Patch 5.4 patch notes
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The latest patch 5.4 newsJace Hall tackles media coverage of WoW addiction
by Michael Sacco 
May 5th 2010 at 7:00PM
Addiction is a tough topic, and WoW is an easy sell as a scapegoat. Like any activity you love, if you feel passionately about it, you should fight for its proper representation. Jace certainly is.
His stance on addiction:
Hall laments that news organizations and personalities seem eager to paint activities they're unfamiliar with or don't understand, like WoW, as unique and dangerous forces in addiction then countless other activities. Among those with addictive personalities or social difficulties, any activity can become addictive, and this particular report, he says, is pure fear-mongering "based ultimately on conjecture.""It is my opinion that human beings are capable of creating destructive relationships and associations with almost anything. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a fundamental trait of the human condition. This trait can occasionally direct people toward the use of escapism. Sometimes this can be a necessary mode of survival and very healthy – other times is can lead to counterproductive personal and social behavior.
What that means is that, YES, someone can get so involved in watching movies, or reading books, or tweaking their myspace page, or surfing, or playing games, or swimming or drinking, or using drugs, or having sex, or ANYTHING THAT THEY FIND USEFUL TO ESCAPE WITH, that they actually begin to ignore other important aspects of their lives and it becomes a real problem."
My personal opinion on these matters is that it's difficult to pin "WoW addiction" on any particular source, and that usually, like Jace says in his article, there are circumstances that extend far outside of the game that can cause these problems.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
BitterCupOJoe May 5th 2010 7:29PM
WoW (and other MMOs) is basically a very fun Skinner box. Hit the lever, maybe you get a food pellet. Our brains are designed to like this activity, because, well, that's basically describing the hunter/gatherer survival model. It's why gambling is fun and work is bad: your ancestors' form of survival (hunting and gathering, knowing that you'll probably get a little sustenance and maybe get really lucky and find a dead/dying deer) was more like gambling than the thing that will actually be more likely to earn you a living in modern society, working at a job. Steady state is boring for humans, compared to feast or famine, as long as basic needs are being met.
The designers of WoW know this. It's a dirty little open secret in the gaming industry that WoW uses slot machine jackpot payouts as part of its design. When you're leveling, you always get a little bit of reward when you kill a mob (silver and XP) and occasionally you get a big reward (green, or maybe even a blue or epic BoE! Ooo!) When you get to 80, the design shift slightly, but it's basically "run heroics and raids for emblems, maybe you'll be an epic." Dailies add the idea of opportunity decay to the mix, because you can't just go back and do the last week's worth of dailies if you miss them. Farmville's crop withering is similar in this regard.
The difference between Farmville and WoW is that there is fundamentally a game in there with WoW. I have no doubt that the designers try to make the best game they can, within the constraints of keeping us around as subscribers. However, when it comes down to it, the game aspects of WoW (not the narrative ones, i.e., all the quest stuff) could be shortened to maybe a 60-80 hour boxed single player/classic multiplayer (non-massive) game, with paid DLC expansions when patches came out, etc. But that's not going to pay the bills for keeping an MMO running, and it's not going to generate $150 million in revenue from subscriptions alone each month. So the Skinner box design it is.
(And for those of you that say, "hur hur, I'm smarter than that, I only play because I like the game," well, that may be true. Unfortunately, people react more weakly or strongly to the Skinner model than others, so you may be lucky because of a quirk of genetics or upbringing in that you are less susceptible to this type of thing; alternately, you could be deluding yourself. Easy test: Stop playing for two weeks, and try not to think about the game at all)
kunukia May 5th 2010 7:48PM
Some people are addicted to telling people about themselves and feeling very clever.
Nazgûl May 5th 2010 8:06PM
Your little "easy test" at the end is more than you think it is. By committing to not play for two weeks, you trigger ironic processing and thus begin thinking a lot more about it than you would if you weren't avoiding play. Speaking of ironic process, the game.
That's a pretty standard psychological phenomena, much more standard than the Skinner box. Which should technically be "conditioning chamber", as Skinner didn't like eponyms.
The rest of your post is filled with a bunch of other false conjecture, specifically: "the game aspects of WoW (not the narrative ones, i.e., all the quest stuff) could be shortened to maybe a 60-80 hour boxed single player/classic multiplayer (non-massive) game..." That is most certainly wrong. For many, myself included, the social aspect is what keeps me playing WoW. I've run out of stuff to do, really. I've got most of the achievements I care to get. I've reached the peak of my raiding career in this expansion. The only reason I keep coming back is the people I play with. So, no, that essence can't be distilled into a "boxed" game (hint: WoW came in a box) that isn't massively multiplayer.
kunukia May 5th 2010 8:33PM
Hope this is truly a reply. I have pulled away from WoW several times, for real life. To care for my mother, to practice my Buddhism intensively, to visit family on trips. Yes when I logged in to get my email, I checked WoW.com, and my guild forums. No, I did not suffer. I love WoW, I play a lot. I am disabled, and I have a lot of time to fill. It is cheap. I do not even get cable. This is it, that and reading politics and other news...
BitterCupOJoe May 5th 2010 8:51PM
Sure, and I play it for similar reasons: it's cheaper than most hobbies, it allows me to scratch an itch (consumption without spending actual money), and it's a social game, and I've got a really nice guild with people I enjoy. I play the game for enjoyment, but I have no illusions that the game is designed to get me to pay, rather than specifically to be fun to play, and there is a difference. Let's be honest, how many times can you do the same content over and over and keep it fresh? There's a reason most games, even large ones like GTA, Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed are finished in weeks, perhaps months: that's all you really need, and that's about as long as they're fun for. You can stretch it out with multiplayer, but even then, there's only so much of it that's fun, and you can wring that much out when you want to.
Bronwyn May 6th 2010 11:42AM
I think you're trying to act like designing a game to be fun is mutually exclusive from designing a game to get people to pay. They are, in fact, the same thing. WoW Designers aren't sitting in an office thinking "How do we get people to pay 15 dollars a month continually?" They are thinking "How do we make this game interesting for both new players and those who have been with us from the start?" Sure, part of the reason they are even doing that is in order to continually make money- that is their job. But you can't come at game design thinking "What's going to make me money?" because that's not why people pay for games in the first place. They pay for games that are fun. You design games that are fun. Fun is what is going to make you money.
And honestly? I don't think your average game designer spends much time thinking about making money. I think if they're any good, they are thinking about how to make a good game.
BitterCupOJoe May 6th 2010 12:09PM
Sure, they definitely design the game to be fun. And they go into it trying to make a fun game, too. I'm not arguing that the game is or isn't fun. But if the choice is between "making the game fun" and "making the game maintain its subscriber base," they're going to err on the side of the latter. And it's true that a lot of the time that the two dovetail together.
However, they do also use things like psychological studies on randomized rewards, slot machine payout schemes, and the like to make the game "fun" in a way that's similar to the way that pulling on the one-armed bandit is to a gambler. I used to work in the gaming industry, and I still have friends who work there, including on MMOs, and they'll readily admit this. They try to make the "game" portion of the game fun, too, because they're gamers at heart; that's why WoW is WoW and not Farmville, where there's not really much of a game. However, they acknowledge that that's not really enough to keep a subscriber base. So, back to loading up food pellets and oiling the lever.
As I said before, I play the game. I enjoy it. I'll almost certainly be playing Cataclysm. It's a good game. But it's also designed to make you keep paying up, and not simply because it's fun.
RomanVS01 May 5th 2010 7:34PM
It's heartening to see people who understand that people who play WoW aren't addicts...seriously,people who think we're addicts if we play a game for fun piss me off,one person gets addicted and passes out without food/sleep/drink and they pin it all on World of Warcraft instead of parents/other things.
I'm glad he didn't make some biased report that makes us all look like no life addicts. And you're not an addict/zombie?/crackhead if you like to play a game a lot,unless doing so harms you.
CaryEverett May 5th 2010 8:14PM
Look, I've peed myself less than 10 times while playing WoW, because I couldn't pull myself away long enough to use the restroom.
If it's less than 10 times, it can't be an addiction right?
Yvl May 5th 2010 7:39PM
So, like, does this guy know that video game "addiction" is no longer politically correct, and that it's all been labeled as a compulsive habit?
Razzmataz May 5th 2010 8:04PM
Care to share where you got that information? I'ma psychology major, and major articles are still referring to what could be technically called compulsory habits as addiction, OCD, and a few other terms.
Ramvol May 5th 2010 7:52PM
What is ironic is most reporters are addicted to there job. They work crazy hours and want to be first with an epic story. Spend weeks away from the family. Sounds like an addiction to me.
Gryffyn May 5th 2010 8:21PM
To Bitter,
Any good game is designed to not be too hard and to keep you coming back for more. What I think the problem is that American society does not condone people having fun and actually enjoying themselves. We live for work. I am on the other side of the big five zero and in my lifetime I have seen a big shift in the way America used to view the work, leisure balance. When I was a kid back in the 60s, most people worked days, five days a week. You worked for a company with the idea that an honest days work got you an honest days pay. Two week vacations where you got away from it all was the norm not the exception and Saturday and Sunday really were days off.
Now, we are pushed to work harder/faster/longer for the same pay or less. We feel lucky if we get a long weekend let alone take a week off. TWO WEEKS...no way the boss will find someone who will work 12 hours a day seven days a week. The whole corporate idea is to wring as much work out of someone for as little pay as possible before they burnout and go do something else. All the computers, machines and so called technological advances like cell phones and the internet have not made our work easier, it has enabled us to work harder and longer. You can thank Thomas Edison and the first pratical lightbulb. It allowed us to do shift work and the trend went downhill from there.
Is it any wonders some parents freak out if their kids are not buried in the school books all night from the time they come home till they stumble to bed? These people who are having kids now have grown up with pre-school, testing for pre-school, and it has been drilled into their heads that if you don't finish top of the class and go to an Ivy League school you are a failure. What the world needs is more doctors, lawyers, accountants, MBAs. If Johnny likes to get his hands dirty and wants to be a gardner they take him to a shrink. Must be something wrong with him if he wants to do do something he enjoys and not something that will make him more money than he really needs to be comfortable.
Nope, American society will always hate games like Warcraft because it allows you to have ....OMFG fun. Life is tough, life is a bitch, dog eat dog. If you slack off for even a minute someone else will slap you down and get ahead of you.
So, perhaps the designers put things in the game to keep you coming back. Anything that helps you forget that no matter how hard you try, only a small handful will ever be the top dogs, and most of us don't have the right family background to even think about being rich or famous.
Tokkar May 5th 2010 8:39PM
Usage error: "unique and dangerous forces in addiction then countless other activities"
That should read "in addiction than countless other..."
Okay, now that my inner language Nazi is appeased, let me just say that l am sitting directly across the desk from a wonderful person who not only plays World of Warcraft, but is also a reporter for a radio station. One of her colleagues recently had a piece on video games, and the one that got picked on as being the home-wrecker? Yep...WoW. We were both a bit appalled at that one, but here's the kicker: the reporter had never played the game and knew nothing about it at all. In fact, the person he was interviewing apparently didn't know anything about the game at all, yet she sure ripped it apart and glorified how it destroyed her marriage!
Gah...
We tried to get him to hear our side of the story, that people will become addicted to anything that they find an enjoyable escape, that many people use WoW for more than just playing a game (I use it as an art medium, for example) and he stated that he would really be interested in hearing about it.
Yeah, that was the last we heard from him.
Double-gah...
WoW is the big dog right now. In the 70s and 80s, it was Dungeons & Dragons. In the 50s & 60s? Rock 'n' Roll. 40s? Radio. 20s? Talkies. Yeah, it's always something.
Tabby May 5th 2010 8:56PM
I find it easy to pull away from WoW.
Here's something hilarious: I'm addicted to books. I don't read them anymore, because if I do, I will ignore food, sleep, family, my job until I finish that book. In school, it was a huge problem because I would go days without sleep, and not do my homework until that book was done. God help me if I had more than one book. Hitchhikers almost destroyed me.
So there's your proof anything can be addictive.
Meg May 5th 2010 11:30PM
I....I love you. I have the same problem. ESPECIALLY in the summer, it's like the warm weather stirs up some crazy book-reading fiend in me. All-nighters are the norm, and back-breaking trips to the library every few days...
Tokkar May 6th 2010 1:45AM
Oh...
Ohhhh....
Oh crap. Now you've gone and done it.
Reading? No...WRITING!
Yeah, I'm probably gonna be up all night now working on one of two that I'm writing - either the sequel to my novel, or the sci-fi that I've started.
Dammit...I was SO looking forward to a decent night's sleep. For a change.
CURSE YOU!!!!!!!!!
(Opens up word processor and begins perusing unfinished works...)
Shade May 5th 2010 9:02PM
WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INCOMING
If the media wants to attack WoW for being unhealthy, they're really aiming in the wrong spot. Let's draw a comparison between WoW and sports...
- - -
WoW is supposed to be a game. In terms of time invested, I suppose the general non-player public would say a few levels, bgs, or heroics per day would be an acceptable time commitment. Similarly, a casual basketball player might go to the gym every afternoon and play for a while.
Now say that basketball player decides he wants to go out for his high school/college/whatever team. He'll start investing hours into training with very specific exercises and very specific goals. His mentality can go in one of two directions: he will either keep in mind the fact that he has a job/education, as well as social life, to keep on top of; or he can abandon everything else for the sake of his training.
In the WoW example, the 'team' would probably be a raiding guild, or at the very least pugging out raid content. He'll closely examine his gear, talents, and rotations, and he'll probably start looking at loot tables for specific drops he wants. Here, too, the mentality can go in two directions: keep the game in perspective, or let it take priority over everything else.
- - -
The problem is that society currently assumes that all WoW players fall into the tunnel-vision mentality, whereas in fact the minority of us do. The reason for that is because WoW is nontransparent - that is to say, it's incredibly hard to understand for non-players and you can't point to something physical and say "This is what I gained for my effort."
Both the benefit and drawback of WoW is that the "corruption of mentality" (so to speak) generally only occurs when players begin to invest more time, because the unhealthy personalities almost all lie in endgame players.
-World PvP, especially ganking. Whereas BGs and Arena matches are consentual and present a challenge, world pvp is all too often a result of bored 80s deciding "Let's go to goldshire and camp the lowbies". Why is it fun? Because you know you're frustrating the people on the other end of your 277s.
-A massive proportion of endgame WoW players act like total assholes, when only a small percentage of them actually act that way in public. For example, the population of hardcore players who feel like superior human beings and make sure everyone in guild, raid, and world chat know it, especially in the event of a wipe.
Because of these issues, even if the media ever moves past the "WoW is unhealthy because it's a time commitment" thing, anyone playing in endgame content will still be painted as unhealthy, but now because of a different blanket statement like "WoW at level cap is only for sociopaths".
tl;dr - Playing a lot isn't a problem, but stop being a giant prick so once the rest of the world realizes commitment != addiction, they don't have anything else to point their finger at
Zehir May 5th 2010 9:36PM
I just want to play my damn game. I don't see why the media has to try and ruin that for everyone. I want to have fun.
Myf May 5th 2010 9:38PM
It's funny how playing WoW for 4hrs of an evening = "Dangerous Addiction"
Yet, watching television shows (like this rubbish) for those 4hrs is somehow perfectly socially acceptable.