Idiot: World of Warcraft Is the “Crack Cocaine of the Computer Game World”
by John Paczkowski
Posted on February 27, 2009 at 2:28 PM PT
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one to two hours of online gaming per day, so warnings that obsessive gaming might be detrimental to one’s health are not without some merit (it’s sunlight, not display light that’s been shown to increase melatonin and serotonin levels). But the suggestion that World of Warcraft is the cocaine of the gaming world and its players by extension, a legion of slathering crackheads, well, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it?
Not according to Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation, which has just finished a report that pegs WoW as the single most dangerous game on the market and the one with the highest risk of addiction. “There is not a single case of game addiction that we have worked with in which World of Warcraft has not played a part,” hyperbolized the report’s author, Sven Rollenhagen. “It is the crack cocaine of the computer game world. Some will play it till they drop.”
And indeed, some will. Last year, a 15-year-old Swedish boy did just that after a 20-hour marathon. But it seems a bit heavy handed to tar WoW for the incident. It’s not as if the boy suffered a temporary state of full-blown paranoid psychosis or ended up in a red-light district tricking for game time. He passed out. Had his dealersparents stepped in, the incident might never have occurred. WoW does offer a pretty robust set of parental controls.
Comments
Coming soon: http://wackycrackhead.com For the World of Warcraft hero in you!
Posted by Mark Omega at February 27th, 2009 at 4:12 pmWell, I don’t play Wow, but I do Still play Everquest, EQ2, and DND online. The longest online time has been about 42 hours, with no known detrmental health effects. Thats not to say,there haven’t been, but none that I am aware of.
I often spend about 30 hours at a strech in online games.
One thing I note, is that they never mention as to how or why the people have died from online time. So why is this? I would love to know why.
So, how much damage am I doing to myself from these behaviors?
Posted by gary cotugno at February 27th, 2009 at 11:44 pmHave you ever looked at the faces of people playing World of Warcrack, Evercrack, The Matrix OnCrack, etc?
They are as a pallid and empty as those of corpses. They look like they’re having just about as much fun as a prison lifer in solitary.
And yet there they sit as if chained to their chairs. Racking up points. Obsessing over special items. Accumulating just as much mental and physical stress as if they were working a soulless desk job in which they had to work harder and harder to get promoted but their quality of life never improved.
Those games do something ungood to the brain. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want anything to do with it.
–Naomi
ps. I play Fallout 3 and Rock Band 2 quite a bit… I ain’t hating on all games, just the soul-sucking ones.
Posted by Naomi Most at March 2nd, 2009 at 2:29 pm