This is a bad idea. One, these counselors will be put at risk of WOW addiction themselves. Two, without teeth, the powers gamemasters have, how are they going to be able to get players to listen to them and take them seriously? Three, there are the private servers where the worst of the WOW community go when they cant play retail, so there is no ultimate enforcement. If Blizzard wants to be creative, they'd add additional information in the achievement area, denoting when the character was created (how old it is) and the average daily time played by the account. This could help identify the hard core from the casual. But why punish success?

Great article, Corey. I think when having fun starts turning into addiction, it is friends that pull us out. And to the previous comment, you can very easily see hours played by just typing /played. There is also a wealth of information in the statistics page, which I think may have the data you suggest. I don't have time to check now, as I'm on my lunch break from WoW, I mean work, but I'll check later on when I get home.

Seriously, this is ridiculous!

No no, no no no. I can't believe these quotes. The idea that a maladjusted person might OVER-rely on outside or artificial stimuli to make themselves feel good is obviously not ridiculous, but this article is!

For a psychiatrist to imply that the source of self-medication itself is the key to solving a wide variety of possible difficulties is insane. Everyone knows that different people need different amounts of stimuli in different areas and in different amounts for different reasons, and to use such old, hackneyed phrases as "spending so much time playing these games that they have lost touch with the real world..." or, "...they played them for up to 16 hours a day, leading them to neglect their social lives..." instead of spending time discussing why anyone might self-medicate themselves into a hole is less than impressive.

If they've ever met a person who was truly in trouble, they should know that contacting them in game wouldn't help. The only way to get someone to stop is to alter their home schedule, make them unable to log on for a specific amount of time, take care of related, root problems (which there will always be) then monitor play after initial contact and progress has been made in all these other areas.

The best way an outside agency can advocate against WOW addiction is by letting people know about what already exists: time management tools. When dealing with someone who has a psychological difficulty underpinning their actions, you can't ensure any sort of remedy without making sure the people around them support their needs and life changes in the day to day environment. How are Tauren Shamanshrinks going to do that? Make suggestions of where to find outside help? Great, but as another poster asked, how will they know where to make the suggestions? What's next? In-game adds for Paxil as you're riding the hippogryph? Sorry man, you guys have the whole internet to use if you want to reach people in their homes. Use it.

The story is ridiculous or the subject matter?

To me it is almost like meeting me at Starbucks to talk to me about my caffeine addiction. Wait, I have a better one, but I can not say it because it is not PG13 but funny as hell... I am laughing my butt off..

The article within the article. Not this article but the Euro Article hehe

I think the psychiatrist himself is the one who needs therapy!

I think the "coffee addiction therapy at Starbucks" analogy is a valid one.

I also think that this psychiatrist needs to do further research into online gaming before he starts this cockamamy scheme. Many disabled gamers play online games for enormous amounts of time, but they are not necessarily addicted. I know I play a lot because it is one of the only things I can do when I'm in pain, and it helps me to direct my focus away from the pain.

WoW has people addicted because of its core design. It is a giant Skinner Box, and I will even go so far as to say that Blizzard purposely tried to make it addictive. Other MMO's, not so much. I have played most of them, and I still jump around every few months or so. I can definitely say that the Pokemon-style gameplay of WoW tires me much sooner than the albeit only slightly different systems that other games employ.