Hidden Life

My brother's addicted to a game at the moment - it makes it hard to ever write something on my blog because he's always in a raid with 40 other people who'll be "let down" if he were to let me use my computer. I can't rightly complain about this because I used to use the same logic to prevent my dad from kicking me off the computer when my parents stayed with me for a few months last year. However it has put me in mind of a conversation I had with George yesterday concerning the corporate side of computer gaming. I was trying to justify the creation of computer games, argueing that some companies actually made the games for the pleasure of the games and not the money. Among the companies I attempted to defend was Blizzard the creators of the game my brother is currently addicted to and the game that almost resulted in me failing my third year of uni.

I got home and one of my favourite webcomics had this strip - the game here is referring to the Blizzard game too which my brother is addicted. It is not exagerrating in the slightest - I have gone through 28 hours of solid gaming with only a biscuit and a cup of tea to sustain me, and no toilet breaks. In the past this wasn't an issue, the basic premise was, I buy a game; I complete the game within a 48 hour period having bought with the game two pints of caffeine of any variant and a large pack of dorritos. Once this 48 hour period has ended the game is only 75% likely to be replayed in the next four months. Subsequent replays of a game rarely take more than a few hours as well. With Blizzard's World of Warcraft however, as with other Massive Multiplayer Online games the addiction is subject to a minimum of 4-5 months solid addiction, with the possibility of losing up to three-four years of one's life in any given game. Somehow I'm finding it difficult to maintain the justification that there isn't something inherently evil about computer gaming.

This is a concept contrary to everything people have taught me regarding things not being inherently evil only used for evil - we know this simply isn't true when we look at atomic weapons and hard drugs but why does it cease to be the case when we apply it to daytime television and computer gaming. There is no doubt in my mind that I have an addictive personality - I find the same solice in comics I do in computer games yet I do not percieve these as a similar avarice. Perhaps it is because I would estimate that I have spent between 15-25% of my life so far playing computer games, a decent percentage of that World of Warcraft.

Today my brother realised his computer was not in fact broken (having assumed it was broken for the past three months). He found this out by turning it on funnily enough something we hadn't tried for those same three months. While this meant I could have done some web research, read other people's blogs and generally check my mail and stuff my instinct was instead to resubscribe to World of Warcraft (£8.99 per month) and login. For the first time in my life I didn't enjoy computer games, I was and am depressed that I even spent the hour I did on them. It made me want to flee. I'm really hoping I won't look back... and for that matter remember to cancel my subscription.