World of Warcraft: the ‘crack’ myth
Before I question some of the hyperbole floating around the mainstream media over the ‘World of Warcraft is like crack’ story, I have to make a disclosure. I do play World of Warcraft and am in fact a Level 80 Fire Mage. Snigger all you want, but there’s dozens, if not hundreds of you reading [...]
The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction – a book review
This book review appeared yesterday over on Metaverse Health, but given the book’s Australian author and it’s broad examination of online behaviour, I thought it was worth re-posting it here.
Nicola Johnson from the University of Wollongong in Australia, recently released a book titled The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction – The Misrecognition of Leisure and Learning. [...]
The rise and rise of the Game Widow
(From our sister site, Metaverse Health)
This article in the Canadian publication, the London Free Press, describes in detail a couple of case studies of gaming addicts. The case studies themselves paint a fairly standard picture of someone with a compulsion for intensive gaming, though some effort has been made to provide balanced coverage of the [...]
What looks like addiction, but is not – Virtual Addiction, Part 3
I spend hours with my computer. It is my favorite tool. I spend time in and out of virtual worlds; I spend time on and off the Internet, surfing with my browser. I communicate, I work, I play. From the sheer amount of time spent with my machine during the day, according to some measures, [...]
On Being a Virtual World Whore – Virtual Addiction, Part 2
There’s been a great deal of debate of whether “Internet Addiction” and its close cousin, “Virtual World Addiction”, should be classified as disorders separate from other behavioral addictions. Psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg reputedly borrowed the criteria for substance use and impulse-control disorders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), and jokingly [...]
Are you a Virtual World Whore? Virtual Addiction, Part 1
Do you crave the fun, excitement, and pleasure of virtual worlds to the detriment of the rest of your life? Would you do anything, give anything, just to be able to spend another couple of uninterrupted hours in a virtual space, Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) or gaming environment?
You have a problem. You are a virtual [...]
Gamers not social rejects: Australian study
I missed the announcement of this research a couple of weeks back but thought it was worth passing on the full announcement from Victoria University:
The video gamer stereotype, which says gamers are lonely nerds with low self-esteem, who are addicted to gaming because they are unable to socialise, has been contradicted by research [...]
