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120-14-59-49

Aren’t those a cool collection of numbers?   What are they, what do they represent, and most importantly, why should anyone care?  No, Hurley is not going to come running yelling “The numbers are bad!” (That was a Lost reference, for those who are unfortunate enough to not know), rather John is going to come yelling “Those numbers are bad!”

Before I get into that, I want to tell you about a movie I really like.  It’s called “Stuart Saves His Family”.  The show is about a guy (Stuart, played by Saturday Night Lives’ Al Franken) who is trying to cope with his family’s problems while taking care of his own.  One of his family’s problems is that his father (Harris Yulin) is an alcoholic and has been doing his best to ruin everyone’s life around him since his children were very young.  That aspect of the show is especially touching because you are shown how one person’s actions affect the entire family.  Part of that plot line is that the family does an intervention with a therapist and it completely backfires because the father is such an alcoholic and is so stuck in his ways that the well being of the family is of no importance when compared to the love he has for his addiction.  It’s a very heart wrenching and tear inducing scene, as you see the love of the people who should mean everything to him treated as nothing more than a hindrance to his chosen way of life.  Eventually, he loses nearly everyone who should matter the most to him (only his subdued wife remains).

The movie is a comedy, and is one of those “love it or hate it” type movies, but the messages it tries to convey are so soundly based on real life situations (and the pain and frustration it causes) that the show will have you nearly in tears at various points, and is honestly worth watching just for the psychological aspects.

Ok, so back to those numbers!  What are they?  They are my time added together for my four main characters on World of Warcraft (WoW).  WoW is an online role playing game where you complete quests and dungeons to better your level, items, and abilities.  As of this time, there are roughly twelve million World of Warcraft subscribers online. Now, let’s dissect those numbers I listed at the top.  The order I have it in is days, hours, minutes, seconds.  I thought I’d be very precise.  This block of time is time spent logged onto the game, and covers the time between December, 2005, up until just recently.  This is just my main characters and does not include other characters that I spent time leveling.

So why would I bother sharing this information with you when it really does seem quite self-incriminating?  Simply because I want to show you how time consuming these games can be and some of the problems this presents for both family and friends.

Like the alcoholic from the movie mentioned earlier that prizes his liquor more than his family and friends, World of Warcraft is as much an addictive, destructive device as any substance out there.  The negative effects on life include loss of friends, devaluing of family and social activities, and the erroneous substitution of real life friends and activities for a temporary virtual community that is as easily obtained as unplugged, thus creating a false sense of security as well as a false sense of power.

Last semester, I had a guy that would always come visit me between my billiards classes (I teach Billiards at Weber St. University) and discuss his WoW characters.  He had some definite insight to the mechanics and helped me figure out my rogue (a class of one of the characters).  As the days went on, he kept leading our conversations to a deeper and more personal level, and eventually, he sought my advice with an aspect of his life that was failing and causing him a lot of pain:  his marriage.  As I listened to him, I quickly learned that WoW was at the heart of the problems between him and his wife.  What started out as a game they would play together, turned into a lifestyle and a competitive activity that was used solely for creating distance between them.  As the dump truck started to unload, I quickly stopped him and told him that the first and most obvious step is to get off the stupid game.  The question was very clear, “What do you value more, the game or your wife?”  He tried to redirect the conversation to the pain she was causing him, and I quickly had to shut him down.  The bottom line was that the game was more important to both of them than they were to each other, and what he wanted to hear was that she had a problem and he was justified in whatever happened between them.  I told him where the counselors at the school were located, and told him to get in therapy with her and to be honest with the therapist about their addiction.  That was the last I saw of him.

Over the last ten years, I have seen multiple people fall into this trap, and it has caused them untold amounts of pain.  I personally know of five marriages that were, or are in the process of being dismantled piece by piece, aided by their involvement in games such as WoW, and have heard countless stories by acquaintances of the same problems within their circles.  It seems pretty much everyone knows of someone who has been affected by this issue.  The most common response is “this is my escape.  I use it as a way to get away from things for a while”.  If the escape was for an hour a day, I could see the logic.  Yet games like this are not made to be played for an hour at a time, and players who are deep into them will rarely spend less than three or four hours a sitting, and often times 6-9 hour sittings are not at all uncommon on a regular basis, due to the time it takes to get groups together, run dungeons (instances) and socialize with their digital family and friends replacements.  It is a pseudo environment that is as susceptible to failure as your power on a stormy night.

A friend of mine who (sadly) I introduced to WoW started up and kicked it into high gear and wouldn’t look back (or down, or sideways) to see that the game was causing problems.  His fiancé had some issues with it at first, but figured they would subside after the novelty of the game wore off.  After they were married, it became a bigger problem and started to be a serious issue.  She expressed her concerns over the game and his response was “Well, I’m not out doing drugs, going to the bars, womanizing, or abusing you, am I?  At least when I’m playing this, you know where I’m at and don’t have to worry about me.”  The only reason I know this is because he confided in a group of fellow addicts what was going on.  Bad choice.  Not a bad choice in the sense that he shouldn’t tell anyone about that conversation, but a bad choice in that the person to whom he gave his life expressed a concern over a video game, and he felt more inclined to defend the addiction to a video game than to solve the problem that his real life partner had with his actions.  Abuse is not solely substance or physical.  Neglect is a form of abuse that is as serious and damaging as any other.

The comparisons to drugs or alcohol go way back with online gaming.  One of the original online games (that achieved mass subscriptions) was EverQuest.  While a fantastic game for its time, it quickly earned the name “EverCrack” due to its addictive nature and destructive powers when it came to relationships, and even employment.  Again, while the game itself is not a bad thing, it is how people use it to justify themselves that is the problem, much like my acquaintance I mentioned earlier did.  We tend to want to justify it by the bad things we don’t’ do, rather than the good things we’ve lost perspective of.

One of the funny thing Giles women say is that Giles men seem to think that time freezes when they enter the bathroom.  I must admit that I am guilty of this, as I love a good long hot bath where the hot water will come back on multiple times as the temperature decreases over that frozen span of time!   As with this time anomaly, online activities also have their own ability to create this effect.  What people think is an occasional activity is in reality a life-consuming, destructive force that rips the very fabric of common sense apart.

The first key to solving the problem is to look at it realistically.  Addictions are never easy to overcome, but there are steps to take.  First is to recognize the obvious fact that there is a problem.  If others, especially loved ones, mention there is a problem, then you can pretty much know for a fact that there is a problem.  If people from your life take definite steps back and even start disappearing, then that would be another really good clue.  Most importantly, if family relations are strained, then something somewhere is amiss and needs immediate attention. Online addiction (games and “social” activities) are as serious an addiction as any other and are just as destructive to life.

Over the last few years, I have lost multiple friends due to this very addiction, and have a few that are in serious jeopardy.  The heartbreak that is a loss of any real-life friend due to the façade of online “friend-replacements” and activities has been extremely hard for me to deal with.  The pain is real, while the cause has an on/off button.  The key is getting away from it.

There is no weaning off activities such as these.  To tell yourself, I’ll cut back, it’s not THAT important to me,” is much like the alcoholic who says they will cut back drinking on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.  The only way to quit is a very difficult task, and that is to abstain from the problem.  It really boils down to priorities and what is most important to the individual’s life.  There’s not one “real life” friendship that is worth any online activity or “virtual” friendship.  Yet look around you, listen to the stories, and know that the problem is as real as any substance abuse out there.

We get caught up in the online life and it really does imbed itself into our life’s routine in a way that is extremely difficult to eliminate.  When I canceled my account, I spent a couple of weeks fighting the urge to log on.  I got bored.  I had eliminated enough of the healthy activities of life that WoW had taken the place of that I entertained the thoughts of “Well, I’m not doing anything else, why not?”  But I persisted and found alternatives that were much more productive and healthy, such as my writing, to fill the void.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that online activities and games are unhealthy or bad.  What I’m saying is that, if used in an addictive manner, they become a replacement for “real” world activities and rip apart your life just as effectively as any addictive substance can.  The key is listening to those you value and love and respect their warnings when they see you sliding.  Just like any addiction, the addict never sees it because they are slowly lowering themselves into it, getting used to the atmosphere as they continue to subject themselves to it.   As Alexander Pope stated in his Essay On Man, “We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”  Our allowing the addiction to set in is a slow process and starts with us feeling that it could never happen to us. We then subject ourselves to and “endure”  the very activities that caused us to “pity” those around us that were neck deep in the addiction that we soon “embrace” and find ourselves caught in. 

In August of 2009, an article called “Just a Game?” which can be found in its entirety by clicking the link below, presents a realistic view of how online addiction can affect a person as well as the home.  In the article is a list of signs that an online activity could become more than just a leisure hobby, and a full blow addiction.  Let’s go over a few and I will put myself into the questions (more incriminating evidence!) and share with you my results.

This is a very good list, and one that everyone should go over.  If you answer yes to any of these, then there is cause for concern.  If you, like myself, have answered yes to many of these, then I hope wisdom would dictate your response.

The most important things in this world should never include online activities and certainly not a video game.  Being a gamer my entire life, I have pretty much always replaced television watching with video games.  There’s just something so much more compelling to me when I’m actually controlling what’s going on in front of me, rather than doing nothing for hours staring at a screen (thank heavens for NetFlix, no commercials!).  Yet the real joy and rewards in life come from the living that are tangibly in front of you that beg for your attention.  Family and friends should always be our sanctuary from the world, not the virtual replacements that become your “internet family”.

The pain it causes is so real, and the cause is so artificial.  By sharing with you my experiences, and exposing some of my own failings, my only wish is to see others get out of that dark tunnel where the virtual reality presses on to destroy that which is real.

Moderation, honesty, and not losing track of what is important in this life are the ultimate goals.  When our senses get dulled, then hopefully we are wise enough to listen to those who care and seek to help pull us out of the quicksand.  

A video clip I absolutely love is from the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun, when Dick Solomon becomes addicted to cigarettes and Sally confronts him about it.  While not an online addiction (that's another episode that is hilarious!) the response he gives while confronted about smoking is certainly applicable.

Until next time,

John

Questions or comments?  Please feel free to contact me at John@rustyarmor.com

“Just a Game?” written by Charles D. Knutson, Brigham Young University Computer Science Department, and Kyle K. Oswald, LDS Family Services, August , 2009.

http://lds.org/ensign/2009/08/just-a-game?lang=eng&query=Online+gaming