Free Writing Center

When a 15 year old boy from Western Sweden collapsed after playing World of Warcraft for 20 hours, did it prove that online gaming is harmful to your health?

Is World of Warcraft Harmful For Your Health?

In the past couple of years I’ve written a number of articles about online gaming. In fact, just six months ago I completed a niche analysis report for a client about the dramatic growth (and projected growth) of the online gaming industry. According to that research, Massive Multiplayer Online Games - giant virtual worlds like Warcraft - represent one of the most substantial segments of the online gaming industry. Americans love immersing themselves into a magical and virtual online world where anything is possible. But are we gaming too much? Is gaming now the new alcoholism of this generation?

15 Year Old Swedish Boy Collapses

According to the report in the Swedish media, the 15 year old boy gathered with seven friends, and all of them played World of Warcraft around the clock. They hardly ate and they hardly slept….for 20 hours. After being raced to the hospital, doctors determined that the boy’s biological systems were out of wack due to sleep deprivation, partial starvation, and “too long a stretch of concentrated game playing.”

You read that right. Too much concentrated game playing.

The truth, discovered in the process of writing the niche analysis, is that not only children are at risk of suffering such a fate. According to recent trends, older women over 40 now make up the majority of online gamers (when you take sites like Yahoo games, MSN games, and other web-based games into consideration). Surprisingly, adults are also more likely than teens to stay up late playing games. So what happens when you have to get up early to go to work the next day?

What is Internet Addiction and Do I Have It?

The Center for Internet Addiction has published an online test to determine whether or not you suffer from internet addiction. For writers like us, however, where the internet is part of your job - how do you know there’s even a problem? Ultimately it comes down to the same criteria as alcohol. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

Some questions to ask:

• Do you find that you’ve stayed up far later than you intended while working on the Internet, and does that happen often?
• Do you neglect non-internet/family duties in order to spend more time on the Internet?
• Do others often complain about how often you are on the computer?
• Does your job or school work suffer because of the amount of time you’re online?
• Do you need to check email obsessively?
• Do you choose to go online rather than spend time with others?
• Do you feel agitated or moody when offline, but relieved when you are back on the Internet?

Yes to just a few of these questions could signal a problem. Richard Kelly wrote a fantastic book titled Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: The People, the Addiction and the Playing Experience that perfectly outlines why these virtual worlds, like the World of Warcraft, is so darn addictive.

Avoiding Internet Addiction

I personally suffered from this affliction since I was in high school. That was before the days of the Internet, and my addiction was the magical worlds of games like Sentinel Worlds (an old Electronic Arts space game) and Ultima. These addictions made it into my college life and incorporated the internet once that was
invented. Finally all of the above addictions integrated into my marriage where it became a problem.

I now work online, but I’ve recovered enough from this addiction so that I can recognize it and work to make sure that it remains under control. The most important thing you can do, especially if you are a web designer or Internet writer who makes a living from the Internet, is to set strict guidelines regarding your online time. Make it like a real day job, where you clock in, and clock out at specific times during the day. And once you clock out, you go home and do offline work, or just enjoy time with the kids and family. As Internet workers, there really is no difference between Internet addiction and workaholism, so stay vigilant and protect yourself. The last thing you need is to end up in the hospital like this poor 15 year old from Sweden who had to learn the hard way.