Since World of Warcraft became the first and currently only massive success in the MMOG market based on numbers, psychologists have been studying and generally condemning the MMO industry for not only creating highly addictive games but also encouraging addictive behaviour in pre-teens. Nobody has however looked at what governments are doing to prevent addictive behaviour in the population or at least educate people to deal with addictions of this nature.

There have been arguments thrown back and forth about the addictive side to MMOs for years but the argument only came to the forefront of media coverage thanks to the success of World of Warcraft. We've all heard about the tales of parents neglecting their children and inevitably loosing them due to government intervention. We've heard about marriages and relationships ending due to people not paying their partner enough attention because they would rather grind than, "grind."

One extreme example of addiction effecting real life issues occurred in China, when the Chinese government and other organisations began to point the finger at MMOs, claiming that they would lead to the collapse of the countries economy and possibly the world economy in a short space of time. If we ignore the decreasing amount of trade occurring in china due to such things as insufficient safety checks in factories, which is set to see China loose billions of dollars of income, I can see how they drew this conclusion. Aside from that however, I believe the government haven’t really looked at the issue in any great detail.

One solution however, is sitting right under our Governments noses, and that is in our schools. It is all well and good condemning Blizzard and other companies for creating addictive games and promoting addictive behaviour but I do not recall any education on psychological addiction. I remember being told that alcohol and tobacco, among other substance, are physically addictive but I do not recall being told what a psychological addiction was or educated on how to deal with these psychological addictions. Why is that?

Well the answer, as far as I can see, is that psychological addiction was not really an issue until now and 18 years ago (when I was born), the Internet was but a brain-child and not anything it is today. Now however, it is a multi-national multi-billion dollar industry and the last bastion of freedom (which will inevitably be taken away) and is the single biggest psychological addiction in existence. If we take this into account, psychological addiction possibly has the single largest detrimental effect on not only economic conditions in the world but also encourages anti-social behaviour. Surely the government has seen this and responded by implementing policy or at least a white paper that calls for sustained training into the causes, effects of and ways of preventing (or at least dealing with) psychological addictions. If they have, I haven’t heard of it.

In the end, we are all subject to psychological addictions from every angle. Prior to the Internet, we had television. Prior to TV, we had radio. There has always been something to latch on to, so to speak. Perhaps now is the time we start educating and investigating ways of dealing with it, not only so we can continue to play MMOs and use the Internet with the confidence that we know the risks but also so that freedom of speech and action continues, undisturbed by corruption.