The unfortunate status of the MMO market is as follows:

WoW houses approximately 12 million players now, 9 million of which are on some level (of the B. F. Skinner model of addiction) psychologically addicted to World of Warcraft ( Source: http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Local/200...296301-sun.html ). Beyond this, there's also the new theories flying around regarding remote personality disorder and addictions to virtual property compounding the issue. Most of these players will remain addicted until they do what the majority of Relentless, Death and Taxes, Team Pandemic, or other notables have done and lose the positive reinforcement they've come to gain from WoW.

Seeing as losing the positive reinforcement from WoW generally takes mastering a class, skill, pvp, pve, or some other aspect of the game, most players will remain, on some level, addicted to World of Warcraft. This being said, ask yourself, how many times have you quit and reactivated WoW?

The retention rating of customers on World of Warcraft is about 96%, which means that 96% of players generally do not cancel their account, or if they do cancel their account, it is reactivated within 3 months. Polls show that 68% of those who left WoW when AoC came out have returned, and 46% of those who left WoW when Warhammer came out have returned (Source: http://kotaku.com/5078328/aoc-and-war-play...back-to-azeroth ).

Ouch, this hits home. Was pretty much engaged and I started playing WoW casually with some pals, and my significant other decided to play. Fun times for a month or two, but I was too casual at it, didn't powerlevel and, as each night wore down, would prod for other types of games (if you get my drift ). The mate, on the other hand, was so focused in the game - I'd get yelled at if I tried to be affectionate! Eventually things fell apart.

One thing to remember, though, is that addiction to games serves only as a catalyst. I firmly believe if there are latent issues, other stimuli will bring them up up at a later date even if gaming is avoided - games just magnify the problems and push them forwards more quickly, be that relationship issues, social anxiety, emotional states, so on, so forth.

What I found particularly interesting was the suggestion that part of the addictiveness of a virtual world is the sense in which you can be more successful there than in real life. Do we agree?

Going to show this to my friends.

Addiction can and will override emotion though.

Show it to your camel buddy.

Edit: This might seem racially charged, but it is in fact sexually charged as it has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with camel physiology.

The more you know .-+=*

I think if you've the type of personality that will get "hooked" there are probably many other things you can cite as having been addicting or potentially will be addicting.