Addiction to the other world

Here’s a fascinating story about a World of Warcraft junkie who decided to take back control of his life and quit this game that truly does wreck lives.

I’m ashamed to say that what the post describes was more or less a faithful description of my life for a year before I too decided to take back control and quit playing WoW.

I played the game for 14 months and spent 65 days "/played" time (This means I was actively logged in for 65x24 (1,560) hours in total). I was an active member of one of the largest guilds on my server and in all honesty I had not done anything useful during this year. In fact, looking back at it, I feel that I completely lost an entire year of my life ! Suffice to say that, professionally, I’m still catching up since during this year I literally had not learned anything new in my field of work (software development.) Sad, but true.

I took a decision to quit playing right before I started The Thinking Blog (this blog was, and still is, my effort to bring meaning into my life after realizing how insignificant my life was during this year). I haven’t touched the game since and have every intention not to do so in the future.

This is really a devastating social phenomenon beyond anything we experienced before when you consider that it affects an estimated 7 million people (the number of active subscribers to WoW). Add to those the millions who play Everquest, Final Fantasy, and Guild Wars and the numbers will run into the 20 if not 30 million (I’m interested in real numbers, so if you have any insights please drop me a line).

WoW and the likes are the Crack Cocaine of our generation and the next.