I would suggest that you read up on the MEDICAL condition known as addiction.

I think you misunderstand addiction. Someone who is addicted to something is unable to control how often they do it, how much time they invest in it.

There's a difference between someone who is addicted to WoW and someone who plays too much. And while your suggestion may work for those who simply spend more time than they should playing Wow, this discussion was focusing on those who are addicted to it.

Or that they develop enough willingness to make an attempt to step back into reality. With any kind of addiction, people do not quit until they are willing to attempt to change their behavior patterns.

Not saying that they would have to log off WoW and go see an IRL therapist. See my suggestion that therapists be made available through in-game methods.

I think that you are referring to a personality disorder rather than the addiction though. While it's true that addiction and isolationist personalities go together in most cases the isolation is a result of the addiction and must be treated as a part of the recovery process.

Alcoholics for instance are often extreme isolationists at least as bad as WoW addicts, perhaps more so since they often don't even have human contact through the medium of the game. They cannot recover however until they develop at least enough willingness to step just far enough outside of their comfort zone to ask for help.

I'm not an expert on addiction and the particulars with MMO addiction may be such that you are correct or that the method employed by the aforementioned therapists will actually be of use. I don't think that enough is known about this specific sub-type of addictive personality at this time to say for sure. However, with what has been discovered with all other types of addictive behavior in the past, the likelihood is high that the same treatment methods and protocol will hold true for this addiction as well. For instance, all recovery programs, for over-eaters, sex addicts, drug addicts, etc. are all based on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The specifics may be different but the framework of the recovery process and the necessary "steps" that one must take to recover from those addictions is the same. And it's been the case thus far, until a better method is found, that this same process is the most successful for all of the various forms of addiction.

I will gladly eat my words if I am proven to be wrong. Anything that helps people overcome addiction is great in my book, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. At least they're trying to do something. At the very least their presence in-game may plant the seed of "I might be an addict" into someone's head that will later grow into the willingness to ask for help.

I have to say that any addiction counselor with even a modicum of knowledge in their chosen field would know going into this that it's bollocks.

The fact is that you don't approach people who have a problem while they are in active addiction. Doing this is the equivalent of going to a bar to have a chat with an alcoholic. Beyond even that, no amount of pestering someone with an addiction is going to make them quit or even HELP them to quit. They simply have to come to the point that they personally are ready to take action and then you just have to make sure that the information on where they can go to get help is widely disseminated in order to ease that transition for them.

One thing that I'm not totally clear on here: Are these counselors responding to actual requests for aid or are they just hanging out and yelling to everyone that they're selling their wares? "I'll give you 10k to talk to me about your addiction...or at least be in my raid."

If they're just hanging out unsolicited and looking for people who want to talk about their problem...well it's good for them to BE there if someone wants to talk about it, sort of the way that you can pick up the phone and call an AA central office in your area when you feel that you may need help with THAT addiction, but I still don't feel that this is the best use of their time.

Maybe it would have been better for them to pressure Blizzard into including some kind of service for this. Where if someone feels that they need help with their addiction they can link to it through the Blizzard website or maybe even contact a counselor in-game. A bunch of counselors walking around unsolicited asking people if they'd like to talk about addiction though? That's a little too much like the Jehovah Witnesses for my tastes.

with this article is that it was kind of minimalist. Cory has been talking about this exact thing for a long time--so I'm not totally sure why it's news now, but I feel like he's done it better in the past. For those who disagree with his assessment based on this article; I advise you to read "Content", a collection of speeches that he's given where he talks about just this type of thing (it's free to download just like all of his other work).

The one thing that I think puts traditional print newspapers in danger of going under that I did not see mentioned in this specific article is that the internet puts them further behind the curve. Television news made "Breaking News" stories possible. The internet made "Breaking News" universal. Where television news can't afford to interrupt their programming every time a new story breaks it's on the internet immediately. Where traditional print media had an advantage over television news (which allowed them to co-exist) is that it allowed for more information, a five-page story in the times contains more data that is relevant to the story than a 5 minute television spot (which would actually be a pretty long spot--not that I've ever seen a five-page story in the times). The ease with which stories can be found on the internet actually allows for even more information than is available in print media. With the internet, I have the option to drill-down on the story, I can read stories about: the author of the story; the city that it took place in; the culture of that city; historic events that may have lead to this; etc.

So internet news does everything that print AND television news media does -- only better. I can get my information faster, on my own time, with more depth and the freedom to research and discover the story in the ways that I think are relevant. It's not like those traditional companies are going away -- there will still be a "New York Times" 20yrs from now--hell there'll probably still be a printed version of it--but most of the content will be online and since it'll still be coming from the "New York Times" you'll still have the same amount of trust (or dis-trust) for that information as you had before.

Cory's article was not about telling everyone that he has the answers; that he is culturally relevant and they are not. It was a warning to traditional media outlets about possible pitfalls in a future economy. As a science-fiction writer, one of Cory's job titles is "futurist", and just like Robert Heinlein before him, it's not a question of whether or not he's one-hundred percent accurate. What's more important is that he speaks with the voice of the present day. I'm sure that he won't be totally correct in his assumptions--because who ever is(?)--and I don't believe that he expects to be completely accurate either (and I say this as an admitted fan of his) but at least he said his piece.

p.s. Just before I wrote this, a representative of Amazon.com was on the today show talking about their e-book reader and how it's one of the main reasons that they're not slowing down in the weak economy. (print media what?)

off topic*

I don't understand why people get so hung up grammatical errors that don't affect the message that the writer was trying to get across. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the problem isn't that he didn't capitalize, but is instead the fact that you judged his intelligence based on his lack of capitalization rather than the content of his message? A rose by any other name after all...