Action News Game Addiction Piece
Comments (0) Action News does a piece about game addiction quoting World of Warcraft and Everquest representing MMORPGs as “new sources of addiction”:
I guess the whole thing is close to fair, if compared with most of the mainstream news bashing of online games.
BUT, the comparison with drugs, AGAIN, is as unfortunate as ever.
As you see, they completely ignore that both WoW and Everquest have, has had, and will probably have hundreds of thousands of players who never had problems like the ones described.
It’s as close to gambling, drugs and other addiction as Monopoly and that Uno card game is.
With an userbase like the ones the games have, shure, it’s innevitable that some kids and adults who already have problems will end up having sad tales to tell. We had something very similar to that with the Dungeons and Dragons RPG decades ago.
But as I see, it could be just about any other thing. A book, a movie, TV series, a music band or whatever.
What parents, friends and other people have to understand is that, for people who already have problems (ADD, depression, etc) anything can be used as a tool to potentialize it… so there must be constant monitoring of habits to prevent those problems from getting worse.
Blaming a game for being the cause of suicide for a guy who stopped taking medication after who knows how much time he spent isolated playing one game is just bullshit.
He used the game to escape reality. So seems more likely that what killed him was the reality he was into.
If something, it’s more believable that Everquest delayed his suicide with rather than the opposite. Unfortunately, he found no one who would make his reality better than what Everquest had to offer, it seems.
Think about that.
News source: TechEBlog
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