PC |
by Dan Nicolae Alexa |
13th January 2008 |
World of Warcraft |
Stop your Azerothian mania right now, young man, and take those damn pills, I tell ya! You're sick and you need help!
A team of British and German researchers have come up with the conclusion that some online video-game players have what the scientists call a "cyberdependece" or "cyberaddiction". So now, after drugs, alcohol and rock'n'roll, parents have another thing to worry about: your MMORPG "passion".
Indeed, according to the study one in 10 gamers shows signs of cyberdependence, and the weird thing is that adults are involved too. While the "disease" manifests particularly in youngsters, grown-ups are not far away from "getting sick"- which in the researchers' opinion means that the entire society needs to act for prevention. All MMORPG players are susceptible of developing the sort of cyberaddiction incriminated by the recent investigation, and guess what, one of the most addictive games cited by the Franco-German team is...
mais bien-sur, World of Warcraft.
The experts think that in France and Germany between 1% and 2% of all MMORPG gamers have developed an unhealthy habit of spending too many hours in front of a monitor, which seriously affects their social life (d'oh, who needs one...). The numbers are revealing: most hard-core gamers spend between 35 and 40h per week messing around with their upgradeable character. In a separate study conducted in France, the Forum for Internet rights (
le Forum des droits sur Internet) had found that more than 60 percent of the French gamers admit to spending more than 10h/week playing, while 5 percent of them arrive at 30h/week.
Jakob Hein, who is one of the authors of the study and in his spare time
is busy gold-farming on Chinese WoW servers is the head of the "addictology" service at the Charity Hospital in Berlin, says that society doesn't officially recognize this type of cyberdependence as a pathology, but rather as "a moral weakness". And this despite the fact that its consequences are serious (
ah, well, speak for your self...): the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred, and real-life social ties tend to be replaced by "virtual bonds", while a feeling of "absence" or "rejection" creeps in if the player is not online or gets kicked from the servers/community... The behavior also gets modified: the person's self-esteem drops significantly, results in school become disappointing, etc.
Hein underlines that authorities need to take in consideration this problem and to deal with it as if it were a plague affecting families and the entire economy. In Germany for example health-insurance companies do not include funds for treating "cyberdependence", while mental-health facilities that treat such pathologic behavior are scarce.
Jean-Luc Vénisse, head of the addictology department inside the Nantes Hospital in France, says that "most of the specialists admit that it's time to take in consideration seriously the problems [generated by] cyberdependance".
I just ask one single question: did anyone of these researchers actually
play World of Warcraft? Or Counter-Strike?
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