World of Warcraft Addiction?

When I wrote a devotional last week mentioning my addictive tendencies with video games, I didn’t realize that World of Warcraft addiction is thisclose to becoming a real-world psychological diagnosis. To be fair, they’re calling it MMO (massively multiplayer online) addiction, but WOW is the biggest MMO world out there.

From a current Yahoo article on the phenom:

Dr. Orzack sees similarities between MMO addiction and more traditional behavior disorders such as compulsive gambling. "The same reward center in the brain is tapped -- the dopamine system. Gambling has all the components that go with these games," she explains.

The story profiles a 20-year-old calling himself Splint who spent his teen years owned by WOW. Before he quit, he was spending one hour out of every four playing the game; that’s eight hours a day, every day, for two years. Why did he do it? In addition to the addictive properties of the game,

"It's an escape from reality," he told us. "When you're a retail jockey, you're nobody. When you're Captain 'Purple Items' with the best gear around, you're looked up to. People ask you for advice, encourage you to 'keep up the good work,' or just gush at your equipment in comparison to theirs."

The article does cop to some positive aspects of the MMO lifestyle -- learning teamwork, principles of economics, and even relationship-building. Lots of people play without giving up work, “real” friends, and other activities. For me, the question comes back to “where’s your head at” when you’re not playing the game. If you can’t get it out of you mind, maybe the game (or sport or relationship or television) is playing you. The challenge for Christians is to get our minds stuck in another world completely.