Gaming Addiction Is For Real.

In this blog I will attempt to explore the world of electronic gaming and my experiences with it. I have been playing video games and computer games alike for well over thirteen years of my life at this point. Everything from Atari to Xbox 360. All types of games, from Pong that consists of a black screen with a score board, pixle ball and two vertical moving paddles to Crysis which has so much detail and action with in it, the top computer technology of today can barely run it at full force. The name of the blog is "Gaming Addictions" and this will be the main thing I will be discussing here. I have seen many friends ruin their lives by devoting too much of their time to games and I as well have struggled with the addiction. Computer games and video games can be amazingly addictive. Of all the types of games that are out today, by the most addictive breed has to be the MMORPG "Massively Mutiplayer Online Role Playing Game." MMO's are essentially whole entire virtual worlds, where players can become a hero, villan or whatever they want to be. They are the ultimate for of expression, players can do pretty much whatever they want to do with very little real world repercussions. I have personally tried many of these and know all to well of their siren calls. Some of the biggest are Everquest, Everquest 2, Runescape, and the king World Of Warcraft. I will primarily be focusing on WoW (World of Warcraft) throughout this blog. WoW is one of the most popular games of all time. It is in fact so popular that there are currently over ten million paying subscribers. This means that ontop of purchasing the game which now costs $20 (originally $50) the subcriber pays roughly $15 a month to play, slightly cheaper if they buy 3-months or 6-months at time. Blizzard Entertainment, owned by Vivendi games also relased a expansion pack to WoW called The Burning Crusade (BC), which costs $30 and is fairly essential to playing the game at this stage in it's developement. Most people that dont play games look at those numbers and are shocked. Why would someone pay $50-$80 to buy a game and on top of that pay $15 every month to play it? Why would someone play the same game that only adds moderate changes every few months via patches (free updates that add things and eliminate bugs) for three years? Why do so many people play WoW? What makes WoW so great? Having played this game for roughly two years, with many breaks in between my own experience tells me that people pay so much and keep coming back because the game is so addictive. I myself was a WoW addict. I would sometimes play the game 40 hours a week, as though it were a full time job. Sadly though this pales in comparison to some of the people I came across. The real life events that these "addicts" neglected were astonishing to me. One of the more extreme examples that comes to mind is when a man in my guild(In game large scale groups of people that you work with to accomplish goals with in the game world) missed his daughters wedding to play the game. I have known people who consistenly play WoW for 80 hours a week, making it their number one priority and essentially their life. The main goal of this blog is to open some eyes and hopefully enlighten some people.