World of Warcraft all or nothing?

I have a Google Alert set to "World of Warcraft", so Google sends me always the latest news on the game. Recently they started adding a section of the latest blog entries, from Google Blog Search, to the alert e-mail. And that made me find this interesting blog post of World of Warcraft addiction:

The author played World of Warcraft, found it too addictive, and went cold turkey. Quote: "I loved every guilty minute of World of Warcraft, and yet I knew I couldn’t go on playing it. I was playing for hours every day, and my appetite was insatiable. There are so many better things to do in the world besides sit in front of the computer all day playing video games. There is awesome stuff out there, like riding your mountain bike and seeing live music and cooking thai food and hiking through clouds in a freezing drizzle."

But now he finds that this plan isn't really working out, because he finds himself bored in the evenings. Quote: "I can live without World of Warcraft, but I can’t live without… well… I suppose I can’t live without long, dark and rainy evenings with nothing to do between 5:00 and midnight. Yeah, I’m not gonna lie to you, this kinda sucks. Even the financial aspect of canceling my account has completely backfired. Now that I’m not paying $15 a month for WoW, I’m looking at $1,500 televisions to fill the void. Yup, in lieu of a subscription to Warcraft, that TV will pay for itself in eight years."

And that is exactly why I am thinking that World of Warcraft isn't bad for you. Because, face it, how many evenings in your life do you spend with "awesome stuff" like "riding your mountain bike and seeing live music and cooking thai food and hiking through clouds in a freezing drizzle", or whatever *you* consider awesome? And how many evenings do you just spend watching TV, if you don't play video games? Dane says "Video games are addictive by design. They are the Soma of our century." Right. So you better give them up and watch TV, the Soma of the last half-century? That doesn't make sense to me.

Obviously the sensible thing to do is to not neglect your job, your family, and all the "awesome stuff". But chances are that after taking care of all that, you will still end up with several hours per week with nothing to do. And in that time you could read a book, build a model railroad, watch TV, or play World of Warcraft. There is nothing that would make World of Warcraft worse than anything else in that list, or any other possible hobby I didn't list. If you start neglecting any of the real life stuff for WoW, then you can call yourself addicted. But if you just really, really prefer playing WoW to watching TV, I wouldn't be worried. Just the opposite, playing a troll hunter is a lot more social and interactive than playing a couch potato.