I know I know, I'm a little late today with the Guest Writer Article...

Just got back from the Oriole game, and it's about 8pm...and we still have 2 parties to get to today so it's gonna be a llllooonnnggg night lol.

Well today's guest writer actually approached me first and volunteered/requested to write an article for the Saturday Guest Writer series. How cool is that! Big thumbs up for taking the initiative on that one bro

So without any further ado, help me welcome this weekends guest writer...T-Hoe-ster Mod !!!!!

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Hey guys, this is my first ever essay/article for anything other than school, so please post comments and suggestions, none of this is copied, but I got some Information from BBCÂ’s Focus magazine, and EBay, trading game accounts and items over EBay is illegal for most of the games, so donÂ’t try it. IÂ’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow, so donÂ’t be offended if I donÂ’t respond for a while.




Game addiction

20 years ago, you had to be a nerd to know anything about how a computer works, and you also had to live in your motherÂ’s basement and not have a girlfriend. However recently that was all been turned on its head, the computing world announced that one of its members had found a girlfriend!

All jokes aside, nowadays, computing and gaming is massive, and if by last years figures were anything to go by, it's going to get a lot bigger, World of Warcraft has had 10 times the amount of players playing in 2005 than it did in 2004, brining the total amount to a staggering 5 million players, with 500,00 playing at any one time, if it carries on expanding like this, by 2007 all of Britain could be playing at any one time!

These games are designed to be hugely addictive, and some people spend hundreds of hours getting their account up to the high levels, my friend plays Runescape (an internet MMORPG (massivly-multiplay-online-role-playing-game)) for around 2-3 hours a day, more at weekends and holidays, and he has been playing it for 2 and a half years, ill leave you to do the maths.

As you can imagine, you have to be very determined get anywhere respectable in these games, and you need the 5-10 pounds a moth for the membership, nothing at all to anybody with a decent job, but when you've been playing for almost 3 years it adds up, £360 pounds, and you need to get that, and on the other end of the spectrum, you get the rich kid who wants to get it all without any time or effort, so, enter EBay, searching for "internet games" comes up with several £700-1000 accounts for various games, that's not bad money. And that brings me on to this, last year in shanghai, a man lent his friend a dragon sabre on Legends of Mir III (another MMORPG), his friend sold it for £500 over EBay. Furious, the man went to the police, who refused to help, so the man went over to his friends house and stabbed him through the heart with an all-too-real knife, so who’s too blame? The Knife didn’t exist in the eyes of the law, but the man had spent lots of time and money to get it, so doesn’t it count as property?

The story above is us one in a growing list of people who have died in real life while locked in the gaming universe, a 51 year old man, and perhaps more shockingly, a young girl, known as "snowly", who had been preparing for a difficult part of the game (, to kill the Black Dragon Prince). Her death was followed by one of the most remarkable events ever on the Internet, an online funeral!





It might have been hard to make the companies put anti-addiction measures into their games, but the death of two of their players, and with 1 in 5 gamers addicted, it's seemed to have done the trick, clocks are being put into games to remind people of time passed, games are now telling players to take breaks in-between playing, which is exactly the reason casinos do neither.

Is this problem going to get better or worse, with new and advanced graphics, will online gaming cost more and more people their lives? It seems a bit extreme, to be talking about people really dieing because theyÂ’re spending to much time in a supposed game?

Thanks for reading, please post suggestions and comments, I will read them and respond when I get back,

Callum.

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Thanks for the article man. Hope you have a safe trip and we'll catch ya when you return!