Help for an MMORPG Addict?

A worried comrade asks: "A friend of mine has had what many of us (his peers) are starting to consider a serious problem that we are becoming very worried about. He is addicted to World of Warcraft, and not in the same way the rest of us are. While most of us are able to disconnect from the game to take care of our own affairs, he plays to the exclusion of his friends, his job (he calls in sick a lot, it is starting to get noticed) and his life. How do you help someone who is actively throwing their whole life away to play a game?"

I've been there

[Southpaw018]

I was addicted to a MUD my freshman year of college. My parents were the ones who rescued me. And I do mean rescued. This is a heartbreaking situation. You cannot help those who are not willing to help themselves, and that is the first step: getting your friend to realize he needs to help himself. Next step: getting him to realize you can help him, too.

Think traditional addiction programs - interventions, counseling. Contact a drug addiction counselor or psychologist who specializes in addiction in your area; many of the techniques involved in breaking addiction are universal. Avoid AA-type pseudoreligious programs. They have been proven not to work (no flames, please, go google the study yourself).

Keep in mind that this is not an easy process. It took me two solid years to bring my social life back to where it once was; now, another four years later, I'm "addicted" to wow in that playfully, not clinically, addicted way. But stand by your friend. Understand that your friendship means less to him than the game does. Addiction is powerful, and ugly, and hard to understand and overcome. But he's got guys (girls maybe?) like you to help him. He's better off than many.


Good luck.

Re:Sad...

[rossifer]

A Korean doctor has outlined a health risk pattern that predicts death from online gaming. The most common cause of gaming death in Korea, according to Dr. Song Hyeong-gon, is pulmonary thrombo-embolism, a seizure of the cortex.

Pulmonary thrombosis (aka pulmonary thrombo-embolism) is when you sit still for too long, blood settles in veins in your legs and starts to clot, and then after you get up, one or more of the clots breaks loose and gets stuck in your lungs.

Intensely painful, fairly dangerous, sometimes fatal.

Has nothing to do with the cortex or seizures.

Regards,
Ross

SOE can fix that for you

[Anonymous Coward]

You could petition the developer to radically change the gameplay and combat systems. That'll get even the most addicted to quit.

On-Line Gamers Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't waste my time trolling through hundreds or even thousands of replies, especially dumb ones that seem to prevail, but here is a good link for On-line Gamers Anonymous if no one has posted it yet. I hope it helps!

http://www.olganon.org/ [olganon.org]

Re:I've been there

[soren100]

Now, a lot of people think that heroin is poisonous to your body, or that most heroin users inevitably OD and die. That's not true. Heroin, like morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone(vicodin, percocet, etc.), codeine, etc. are actually rarely ever physically harmful unless combined with alcohol or other respiratory depressants. Even at high doses, they don't really exhibit any toxic effects on your body. They actually lower your heart-rate and blood pressure, and are arguably healthier for you in the physical sense than alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine even. ... I'm unlikely to suffer any physical consequences from my heroin habit other than perhaps I'll age a little slower than other people (a side effect of chronic heroin use).

I can see why you would believe that, but you are missing the fact that your brain and its subcomponents of will, thinking, reward (dopamine,etc), motivation are also physical systems in your body -- they are just neurons linked together in a certain way, functioning in a certain way. The fact that science has not yet begun to really understand how they work does not make them any less real. Damage them, and they will misfunction. Destroy them in any way, and you will end up with all kinds of problems -- (Oliver Sacks ( MD neurologist) has some great books demonstrating the various disabilities that can happen with brain systems that we all take for granted, including very specific language and cognition skills -- one example is "The man who mistook his wife for a hat")

It seems like the two myths of the addict are "I can quit at any time that I want, really I can, I just don't want to" and "I know that I am addicted, but this stuff is not really so bad" ( you even follow this up with "hey, it's kinda good for me -- I'll age slower!")

You end up proving the above paragraph wrong with the following paragraph:

But the reason why this is an addiction, and not just a habit, is because it has consumed my life. It takes up all of my energy (constantly trying to acquire drugs, support my habit, get new needles, avoiding withdrawal), and when I'm not on heroin, I'm thinking about it.

This shows that your brain systems are seriously detiorating from the drug use, whether you are ready to recognize this fact or not. If you can't choose to think about anything else other than heroin if you are not on it, then your thinking system is damaged, end of story. A good analogy might be a car -- a properly functioning car can go north, south, east, west, backwards, forwards, in circles, instantly and upon command. If it does not do those things, it is somehow damaged, like my friend's car that had no reverse. Your thinking system, by only going in one direction "heroin! more heroin!" is much more deranged than a car that has no reverse. It's like a car going downhill without brakes.

If you damage the braking system of a car, you can examine the rest of the systems of the car, and it looks like the car is in perfect shape, as long as you don't look at the braking system. However, if you are going down the hill without being able to stop, you recognize that something is wrong. If you have never had the experience of going over a cliff or crashing at the bottom, then you might even think going quickly down that hill is not really that much of a problem.

This brings us to the next point -- that you if keep going in a certain direction, you will be sure to end there. If you drive every day toward Floriday, New York, California, or Idaho, you will end up in those destinations. It is pure cause and effect. You cannot keep driving toward a destination without endiing up there. You imagine that you will not end up in the typical "junkieville" destination that you see others in, but your imagination is only limited by the fact that you have never yet been there yourself. You probably never thought you would end up as an addict when you were "