I am not married. I have no children. I do live back with my mother now though, so I cannot say that my time locked away in my room does not have a negative effect on people other than myself. I began to play WoW four years ago, having originally played the rts games that heralded it, initially thinking it'd be great to be able to actually walk around in all those buildings you created or destroyed in the strategy game campaign maps. For a long time I managed to balance my time between playing online and living a relatively normal life through work, friends and relationships. I quit the game every once in a while when I got bored or no longer found the content interesting. I consider myself intelligent enough to fully realise that the design of the game is primarily geared towards enticing you into a system of simulated rewards along a sliding scale. No matter how you strive to equip yourself in the best gear, how quickly you manage to clear a certain dungeon or raid boss or how many hours you spend levelling up one of the professions to make in-game profit through the auction house, the developers will continually and systematically release new content that makes your work redundant and forces you to repeat the process.

Initially I found this to be an attractive aspect of the game. It was something you can never complete, and thus never get bored of, right? Why go out and spend a load of cash every other week because you have completed that new game you bought, when at less of a cost you can just keep on playing this online game and be fed a stream of new places to explore and new things to experience? Even when, after I had taken an extended leave to work overseas as a volunteer in an attempt to broaden my experiences and enliven my passion for live, my account was compromised and I lost everything, effectively having to start over in terms of gold and equipment, I continued to play. I simply created a new character to earn with and before long had amassed the fortune I had lost, re-equipped my characters and advanced from the stage I had left off. This may be rambling now, but I think it's important to highlight just how obsessed I am with this virtual world.

Nearly all of my issues relating to the game are related to personal flaws. I have an incredibly low self-esteem and suffer from severe depression. I am scared of a world I have grown to deeply dislike, through the things I have actually gone around the world to see, and have very little faith left in humanity. Thus, in the arena of fantasy I find an escape. All of my shortcomings and fears are buried beneath a glittering avatar of my virtual self, where I can earn achievements through work, sometimes on an incredibly unbalanced scale that'd have an employer taken to court for in reality - 80 hours for a tabard and a title that makes me look a little bit better. Essentially though, for the majority of people that play, this is what takes hold. The overwhelming drive to 'appear superior' to their peers. It could be argued that this is a hard-coded aspect of human nature, but it is one that the design of the game thrives upon. You build esteem and reputation based on your skill. So when outside influences threaten that reputation - say, someone in reality asks you to do something while you are involved in a boss encounter, walking away would result in you all dieing and the others, people you will never meet, will end up being pissed off with you - you become naturally defensive. For those of you posting on behalf of close loved ones, you have likely encountered these situations, where your relative/ betrothed/ spouse becomes irrationally angered by a simple topic that may distract them from the game. What we gamers fail to keep in perspective is.... everything. Life slowly but surely becomes a sidenote to whatever it is in the game that attracts us most, be that killing a difficult boss, reaching a certain total number of player kills or simply exploring for an achievement.

That, relatively recent, addition to the game is the developer's crowning masterpiece - their true display of business genius. No longer are the dull tasks of killing redundant bosses or exploring the in-game world utterly devoid of return - now you are rewarded with a certain number of points to your character for meeting certain requirements or fulfilling certain goals, all geared entirely towards simply looking 'better' at the game. You cannot even buy anything with these points. They are utterly useless. Yet thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, including myself, will hunt them down tirelessly. We can get some points for killing that beastie, which we are now able to do wearing a frilly dress and punch to death where before it required us geared-to-the-gills? Off we go! We can kill a god that once took 40 others with just 3? That's our night sorted.

Perhaps I am an extreme case. I realise I need help. I realise that Warcraft is designed to create a situation that encourages replay. I realise that, though incredibly canny in their implementation of game aspects, the company involved is not to blame. I realise I should likely seek professional help, to deal with the issues that really have me signing my life away to a childlike facsimile where pain equates to a few flashes of red around the screen, death means a simple run back to the corpse where you might resurrect and there is no poverty because you can just kill some creatures and sell their organs for insane profit.

If any of this made sense, and you made it this far, I hope it helps you recognise why those you care for act irrationally, and that it not for loss of love for you. If you are addicted yourself and recognise any of what I said, be strong. Walking away is not easy. Facing life is not easy. The world is a hard and brutal place, sometimes too much for many of us. Do not isolate those you have. If you feel you have nobody, seek help from wherever you can. Do not become like me.