That said, I know that addiction is a real danger. I played WoW for about five years, most of that addictively. I ruined friendships, I jeopardized my job, and I basically stopped growing as a human being during that time. It was a net loss for me. I have been “clean” for about a year and I feel I am still recovering from the shambles my life fell into during that time.

For anyone who thinks they may have a problem with addiction, WoW Detox is a good resource, as Trent suggested. I’m also a member of olganon.org, Online Gamers Anonymous, which is more like a community for addicts. It’s a tremendously supportive group and I credit this with a great deal of my success in recovery. I’m just throwing that at there in case anyone might benefit from the information.

Personally I think Trent has covered this topic with fairness, although it’s clear he values some hobbies more than others. Fair enough. I don’t intend to start watching American Idol so I can discuss it with my coworkers, either.

Of course it’s social it’s people talking and communicating and doing things together.

Some people think — it’s not real because you haven’t met in person. How can you know hwat you are being told is true.

But the same thing can be said for people who meet in real life. Say, there’s a gardening club you belong to you. You socialize.You start off talking gardening but then it changes to jobs or spouses or kids. Or your other hobbies./ Maybe someone says “hey let’s go have lunch sometime” or “let’s go see that new movie” and you do and friendships develop.

Guess what — it’s the SAME as online communites. I know it can be hard to wrap your head around. Especially with the whole — you haven’t seen the person! What if they are lying, but the same thing can be said for the gardening club, sure you’ve seen them but how can you be sure they work where they say they do, or have parents that live out of the country. You just learn about people and trust them.

I’m part of an online community that came together because of a tv show. A TV show, that’s right. And we talked and analyzed and socialized.

That was — 10 years ago for some of us. No wait for some it was closer to 12 years ago.

We talked about the tv show and also about our lives we grew as a community the way all communities do. Sometimes it was bumpy sometiems smooth, we have new people, old people fell away — old people came back.

There have been 3 marriages out of this community and lots of kids, we’ve been there for each other during death, divorce, pregnancies, childhoods, natural disasters. for the past 8 years (I think maybe longer) we’ve gotten together yearly. Not everyone but as many as we can. We’ve helped each other out financialy, we have a secret santa exchange. We even have our own slang and customs.

We’re family a big extended messy family and it’s great. It’s wonderful.

We know each other and are there for each other.

I met my current boy friend and the man I plan on marrying through an online game (Not WoW), one of the community members that fell away, she met her current husband (and father of her child) through the same game — even though I had no idea she played it. And now she’s come back to the original community , well at least the way she can.

Just becuase you dont’ understand it doesn’t make it less valid or less real.

On the contrary, guild members know each other extremely well! We know each other’s names, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, children’s names, birthdays, religious affiliations, what kind of cars we drive, likes and dislikes. We all know when one of us or our family members is sick or gets a promotion or graduates or goes on vacation. A number of our members are either married or boyfriend/girlfriend. Members visit each other in “real life” quite often, certainly more than some families see each other. Just a couple of weeks ago, one member shipped another one a container of their homemade kielbasa and eggplant casserole clear across the country! When one of us is having technical or money troubles, another will send them a spare monitor or video board.

We have one couple that met in the game last year, realized they live in the same town, and are well on their way to being engaged to be married. We have another beautiful young couple, a school teacher and an accountant, from two different countries who met in the game. Over the course of two years this young man has obtained a visa and moved to the U.S. to her town. They just celebrated their beach wedding a couple of weeks ago (the anniversary date of when they met online) and we have plenty of new photographs on the guild website to share. All of us have encouraged and laughed and grumbled over these experiences right along with them each step along the way as they made their plans, visited each other every few months, fought the bureaucracy and red tape of obtaining American citizenship, and finally settled down together.

Don’t tell me we don’t know each other and never will. You really have no idea. We are more like a family than many families I know. I’m sorry to derail so much, but I prefer to see folks gently enlightened when it’s clear they are very much in the dark.

Why do we post comments on blogs?
Why are Facebook and Twitter so wildly popular?
Why do people join discussion boards for things that are of interest to them?

MMO’s definitely have a strong social aspect to them, especially given their base origins in tabletop role-playing games, which are intensely social. I play tabetop RPG’s and have been introduced to many new people when one of the other people brings a friend into a campaign. MMO’s create an online place where you can go into a world where other people are basically looking for people to play with them. So while you are resting up between fights, there is an opportunity for small talk and so on. People can and do get to know each other very well. People have formed strong friendships, found spouses and grieved when they learned someone they had been playing with for years died or was diagnosed with a terminal disease.

The same thing could happen in any online forum. For instance, my wife likes a particular site that is devoted to mothering. They have a discussion forum that has hundreds or thousands of women posting questions, sharing advice and so on. I used to actively participate in a car enthusiast board that had occasional local meetups. The forum my wife contributes to booked a cruise where people could meet up in person. Heck, even the love advice column in my local paper has spawned a community that has frequent in-person meetups. The same goes for MMO’s. A guild might have a meetup in some city or at some convention.

Just because you meet people online doesn’t mean that you will never meet them in person. That’s making a huge assumption. In some respects, the MMO is just another online forum of like-minded people that are extremely common on the Internet.

In the end, I took a break for about 9 months. I find that I am able to balance my playing now. I don’t bother with achievements. I don’t do daily quests. I don’t worry about being the best. I play because I enjoy it, but I don’t let it make decisions for me.

In the past, I would schedule my life around WoW. Nope, can’t go do this or that because I had a raid. Now I put life first. Sure, I’d like to raid with you this week, but I would rather spend time with my family.

For those of you who have never played, it is easy to dismiss the social aspects of an MMO like World of Warcraft. There was an article in Wired.com that nailed it: “A relatively straightforward game that, if you were just playing as a single player, would exhaust itself rapidly, takes on a hugely longer life when you add even relatively light social interaction.”

You start with no money, zilch. You get money for selling things you’ve collected on your travels or for completing quests (often, and particularly to start with, pitched as jobs/favours for people). Once you’re a few levels in, you can start learning professions – they cost money to learn but in turn, you can use your new skills to earn you money. You can also try speculating on the Auction House, which involves learning about the internal market and supply & demand on your particular server.

While most players are generous in other ways, beggars – people asking for money – are frowned upon and unless you’re good friends/guildmates with some rich players, you’re unlikely to get loans. There is no credit. You have to earn your money, you have to work for it one way or another, you have to save up if you want to buy some cool threads or an expensive new ride, and risky ventures at the AH don’t always pay off.

Sure, the money isn’t worth anything once you leave Azeroth but the lessons are more transferable to the real world than many people think.

It’s easy to keep a subscription you’re not using, thinking “well, I’ll get back into it eventually,” or not even thinking about it. ~$15/mo may not break the bank, but it’s still paying for a service you’re not using. Better to unsubscribe, keep the game installed, and re-subscribe when you’ve got the time & interest to play.

Some disincentives for unsubscribing are a.) losing time you’ve already paid for this month, and b.) losing your character(s). The latter varies, depending on the game. Some will keep your characters for a certain period of time, after your subscription ends. Some will charge you to restore characters when you resubscribe. Some will keep them indefinitely.

I’ve always been good with money & saving and always had plenty of gold in WoW.

The fact is, he would lose credibility if he stopped speaking from his mind and heart and daily experience, and instead began crafting his thoughts to “be careful of his biases.” Both of you need to just think about that. He gave the pro’s and con’s of the subject in his blog post based upon his viewpoint. What else would you have him do?

Saying “WoW [or any other game] is horrible because I couldn’t control my own involvement” is, in my opinion, shifting the blame onto the product from yourself.

People who say you aren’t socializing with people in multiplayer games have just never made real-life long-lasting friendships through that medium. I have. You really get out of it what you put into it.

I think perceived value is the important thing here. If you’d rather sit and watch TV, go for it. There are benefits to doing it and not doing it. Same with games. Same with books. After all, reading a book involves just sitting on your ass doing “nothing”.

Absolutely not true! The social element is THE reason to play MMO’s. You may not realize that MMO gamers are on headsets and microphones virtually the entire time we are online. I am in a video game guild with about 70 accounts, and on any given night there can be 20 to 30 of us from across the globe online together. Think of it as a big international Skype conference call. There is NO WAY we could get that variety of social exposure if we relied upon telephones and handshakes.

During the week we generally divide up into groups of 6, but on weekends there will usually be 24 in the conference call together, which is when we conduct the large cooperative events for 2 to 3 hours at a time.

Most of us have known each other literally for years, although we are always gaining and losing a couple of members here and there. We communicate a lot about the game, but we also keep up with each other’s lives, current events, movies we’ve seen, political issues, our jobs, our girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses, American Idol, anything you would chat about on bridge night, garden club meeting or chess club, or around the water cooler. Sorry, but it’s simply light years away from watching television.

And as far as this stereotype gamer, NONE of the folks in my guild live in their parents’ basements. We range in age from 20′s to 60′s, we all have real jobs and real homes, children, retirement accounts, political views, typical people not unlike the ones that prefer to watch television every night.

You nailed it right there. Although he claims the site is for entertainment purposes only, it is far from that. Reader mailbag, published books; that is no longer entertainment. People have looked to him for sound financial advice. The ‘I am not an advisor’ excuse does not fly anymore. He may not be a Certified Financial Planner, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t giving out advice he thinks is right to people who desperately need some.
The disclaimer at the bottom is a joke and everyone knows it.
“no information found on this site should be construed as financial advice.” Really? then stop giving people specific advice about how to solve their problems.