Postcards from Gameville

My hands-down favorite WoW podcast, Taverncast, is back from a long hiatus with a new episode of their “After Hours” format. (It’s the June 4th, 2007 episode if you go to their archives.) This time they talk about game addiction, and the results of an experiment Eloysius, one of the hosts did in the style of the film Super Size Me, in which he attempted to play at least 10 hours of WoW every day for 30 days. It’s a really interesting look for those of us casual players into how hardcore one can get, and how you can get to that point. He also went into how it started to affect him, both physically and emotionally. Good, good stuff.

Towards the end of the show, they went over a list of potential signs of game addiction, tempered by Eloysius’ experience. Some of the signs:

• Constantly forsaking important real-world events for game-events.
• Being regularly unable to keep to self-imposed limits on your playtime.
• If you spend all your non-game time thinking about the game, looking up strategies and information, talking about it, etc.

Eloy stressed that consistently falling into those habits was key. If you went on an all-weekend bender, that’s not addiction. But if every night of the week, you tell yourself you’re only going to play for a couple hours, and you end up playing for six or seven… that ain’t good.

It’d be great if Blizzard made a list of these types of symptoms available and highlighted them on the site. One of the other good points the Taverncast crew made was that many of us are concerned about addictive behaviors, but we wouldn’t know how to recognize it in our friends. Compounding that is the fact that we’d have to be around as much as our addicted friends in order to get a clearer picture of what’s going on with them. If you’re only on for three hours one night, you won’t see that your friend’s been on for six hours before and will be on for three hours after you leave.

I highly recommend you have a listen to this episode. And the rest of the show, it’s really well done. If nothing else, check out the Halloween special they did. (I spent part of last year trying to listen to two episodes a week during my work commute, starting at the beginning until I caught up.)

Apparently today, as Steve Jobs was giving the WWDC keynote, an error message popped up saying something about World of Warcraft had crashed. I had a friend who was there who later told me about it. Hah!