(World of Warcraft). The tale of one guy, a very 'hard-core gamer' giving it up, because of the huge toll it took on his social life. Online games are just like any other addictive agent; if you are playing 10,20,30 hours a week or more, somethings gotta give. Usually its your social life first, sleep second, job third. I ran into this aquantice of mine, she had dropped out of grad school recently, then. She said she and her boyfriend were playing WOW all the time, and never went out. I could tell, her skin was so white she was corpse-like. I don't know if WOW precipitated the dropping out, but if she started when she was in grad school and dropped out, well the drug gets worse you see, not better. And it's hard to quite.

Luckly I never got into online gaming too much; and offline games you beat fairly quickly so there is not much danger of that (and I hardly ever play any more). I tried everquest, but found it extremely disappointing. It was frankly boring, the people were rude, (or those that I could find once I never see again), I would spend hours running around and getting obscure things I wouldn't know what to do with. The final straw was the realization that I completely did not fit into this culture, and I never would (which is fine!). I play Kingdom of Loathing now, it's fun but short (only 30' per day max), and it doesn't promise to be the long term time sink that so many online games are.

What many people have noted on the comments of that post is that it's such a huge waste. You get some pixelated treasure if you 'win' (and there is no real winning in WOW). You get a very brief feeling of accomplishment, then what? It doesn't last. It's merely an escape from life, and when you go back to life, all the problems are still there, but probably more so.