Warcraft Doesn't Have To Wreck Lives... but it does...

And in opposition to the posting I did yesterday, come this one:
Slashdot | How Warcraft Doesn't Have To Wreck Lives

Online gaming is now part of our internet lives. And whatever you do, people will always critic your work. But these dicussions seems to lose sight of the real question that should come out the oppisition of these ideas:

Why are some people wrecking theirs lives in a MMORPG while others don't?

To get a full answer to this question, we need to go back a bit, stand way back and examine the problem from a more historical perspective.

These MMORPG, when you come down to it, are simple games. A pretending game with a set of rules in a fictionnal universe. Just like D&D, or Warhammer 40000 from a couple of year ago. People have wreck their own live with theses games also, but on a smaller scale. Technology brought better immersion into the game, as well as lowered the bar for the rules of the game. Thus, with online gaming (in the form of MMORPG), every problem that has existed in the past in the form of a table-top game, becomes much worse.

Even worse, most of theses onlines games are made to give the player easy and tangible rewards. While, it does tend to make the game more fun, it does keep players hooked ("just one more... ").

But the biggest problem, table-top, real live, or online is that the responsability of playing responsably falls in the hand of the player. If the game is engineered, by choise or by chance, to keep the player hooked, it can become like a form a addiction.

A good life, is a well balanced life. Everthing can become an addiction or a obsession, but when taken with a responsible mind, it's all good.