Game Addiction

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Lagrangian
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My laziness protects me from such tactics as those mentioned. I am immune to both WoW's cooking and grinding tactics.
I haven't played WoW in about 3 months now. Simply because I haven't felt the desire.
 

gambit924

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Yes that was certainly interesting. Oh for the days of PSO and not having to pay for anything but the game and the net. I loved that game. Anyway I think that games are indeed addictive and people have to monitor themselves, an addiction is only as addictive as you make it (or at least some of them), especially in this case. For some people the addiction works for them but still monitor yourselves.
 

Adam

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There was a time when I played World of Warcraft for 8+ hours a day. Guess their techniques worked on me. ;)

(I'm 1 year "clean.")
 

efkelley

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I am decidedly UN-clean where WoW is concerned. That said, I'm pretty well past the 'MUST GET PURPS' stage. I think it unlikely I'll ever return to that.

This is not to say that other things haven't grabbed my attention though. I'm just incredibly thankful that Dragon Age wasn't in an MMO format. I'm not admitting to anything, but there MIGHT have been a 24 hour session in there. /cough cough
 

SPMiller

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No, it's not news.

I've been clean of WoW for over a year. Fortunately, I was nowhere near as bad off as many of my fellow players. Once I hit a certain level of achievement, I decided I had "won" the game, despite the fact that it has no explicit win conditions.
 

Brukaviador

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Best line in that article: "People pay thousands of dollars for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A video game suit of armor looks pretty and protects you from video game orcs."


I had the Warcraft addiction for a while too. I had it bad. Basically it was a relatively cheap form of entertainment while I was saving up for a house but it wasted thousands of hours of my life.

What actually cured it was knowing this one other guy I worked with who also played it. He was in his late 40's or early 50's, divorced and literally did nothing else. He would eat, sleep and breath Warcraft. No outside life of any kind whatsoever. I'm surprised he even made it into work. When at work, it's all I heard him ever talk about. He'd constantly want to come to my cubicle or go for lunch to talk about it. At first it was a nice little break from the day but then it became so overwhelmingly much that it turned me off the whole idea of gaming for a long while. I said to myself: "Man, I can not turn out like this guy." I ended up quitting the game and focusing hard on my writing. Best decision I ever made.
 

Al Ross

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I've never really been addicted to one game. I love gaming and will always be a gamer. I game less now. I got a family and work and my writing. Now a play once in a while. Some times more than others. Last game I played daily was mass effect 2. 2-3 hours a day.

I used to game 8-10 hours daily but never one game the whole time. I played so many games that not many do phase me, I've seen them all. Once in a while a great game comes by that attracts my attention but never for too long.

I did the MMO thing, longest I stuck with one was about one year. After a while they all become repetitive.
 

sunandshadow

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An odd juxtaposition. The video game addiction article had me feeling glad I get bored so easily that no MMO can hold me past the point where they get too miserly about doling out new actually fun content (usually around level 50). But then I followed the link near the end about how the real world's system of rewards is so much more slow and unfair than we expected to be.
http://www.johndiesattheend.com/updates/?p=1071

I don't think the attribution of why we have this expectation to montage scenes is correct, that's way way too small of a cause. Personally I've long believed human nature and the nature of the universe are fundamentally incompatible, it's not a product of cultural conditioning. A species-wide instinct that things ought to be easier must be related to our species-wide instinct that magic really ought to work.

Well, I don't know why we feel the way we do, but it's undeniable that the agony of hard work and unfairness that hard work has no guarantee of being rewarded are one of the largest causes of emotional pain in the world. There are many, many people who love fiction, or art, or something, but when they try to create they'll end up unhappier than they started after being defeated by this agony of effort. I don't know how many projects I've started in my life where I took great pleasure in the idea, had fun with the first little bit of work, but then any pleasure I could find was slaughtered by the heartsickening realization that nothing can be accomplished with a reasonable amount of effort and most things can't be accomplished at all.
 

efkelley

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I liked the portion of the article that talked about the connection between gaming and work. The three things that people generally need to enjoy their jobs are:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

So, as writers, autonomy is completely nailed. Even when you're dealing with your editor, the majority of the work is yours. She's only going to suggest changes that she believes will make it more successful, and, ultimately, the decision is 98% yours.

Number two is also dead on. There are few things as complicated as writing a compelling story from beginning to end. You can make a case for Brain Science and Rocket Surgery, but taking a creative spark and communicating it to others is amazingly complex.

And now we hit number three. Since writing is effectively art, there are no set set criteria for success short of actual sales (and there are still best-selling authors out there who are unsatisfied with their work). The actual connection between all the work of creating, crafting, and finally selling is STILL no guarantee of reward. It's amazing that any of us EVER work at it.

In the meantime, there's still Warcraft. ;-)
 

SPMiller

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But if you finish a work of fiction, you get the satisfaction of completion whether it yields financial gain or not. You also get to (honestly) claim you finished something, unlike everybody else who talks about how they'll write a novel someday, if they ever get the time, maybe.
 
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