Today I saw a link to this blog up on Slashdot:

http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html

Over the years I have heard the loud echoes of this sort of sentiment. Just look at the headline on Slashdot

“How Warcraft really does wreck lives”

Reading this guy’s personal experience does make it sound as though it was the game itself that lead to him gaining 30 pounds, not playing the guitar anymore or doing Kung Fu.

“It’s the game’s fault.” “It’s not my fault”. “The game made me do it.” “Games encourage kids to go out on murdering sprees”… and on and on and on.

At what point do personal choices come into the picture here? This gentleman clearly made life choices about what he wanted to do with his time. I respect that. I even can respect the position that some people play these games too much, because I personally think that’s true. But the game isn’t making them do anything. The game isn’t designed to keep people playing. It’s only designed to entertain them.

I actually think it’s the other way around. People are designed that way.

When we as humans find something we like to do, we want to keep doing it.

It really is that simple.

It’s in our DNA. Are some people more prone then others to getting “hooked” on these kinds of games? Maybe. But there are plenty of people who are hooked on NFL Football and don’t want to hear from their family on Sunday’s because they are busy watching the game.

In my younger days I can say I was hooked on Dungeons and Dragons. It was an obsession. The same was true of my first online game (Simutronic’s Cyberstrike)… and Magic: The Gathering was a bigtime passion of mine and many of my friends for a long long time. I spent way too much money on buying those cards. To some of you maybe these were obsessions of yours too. I certainly don’t blame any of those games for the time I “lost” to them. They were some of the best times I had with my friends and also contributed greatly to the kinds of things I like to do now.

I think it’s all the same in the end. We all have to make our own choices. I don’t believe for a second that WoW (or any other MMO including our own) is designed to get people hooked.

It’s a game. 

It’s supposed to be fun and it is.

If it becomes an obsession for some people, that’s something they need to think about changing for themselves. As gamemakers our job is to make great, fun and challenging games. This isn’t the moral equivalent of the Manhattan Project where we have game designers saying “this is just too fun… the world will be a worse off place if we make it too fun”.

It’s a game.

Smed