For instance, one of the links Dsh supplied us with concerned a man whose wife left him because he was "addicted to video games," but from the comments made on the thread concerning the "obscene" amount of stuff he had in his house, the speculations that he could not have gotten any use out of most of his collection, and the "high" he perceived to have in videos made after shopping sprees, it sounds like he was struggling with hoarding/obsessive-compulsive issues or bi-polar disorder. The video games sound less like the root of the problem and more like the vehicle that exposed it. In contrast, if he'd been addicted to cocaine, then cocaine would clearly have been the problem.
I am hardly an expert on these matters, however, and will happily defer to the PhDs we have in-house here!
But regardless of semantics, I have a lot of sympathy for the author of the Diablo story and am seriously impressed that he was able to recognize, confront, and triumph over his problem. Just recognizing a destructive behavior in yourself is worthy of respect. A lot of people don't even get that far.
I agree. The only time in my history of video games that negatively impacted my social life/mental well-being was when I discovered a MUD called "Legends of Cosrin" when I was in middle school. I'd always been a huge fan of text adventures, so this game was an unbelievably good time -- but it was also the first game I played that kept existing and progressing after I was logged out. With the ever-present awareness that several in-game days were passing while I was in school or eating dinner with my family, I got so stressed out thinking about all that "wasted" time that could have been spent leveling up to keep pace with my friends or taking advantage of time-specific bonuses and events. Then came the afternoon that I invited one of my best friends over to hang out after school just to ask her, "Do you mind if I play Cosrin while you're here?" I played for twenty minutes or so and then felt sick to my stomach for ranking it above my friend in terms of importance. I deleted the program shortly thereafter, and it was like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders. It also helped me recognize how the fun had been sucked out of the activity long before I'd even noticed there was something wrong.Menegrothx wrote:Oh yeah, one thing about WoW (and MMORPGs in general) addiction is that you will start to feel guilty when you are not playing the game. Many times I logged in for hours to do absolutely nothing, because I felt like I needed to be in WoW.
To this day I'm wary of getting involved with time-sensitive activities for this reason -- and that's not just limited to video games. I dropped off of Facebook several years ago when I realized I felt compelled to constantly log in and keep up with minute-by-minute updates, and I never want a smartphone because I'm afraid the siren song of the internet in my pocket will be too difficult to ignore.
