A Blog for World of Warcraft Survivors

"This legendary mount cost me 200 hours and a marriage."

As  much as I dedicate this blog to refuting vicious rumors about video games, linking them to childhood corruption, mass killing and every other evil under the sun, even I recognize that there is such a thing as video game addiction, and it’s not a laughing matter.

I suppose you can become addicted to any game if you become obsessed with it enough, but one genre has been known to eat more lives than any other, the MMORPG. And there’s one such game in that genre that towers above all the rest in terms of addictness, World of Warcraft.

I’ve long read about lives ruined by the game, whether it be complete social isolation or the destruction of marriage or the neglect of children. If not kept in check, the never-ending game can prove exceptionally dangerous to one’s physical, mental and emotional health.

But now one former WoW has cataloged his own tale of addiction and recovery, and invites you to do the same. He started a blog called WoW Survivor and it’s for “Those who have abandoned virtual world’s for the real one.” He gives his own testimony of the toll the game took on his life:

“Where it went wrong: Unlike console games, which can have the same effect if you play them too much, there is no end for MMOs. I started a character that I thought would allow me to never play with anyone. But as many have experienced, I found myself joining guilds to experience all the content in the game. Soon, I was putting virtual ‘friends’ above my wife and other friends.

When it hit the fan: I had ‘quit’ WoW once, after a year or more of playing and life was, believe it or not, good during that vacation from Azeroth. I was going to school full time in NYC and working. Because of an issue with my family, I became depressed. I stopped going to class, quit a good job for a lamer one nearer to my apartment and reinstalled WoW. Instead of dealing with my issues, I ignored them by grinding reputation for a mount while my wife was at work. Yes, I’m a bastard, and yes, she found out.

How I quit and how I cope: It was clear to me that I was on the verge of losing the person I cared about most over something that really didn’t matter to me and had ZERO real life benefits. I agreed to and went to a counseler to provide guidance on how to actively deal with the issues in my life and that helped eliminate my depression because I was no longer a passive variable in a world I didn’t pay attention to.”

His latest post invites other readers to share their own stories, and though the blog is new, I predict it will definitely find an audience.

This is a pretty personal issue for me, as I, myself have flirted with full on video game addiction. I can pinpoint entire months of my life that were essentially blacked out by another Blizzard franchise, Diablo II, in pursuit of weapons and armor that didn’t exist. Because of that experience I’ve purposefully stayed away from World of Warcraft all these years to avoid getting sucked in to the black hole of grinding for imaginary prizes yet again.

I suggest sharing your own story either here or on his blog if you’ve got one. As much as I like gaming, it must be said that too much of anything is a bad thing, and sometime you have to know when to just walk away.

[found via GamePolitics]