Wives Who Hate WoW

I was reading the following on a WoW blog. It is kind of funny all the parallels I see in WoW blogs and poker blogs. There are communities. There exist A-Listers and Z-Listers like myself. In fact they even have blog wars where bloggers storm off and delete their blogger accounts.

The last one was pretty interesting. A group of people (who I do not judge but I am not as into it as they are) do something called Role Playing on the servers. These people from what I can tell make up stories about their in game characters and then play them out in the game. I guess they sit around at the bar in WoW and drink and chat and um pretend they are in a real bar? Do not even ask what Cybering is.

Anyway one of the newer bloggers wrote something about causing problems with role players for fun. I guess they have a long history of being made fun of. Imagine that. So the A-Lister writes a rebuttle and her troll minions all swarm this bloggers site and write nasty things to her. We have seen this behavior before have we not? I found it amusing.

The original point of this post was to point out the paragraph in the article above where the author says "Hey my Addiction to WoW is not like evil gambling". Obviously I took a little offense to this. I do agree that gambling has a darker side. However I think the author does not realize that ALL ADDICTIONS can lead to destructive behavior INCLUDING game addictions. If you do not believe that then check out this link. It is an extreme example but not the only one.

Anything can be a very unhealthy addiction. Whenever you find yourself doing one thing to the exclusion of others your life becomes unbalanced and you end up hurting yourself and others. It could be something supposedly healthy like jogging or weight training... or something more associated with these types of behaviors like gambling or playing video games.

Singling out poker or other forms of recreational gaming is wrong and in the context of the article hypocritical. He bemoans his wife calling his video game an addiction then does the exact same thing to other peoples hobbies. A lot of very successful and well balanced people enjoy gambling and it never become a problem. A percentage of people with pre-existing addictive tendencies get destroyed. If it was not gambling though it would be something else and the effects would be just as damaging if possibly harder to see from the outside.

Anyway I thought it was interesting how people label the things they do not like and make exceptions for the things that they want to do. As the old saying goes "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?".