Comment Founded In Addiction (Score 1) 457
All this madness is founded in addiction. It is becoming semantics to argue if a game is real or not anymore. Because it is becoming so realistic. The people you interact with are real. This is what counts. Your not just playing a single-player fantasy experience. What brings it to an all new level is that it is real. That its live with other people through a different body and experience. Your arms, fingers, and eyes merely become an interface and you are immersed in another world for all intents and purposes.
The real core of it is addiction. Addicted to the positive emotions and feelings extracted from these experiences. Its critically simple that when rewarded our minds create pleasure that we seek out over and over again.
A sword, regardless of its independent value, wouldn't be worth killing if there wasn't a world that made it real to exist in. So this implies that the real reason someone valued the sword was to have that sword in that particular world. An equally rare sword in a less popular game world wouldn't be as worthy. The addiction to the experience creates these perceived values. Perceived friends, marriages, alliances, and experiences.
In this way they should be looked no differently upon than a drug. What is the purpose of a drug? To help you (or force you) to escape reality. Hmmm... interesting parallels. And the qualities of addiction are present. You take away a hardcore MMO player of WoW or example and they WILL experience withdrawals. The psychological addiction is to blame.
Cancer sticks, beer, wine, it doesn't matter. People find things to be addicted to.
Lets also consider that we can't be surprised that there was 1 psycho killer out of 3.5 million people. People kill people every day and it far outweighs that ratio. Not that its right or good. But the sheer numbers of the population of that game world and the diversity... its bound to happen by statistics alone.
The real core of it is addiction. Addicted to the positive emotions and feelings extracted from these experiences. Its critically simple that when rewarded our minds create pleasure that we seek out over and over again.
A sword, regardless of its independent value, wouldn't be worth killing if there wasn't a world that made it real to exist in. So this implies that the real reason someone valued the sword was to have that sword in that particular world. An equally rare sword in a less popular game world wouldn't be as worthy. The addiction to the experience creates these perceived values. Perceived friends, marriages, alliances, and experiences.
In this way they should be looked no differently upon than a drug. What is the purpose of a drug? To help you (or force you) to escape reality. Hmmm... interesting parallels. And the qualities of addiction are present. You take away a hardcore MMO player of WoW or example and they WILL experience withdrawals. The psychological addiction is to blame.
Cancer sticks, beer, wine, it doesn't matter. People find things to be addicted to.
Lets also consider that we can't be surprised that there was 1 psycho killer out of 3.5 million people. People kill people every day and it far outweighs that ratio. Not that its right or good. But the sheer numbers of the population of that game world and the diversity... its bound to happen by statistics alone.
