Feb 28
An internet computer game has been condemned as being as addictive as cocaine after a teenager who played it 24 hours non-stop had convulsions.
World of Warcraft has been hugely successful in capturing the imagination of players by drawing them into a virtual universe of battles and quests.
See if this article sounds as stupid to you as it does to me.
It’s the mail. Enough said.
Or, to expand on that: We in the UK all know that there’s never been a time when the daily mail hasn’t been outraged about something. Since the mail lives off of ignorance of it’s readers.
Just a crappy paper, read by the stupid.
(as you can see I have no love for the thing)
if some one is so stupid as to play a game to the exclusion of eating or drinking. well frankly there is some natural selection about to happen.
“Psychiatrist Dr Richard Graham of London’s Tavistock Centre said: ‘Some of my clients will discuss playing games for 14, 16 hours a day at times, without breaks and without attending to their physical needs.”
seriously.. these types of people do not need to be in the gene pool
So… if I crush up my World of Warcraft Collector’s Edition DVD’s.. Game soundtrack CDs… all the physical material that comes with owning all the expansions… that the powder will be more addictive than crack cocaine? Sounds like someone’s been drinking the crazy juice.
Makes total sense to me. Ever hear of “World of Warcrack”?
Note: I didn’t read the linked article.
Ah yes, The Daily Mail.
Like Dol said, they’ve always got something stuck up their arses about something.
Let’s just be thankful they didn’t find an ‘illegal’ asylum seeker with his Undead Warlock.
Article has many valid points, WoW can be very addicting just like a gambling addiction. Ofcourse just like with gambling there´s some people who can play and quit whenever they want, but there will always be some people who get addicted and won´t be able to quit on their own.
Saying WoW is more addictive than crack/cocaine though I´m guessing it´s not cause then there´d be way more then 11 million subscribers (1 month worth of cocaine for 15 bucks? Sign me up!)
What really makes me wonder though is why the parents of these young people let their kids sit in their rooms without eating or going out for 24 hours? The real problem there is just bad parenting if you ask me.
Oh and to Griff, people don´t become addicts on purpose, even if you do play or drink or use drugs of on your own will, trust me, nobody does it with the intention to become an addict. And about them not being necessary to have in the gene pool you won´t have to worry, people playing WoW excessively probably don´t get out much to reproduce :p
And Scott, the article doesn´t sound as stupid to me as it does to you :p
Someone who is able to play wow to the extent of getting convulsions is clearly not allright. lifeless people are able to find plenty of ways to screw themselves up. if its not by playing, itll be by doing something else.
oh and healthy people dont get convulsions just because
No offense, but I think WoW is dumb. Actually, I don’t like any MMO, probably because I have no friends.
Anyone remember the kid that played Starcraft for 50 straight hours and died? This kid just had convulsions.
Starcraft: 1
WoW: 0
Stupid? Why yes, it does sound stupid to me. SO stupid, in fact, that while trying to read it I forgot how to read entirely. My literacy seemed only to return once I closed the tab.
Before my parents took away my 360 for an entire year, I couldn’t stop playing it. I thought of nothing but playing it, loved playing it, and wanted to do nothing else but play it. When I wasn’t playing it I was thinking of how long it was going to take until I could play it again, and when I was playing it I was in heaven. After going without it for just under 14 months or so, it no longer has such a pull on me.
I was NOT addicted. I was OBSESSED. There is a difference…one means you’re boring, the other means you should seek medical help.
Daily Mail… makes the National Inquirer seem plausible and factual.
I love the foil helmet shot. That cat is PISSED!
That screams for a caption contest, Scott!
First @Wappes, way more people than that have died playing WoW I can think of 3 times off the top of my head.
Second, my mom fought with addiction her whole adult life, she eventually died because of it. I find it VERY offensive that someone would equate playing a video game with the hell that my mother put our family through. It is obvious that Sven Rollenhagen, the person that they quote in the article, has never dealt with someone with a chemical addiction.
It seems that many parents are quick to blame anything or anyone other than themselves, when it is obvious that they are raising children that have no self control at all.
I shutter to think what the world will be like when these morally bankrupt out of control kids do when they are running the world.
addiction, natural selection, you name it…
that pic is win
wasn’t there some study recently that said video game addiction is a load of horse crap? There was something about how, although people being treated for video game addiction show symptoms of actual addicts, scans of their brains didn’t show any sign of addiction. Most of their symptoms were attributed to a natural tenancy to be anti-social.
i meant the video game addiction
Ok, if the kid played for 24 hours straight, (does anyone else find that number a little convenient and cliched?) where were the parents? Seems to me this was a parenting failure more than a WoW problem.
Hell, I have insomnia. I once stayed up for three days strait and started hallucinating. Is there going to be a story about lack of sleep being addictive.
The headline says ‘more addictive than crack cocaine’, but I couldn’t see that line in the actual article anywhere. Or did I just not read it properly?
The headline was inexcusable for a professional writer, but the article is actually very valid. Games can be addictive, just like a lot of things. WoW is one of the more addictive to those susceptible to those tendencies. Increasing awareness is not a bad thing. Note that this doesn’t mean we should ban addictive games like Brazil did.
…
Yes, the cocaine comparison is hyperbole, but the message is sincere and otherwise accurate. They’re obviously talking about mental addiction, not physical addiction. It might make more sense to people familiar with drug addiction to instead call it “obsession” with games. The message is still the same but without the weighted word.
Just because games are our favorite hobby doesn’t mean we should reject every negative comment about them. There’s a lot of misinformed and biased negative attention towards gaming, but that doesn’t mean we should respond in equal stupidity. We should instead respond with thoughtfulness and intelligent discourse. In time, like all media before it, people will come to understand games for what they are.
But… I haven’t played WoW in…. I think 3 weeks??? Not sure. Does that mean I’m immune to the addictive qualities of crack? Woohoo! Trippy dreams and stranger things, here I come!
/
\
Can you get obsessed with a game? of course you can, you can get obsessed or addicted to anything…this is just like blaming the beer brewers if you get in a drunk driving accident – nobody put a gun to your head to make you do it…
And on another note, that pictures of the tin foil headed cat is utterly awesome. I can almost read the cat’s mind – “Yes, I will be killing him in his sleep tonight….”
I had convulsions when working in a loud environment. It must have been the noise and not the fact I was tired from getting very little sleep for several days, starving from not having enough time to eat, having to change medicines, looking at a brightly colored desktop on a CRT and having had seizure warning signs all of my life without an actual seizure. So logically, loud noise is more addictive than crack cocaine. Makes sense. No?
That’s what I thought: No.
Did you hear that? Sounded almost like the first battle cries of the coming battle. Could it be we have witnessed the first of the attacks against Wow to utilize “science” and “concern for our children” as their primary weapons? If so, I think history has shown that when those two items are used to rally the masses it only bodes to of a larger crusade on the horizon. As an avid gamer I know from experience the impact that fairly clueless “news” “reports” can have on my hobby when they push into the fears of parents. I hope that I am wrong but I fear that Wow is set to become the next Mortal Kombat, Pokemon, or Mass Effect; demonized for ratings. This is not to say that i believe Wow might be going away because that would be ludicris to believe. No, i’m simply stating my belief that we, as gamers, are in for another wave of general media plublisity, nonsense, and annoyance, prepare yourselves accordingly.
Whenever I see any of these stories I recall the time my wife demanded I stop playing SWG… i was addicted to that damn game. Now normally when you are addicted to something you CRAVE it MORE when you attempt to quit… I left SWG the day she asked me to and felt GREAT afterwards.
My first, and really only thought was, “Parents?”
It only took an American 24 hours? We’re wusses. The Koreans can go for days!
@Darrell: i had exactly the same thought! go figure
I’m a writer for http://www.gameobserver.com, and when I saw this…article, I wrote a slightly more detailed counter argument. Go to the site and check it out.
A word of warning Scott, that’s the Daily Mail. It’s the UK’s premiere bastion of yellow journalism and hyperbole. It’s almost guaranteed to contain 99% half-truths and bald-faced lies in every article (the 1% of truth in this particular one being that they got the name “World of Warcraft” right.
If anyone had read the comments i think there were at least like 1 or 2 comments that made logical sense but i stopped thinkingthem reliable after i saw someone writing “I am a 68 goblin”
Now if my wife was “a 69 goblin”, then I’d be a happy man.
erm, I can say that here can’t I?
heh
Sounds like some kids parents were away and he decided to see how long he could play wow for and the uk ‘newspapers’ have run out of celebs to slag off.
Oh well life goes on!
I’m surprised that the guy can afford a computer, internet connection and WoW subscription, not to mention a house to put it in and electricity to power it all, given that he appears to refuse to work even the modest amount of hours legally available to someone his age. Unless, y’know, he has parents or something, but I’d've thought that they’d step in before the whole “collapsing in a fit” thing, so perhaps not.
What I find particularly ironic is that when he spends a day straight playing WoW, it’s an addiction, but when I spend a day straight using CAD, it’s an education. Go figure.
Good thing I dropped WOW for something safer like Heroin and Whores.
“WoW can be very addicting just like a gambling addiction. Ofcourse just like with gambling there´s some people who can play and quit whenever they want, but there will always be some people who get addicted and won´t be able to quit on their own.
Saying WoW is more addictive than crack/cocaine though I´m guessing it´s not cause then there´d be way more then 11 million subscribers (1 month worth of cocaine for 15 bucks? Sign me up!)
What really makes me wonder though is why the parents of these young people let their kids sit in their rooms without eating or going out for 24 hours? The real problem there is just bad parenting if you ask me. ”
I agree with you completely… Wow is more like gambling than crack/cocaine. Some people can start and stop when they wont, but some people cant. But I don’t think World of Warcraft is an addiction. It’s more of an obsession. The people are obsessed don’t HAVE to play WoW, but they think about it all the time and really WANT to play it. If they don’t they won’t go through withdrawal, they just will have to wait until they can play it again…
For this specific case, I agree also with the parenting comment. DUDE! WHERE THE HELL WERE YOUR PARENTS? This is totally bad parenting, and its because of his parents he had the convulsion (in my opinion), because they LET him play for this long non-stop… And if they weren’t home or something, with a kid like that they should have gotten a baby sitter or something to make sure he didn’t do something like that….
Side Note: How the hell can you become that obsessed? I’m 13, and play WoW, but I have never gotten very obsessed with it… I don’t think I have ever played more than 3 hours straight…
the cat is lookin really happy
The thing that pisses me off is when something addictive is “bad.” If I were to read for 24 hours straight without eating they would say “oh, he just likes to read a lot,” not “oh mah gawd, he’s addicted to readin’!”
Also, it is the players’ faults they get sick or whatever. I mean, it’s not really that hard to stop playing, and it’s even easier to stop and get a bite to eat or go to the bathroom. I mean, come on, really?
And I see no physical need for WoW, maybe there’s some psychological stuff there, but I don’t see any PHYSICAL need for it, thus can it be a true addiction?
And the cat is thinking “Tonight he will die in his sleep…oh yes”
To Bart7374:
Was your comment directed towards me and my article? If so, thanks for reading it and the feedback. You make good points, definitly with the “Not an addiction, more like an obsession.”
It was called Evercrack long before World of warcrack.
We talked about this on my podcast just last week. It’s ridiculous to say that WoW is more addictive than any drug, not only because it’s false but also because it, in a way, makes WoW as bad or worse than these drugs. Society has always needed a scapegoat for its problems, think about it. Rock and roll, violence in movies, sex, drugs and violence on TV, then video games, now WoW is the new scapegoat. Bleh
Wuss.
My max was 32 hours before collapsing, this was also when i was younger and healtier, but man, was that some crap week that followed.
And yeah it’s not an addiction, it’s an obsession; I understand that throwing those morons at the Daily Mail would only result in failure but can someone throw ‘em a frikkin thesaurus?
Its the writer of the article’s job to attract attention, without ratings he is out of a job. So yeah he is going to spice it up a bit. Also he has to pick a side and show all the reasons that WoW and video games are addictive that way when people read it they will tell other people what a load of crap they thought it was or how bad video games are becoming and then those people will read it too. Thus he has high ratings and he keeps his job.
The addictiveness of Cocaine is highly overrated…