Gaming addiction and MMORPGs.

Sometime in the early 2000's, MMORPG's gave a way for gaming addiction to go from being a rarity your Druncle Phil has alongside his gambling addiction, to being one of the most common household vices. Billion dollar giants in the gaming industry invest the majority of their overhead into marketing exactly down that path in order to coax those who would have once had an intense hobby, into being addicted to a demanding lifestyle. It is literally engineered into the foundation of the MMORPG framework In the same way, nicotine is foundational to the tobacco industry. The time and money investment it takes to keep up with peers in most of those games, enough to get a competitive adrenaline rush when playing, is getting bigger and bigger every year as they turn questing into tedious farming with longer and longer time sinks to accomplish them. And I don't think it will stop or slow down until a giant class action lawsuit decades in the making finally makes headlines.

The requirements of a player are optimistically designed to have as much of a demand on a person's time as a having an additional part time job. For a large portion of that customer base that are in long term relationships and have children, the ripple effects of the addiction into the lives of their family will echo for generations. I think what really gets me is how benignly internet gaming addiction is treated in everyday life- and wondering at what point the alarm bells will be ringing loudly enough for it to be more commonly regarded as a niche hobby requiring steady caution.

We should all wonder how much of the functionality "gaming" has swallowed of the already smaller slice of social and mental well-being the internet has been helping us evolve, alongside the countless milder or more positive evolutions it also heaps onto us with our enthusiastic consent.