.

[If only there had been some sort of authority to look over the boy. Perhaps someone with the wisdom of age from who's loins he could have sprung, then raised him for 15 years, brought the computer, and payed for his WoW account every month].

QFT. Fucking lazy parents that don't give enough of a shit about their kids to TALK to them or regulate them. Rules and boundaries are good for people you frelling loonies!

Ahem. I digress.

WoW - Should be WaPoS

Wow should become Wot a Pile of Sh**e, they can has no purpose, requires no immediate skill just the inability to do something with your life and extrememly depe pockets....why people PAY EXTRA a month to play a game is beyond me, granted for pay for an internet connection when playing the likes of coounter-strike, command and conquer etc online but at least you only have to pay 1 time for the game itself whereas WoW (and other MMORPGs) have you pay a subscription...and for what? take 1 look at Blizzards profits and you'll see stupid amounts generated by WoW...some call it good business, i can it ripping off.

Flame Icon? I'm playing Pyro...frying me some Scouts in TF2 thanks to the damn Scout Update

@AC 20:38

ACTUALLY they have parental controls to limit playtime on WOW so if your kids playing too long it immediately boots them off for however long they want so there is no need to regulate their wow intake 24 hours a day because Blizzard does it for them if they bother setting it up.

Now back to equipping my epic robe

half the time

Its the fucking parents who are the addicts in WOW just ask my now ex wife the dirty little wow whore

The Sticky Sweet Honey Trap you'll Deny Hopeless Addiction to.....

.... as you Battle to Save its Systems?

"They learn and study the techniques of creating addiction, though they call it something else. It's how WoW and all the other online games make money." .... By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 27th February 2009 20:38 GMT

And there is the demon which controls all you pussies, hiding in full sight, as bold as an ancient hooker and to which you are hopelessly addicted and therefore easy prey/carrion to its myriad reinforcing vulnerabilites which destroy/self-destruct from deep within aspirant hosts ........ the perverting and subverting love of [excessive] money.

Go on, Deny it for to Prove it true.

PS Don't shoot the Messenger whever the Fault is Lodged and Deeply Embedded in Others in Denial. That just wouldn't be Cricket, old Boy, there's a Good Chap. :-)

Might I suggest dDeep Therapy Sessions and Cyber-Counter-IntelAIgents 42AIdD Controls in Disaster Recovery. :-)

oWoW

That's the proper title. It's kinda like advertising yourself as open for bum rape -- unpleasant and painful for nothing gained.

WoW is addictive...

Call me when that addiction claims as many victims as tobacco and alcool, please...

(Played WoW until six months ago)

You can turn it off

[You can try to cut off his access at home, but can you quit your job, go without sleep and stand guard 24/7? Can you follow him to friends' houses? Sit with him in school? You have to think about it as if the addiction really was to crack cocaine. Except computers are everywhere and they're not illegal. By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 27th February 2009 20:38 GMT]

Uh, since WoW subscription is not free, you CAN actually cut it off by stop paying. If you care enough, you can even install parental control programs on all the computers that specifically blocks WoW, just in case the kid has other ways of keeping his account current. If you totally ban it at home, how much time can the kid spend at his friend's house playing WoW? His friends will get sick of him in no time if all he does there is play WoW on THEIR computer.

I dislike WoW, but I dislike ignorant and irresponsible parents a lot more.

Forgot to mention

I usualy play as Louis in the game and I regularly do lines off Zoeys....I will stop on this one now.

Oh thank god

I know this is totally off topic but I haven't seen a post from AMFM in at least a week. Though he fell off the face of the earth nice to see Ive just been missing them :P

/Back to the regularly scheduled face rape that is my team vs whoever in L4D

@ac

Who wears the pants in your family?

Pull the damned plug... it's not THAT hard... and it's YOUR responsibility, not the game designers'. It's only hard because your kid is used to doing whatever the hell he/she wants and you just caving after 3 hours of negotiating with them, with the vane hope that if you can just tell him the right thing, then he'll magically agree with your wiser position, and change his own behavior. Well, unfortunately, that's not how the mind of a teenager works. When they want something, that's it... they just want it, and it's your job to take it the hell away if it becomes an addiction.

@breaking addiction by AC

"You can try to cut off his access at home, but can you quit your job, go without sleep and stand guard 24/7? Can you follow him to friends' houses? Sit with him in school? You have to think about it as if the addiction really was to crack cocaine. Except computers are everywhere and they're not illegal."

If you think your 15-year old kid is addicted to crack cocaine that is exactly what you are supposed to do if you think that is what it takes. If you have spend fifteen years of your life, a hundred grand or up (depending on your standard of living (and currency)) on the bugger and you learned to love him in addition to the biological love hardwired into you, then yes, you do whatever it takes. In fact you do it regardless if you think it is what it takes or not, you do in just in case it is what it takes.

In addition. It may be that you have to think about as if the addiction was to crack cocaine, even though people that treat addictions in general usually say that it doesn't fit any addiction pattern they know of. It still may be, and as you say computers are everywhere and they're not illegal. So it can be hard to control, except that it would be more like a drug that it takes five hours and up to shoot/snort/smoke/eat/drink/taste/lick.

You say it easy to say if you never have parented teenagers yourself. Yes, you are right, it is easy to say. However, that doesn't make it wrong or impossible to do. I am sorry, but if you can't account for where your kid is and what he is doing for the most part of the day I am deeply worried. If you can't account for where he is for so long that he manage to get sleep deprived and suffer from starvation, then I really do hope you neither have any experience with raising teenagers, and that you just made up that bit where you mention your supposed kids.

@mycho

Oh yes. Angband. Now THAT was a game...

Got those shakes again. Haven't had them for years, man. Decades! You had to go mention it, didn't you?

Breaking the addiction

At some point, I Beta's World of WarCrack. And I'm glad I got out of it before all the -teen-year-olds got on it.

OTOH, I have now sold my soul to LotR Online, which is made in the way World of WarCrack should have been made. Awesome visuals, less-repetitive quests, and no 1337|<1d5 spamming the channels.

Mine's the Ranger robe with the stack of Longbottom Leaf in the pocket.

@ACs - addiction

Right, let me make this very clear; if your kids die of starvation due to excess WoW, then that is a sign that you shouldn't have kids again. EVER. You have failed as a parent.

Simple as.

If you can't control them outside your home, fine. Only so much you can do. But you can remove WoW from the home PC, and if they don't come home, just a call to the police saying you think your son Timmy is at Johnnys house smoking marijuana is all it takes to get them [both] out of there and give them the fright of thier life when they get a night in the holding cells with Big Jock who likes lithe young men.....peer pressure for getting their mates in deep shit too will have far more effect than you shouting at them ever will - if Johnnys parents understand, they won't argue....but according to your logic, it is IMPOSSIBLE to stop a child PLAYING A COMPUTER GAME so maybe they won't...

Seriously, sort your life out, you complete pussy - they are your kids, if you have to give them a psychological kick in the face to sort them out, then do it - my parents did that to me a long time ago [weed and booze - far more dangerous in every respect] and I'm far, far better for it.

You fucking failure.

Steven R

Why do people pay per month?

Because its about the cost of two videos per month and provides a whole lot more entertainment than what Hollywood churns out or what's on TV. When seen as an alternative to TV/video it suddenly becomes both interesting and cheap.

I work in IT so I have several computers around the house, but how about *not* giving your kid a computer (or tv). I've used computers since I was 13, but while I have accumulated a lot of information from computers, they are not about education.

Education should be about learning how to learn, learning how to think and reason and learning how to express yourself clearly and precisely. Computers are pretty useless at all of these tasks. In fact, the ease with which computers allow one can reorganise information and incorporate other people's thoughts with minimal input from yourself, actually works against the goals of education.

If little Johnie is always at his friends' house, parents should find out what he's doing there. If its something you don't want him doing (or you can't find out what he's doing), don't let him go. Is he buying time-cards to play at friends? Well where is he getting the money from?

Saves me money

This game is perfect for me, its a enjoyable as well, i don't spend all my time on it but it does require time to do anything i want so it prolongs the game more and there is always something to do.

I've quit this game several times and always gone back to it.... Why ? because i have 3 consoles and about 30 odd games for each that are all completed... most gathering dust as once single player is done it get dull/boring (unless you have a really nice multiplayer or extras).

I wouldn't call this an addiction to the game, but more and addiction to my cash, i complete games in a week/month, thats 10/50pounds.

I would then want a new game to finish that would be another 10/50pounds. World of warcraft costs around 15 every two months, thats a huge saving for me on other things (like my soon to have Sony P series netbook :D)

This game will always get a thumbs up from me no matter what, oh and yeh the kid should really have some parental features or something if he can't handle an addiction.

"Addiction" a selective term?

When I was a kid I split my time between sports and reading. Both were seen as "good". The majority of the sports I played were team sports, so that was seen as both "character building" and "good social interaction". I would happilly play football all afternoon for hours, then go home and read novels and historical biographies into the small hours of the morning, if I could escape my parents checking I wasn't reading under the covers. I have no doubt it did affect my school work - I was always hankering to get through boring maths lessons to get to phys ed and more sport, and at home I would put off doing homework if I had a good book to hand. Just about all my pocketmoney went on books. In a way, I was addicted to books and sport, but nobody has EVER described that as a bad thing. At worst, my parents would sometimes grumble that I "always had my nose in a book".

Now, how much worse a use of time is it to spend playing an online game than reading novels? Both require inventive production to capture an audience, both require money to pursue, and both could be described as unproductive uses of time. Indeed, reading for enjoyment is just that - can you really claim even "literary classic writers" such as Charles Dickens are in any way relevant to modern life? How will "Oliver Twist" help you deal with that project plan you have to write next week? Didn't think so. And online gaming can lead to more social interaction than sitting alone in a room reading a book. Maybe in twenty years it will all have changed and children will be largely educated in virtual classrooms online (how much more interesting would a history lesson be if you could walk through a virtual Roman battle, or down the streets of ancient Athens?). Maybe then online gaming will be considered with the same benevolence as reading.

After all, there have been periods in history when some thought too much wieght was given to reading anything other than factual volumes. As late as the 19th Century, respected writers such as Arthur Helps talked about such "fanciful reading" as; “Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.”

Addiction?

Now, if only Blizzard had bothered to include parental controls into the game. Maybe set it up so that the parents can specify exactly when they can play (not during school hours, not late at night) and for how long and make it account based so that it doesn't actually matter if you play it on your own computer, on your friends computer or at a cybercafe. Maybe make it password protected with a separate password to the account so that little Jonny can't just go back in and reset it. Oh, actually that's exactly what they did.

This is exactly the same problem with the hysteria over the prying Paedo's in little Susie's 'I love High School Music' chat rooms. If you're concerned, put the computer somewhere communal in the house and not in their own bedrooms.

Insanity, but not from those you'd expect.

Yeah, and computer-illiterate parents are supposed to know how to set up parental controls? Most kids can usually run circles around their parents, since 24/7 surveillance isn't commonplace yet.

It's just like any other addiction: it's a mental health issue. Until this society gets over its phobia about discussing mental health issues rather than criminalising and ostracising those who have it, it'll just get worse. From "War on Drugs" to the growing "War on WoW", it's utterly insane that almost 80 years of complete failure hasn't taught anyone that Prohibition doesn't fucking work.

well...

"[If only there had been some sort of authority to look over the boy. Perhaps someone with the wisdom of age from who's loins he could have sprung, then raised him for 15 years, brought the computer, and paid for his WoW account every month]."

Sarcastic but completely true....Where were the parents then?

Narrow View...

This guy seems to have a very narrow view of game addiction. I have personally been "addicted" to EVE-Online and WoW. People have KILLED in real life over items in other games like Everquest. What is addiction, is it not being able to stop? Maybe I don't want to stop? I bet people who are addicted to crack cocaine *do* want to stop being addicted, that's the difference... I recently asked myself "Do I want a very good degree mark, or do I want to play WoW?" I chose the former, and had no problems putting myself on a 4 month /afk - because that's what I WANTED to do.

Maybe WoW just scoops up all the publicity cause it has 11 million players, and is therefore statistically likely to have the vast majority of people dying from "addiction" to it.

ROFLMAO & LFM

last two paragraphs cracked me up

WoW! It's the crack addicts invasion!

So when are we going to see kids robbing car stereos to sell them and buy their doze of 15$ pre-payed WoW cards?

Fortunately...

...there's a quick, simple way to spot WoW addiction, and to tell immediately if a player is an addict or just some guy who likes the game:

http://tacit.livejournal.com/284131.html

Just wait until they make it illegal....

.. as the government is wont to do with anything that large numbers of people actually enjoy.

We'll end up with Robbie Williams on Parkinson talking about his level 60 Night Elf lady-boy, no doubt closely followed by George Michael discussing the joys of "twinking" a second account and a harrowing serialised in the Daily Mail account of George Best's struggle with his 16 hour raid habit by whoever it is who's milking his corpse for a book this week.

After that it'll only be a matter of time before we get Bill Clinton crawling out of the wood work to tell us he installed WoW once, but never actually logged on.

Step Up

Sad that someone dies but it honestly not the games fault. I just can't believe people can even think it is. The game provides tools to manage this and even then parents should know what their children are up to. This is just a sign of the times with people thinking the world is responsible for their kids. We are NOT so live with it.

And to whoever was that clown about the game controlling people and quit to prove it? Honestly how can you agree against that. I should quit just to show you I can? Get real noob, I don't want to quit and to all you out there that blame the game HTFU. You can have a successful real life and the full epic toon. Just step up and make the effort.

If crack is only that addictive...

Awesome, this means I can take up a crack habit and just stop after a few weeks when I find something better to do :)

*yawn* Moral minority nonsense again...

"My son is obsessed by [insert football team], so we have to ban them, tear down all his posters, refuse to let him go to the games or watch them on TV! Right now!"

"My daughter only listens to music by [insert artist], so we have to ban her from watching them, hearing them and then we have to make sure they can't peddle this filth any longer!"

"My kids watch so much television...."

Do I need to go on? I didn't even have to resort to the Twat-O-Tron to create similar NIMBY Daily Fail reading nonsense.

If you want to address a social issue, lets look at DRINKING or SMOKING or the violence that surrounds us each and every day in the street.

Stop picking on the little things and look at the big issues.