1P Start

Addiction of any kind is obviously a huge problem, and in these days when most of us can get hold of pretty much anything we desire, the range of addictions is growing massively.

It used to be that someone’s vice was sex, drugs, or drink, and that was about it. Now we have different forms of addiction, from porn, to the Internet, to gaming. However, out of those, I’d assume that gaming was the least serious, with less underlying reasons attached to it. But that’s not the case, at least according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon, who recently spoke to Boston.com about the prevalence of addiction to games such as World of Warcraft.

Block specializes in treating gamers who get so caught up in the world of warlocks and elves that they can’t then drag themselves away. And he views gaming addiction as more serious, and more complicated to treat than porn addiction.

The reasons he claims are to blame for this are two-fold. Firstly, porn addiction is more tolerated than gaming addiction. People expect porn to be a factor in a huge number of people’s lives. Sex is all around us, and so when someone gets addicted to one element of that, it’s not wholly unexpected.

The other reason is that therapists are unable to treat gaming addiction in such an easy way as porn addiction, simply because many don’t understand it. This is how he describes the problem:

OK, there was a man engaged in a game called Eve Online. He was one of the most powerful characters in the universe of this game. He had played for years and accumulated great wealth; he would have been worth about $17,000 if he sold his character and all his virtual assets on eBay.

Well, within the game someone took out a contract on his life. And in the span of one night, this guy lost thousands of dollars, lost his alter ego, and was betrayed by everyone he knew in this world.

How does he describe that experience and have any of his friends understand it? It’s so bizarre and otherworldly. In fact, it’s so bizarre that many therapists don’t want to go there.

Even as a gamer, I don’t know about every game there is, so how can a therapist, with bigger things to deal with, be expected to?

World of Warcraft and other similar MMORPGs are highly addictive, and many cases of people, not just kids but adults with otherwise full lives, have ended up wasting their lives, even getting divorced! It seems that with therapists not guaranteed to be of any help, the problem could end up getting much worse before it gets any better. Which is a scary thought.