The International Herald Tribune has two articles about addiction to massively multiplayer online games. One is the classic story about South Korea, with nothing new, including the story of the Koreans who played until they died, one guy playing 417 hours in 20 days. Must have been on his way to rank 14 in WoW PvP. ;)
The other story is slightly more interesting, an addiction treatment center in Amsterdam now treating online game addicts. Now there is a profitable secondary MMO market, treatment costs $350 to $442 per day for four to eight weeks. You could play WoW for 2 years for the cost of one day of therapy.
Obviously the problem is not with WoW, you can become addicted to about anything which offers escape from the real world, for example TV. But I wonder if one day games in the USA or Europe will have the same sort of addiction-prevention mechanisms that are already installed in China, that you get less xp after playing for over 3 hours, and after 5 hours you don't get anything any more. Does the Chinese World of Warcraft already have such stuff installed? Should be easy to port to the western versions of the game.
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