Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
What's the difference between an addiction and something you like doing?
We like to do the things we like to do. I have a friend of mine who likes camping and takes it to the extreme. He's got a jeep, and spends his weekend at a lake in a tent fishing, hunting, and four wheeling. He spends a lot of money and time on it. Nothing wrong with that; He's doing something he enjoys.
Whatever.
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To me addiction is when doing whatever it is you are doing starts to cause problems in your everyday life.
For example. A woman I know was addicted to World of Warcraft and it cost her a marriage and nearly her job. It started out just as something she enjoyed doing. She would play after work or on the weekends etc. Then it got worse. She started playing more and more. A couple of times she forgot to pick her kid up from their sports practices then one day her computer broke. She called another friend of mine who builds computers and he told her that he would come over that Saturday to check it out. He thought it was either a memory problem or possibly a hard drive issue. Whichever it was he could fix it that day.
The computer broke on a Thursday afternoon. She couldn't wait two days to get it fixed so she went to Wal Mart and spent $1400 on a new computer, brought it home and back then then game took a few hours to install so by the time she had it all installed it was too late to play anyway. When her husband found out he was not happy and forced her to take it back. They had a big fight about it, but by then the old one was fixed so she took the new one back.
A few months later she was so bad that she would come home from work, sit down and play until she was ready to pass out then go to bed. Everything involving the family took place while she was on a short break for a few minutes in the game. One afternoon she came home and found the computer was gone. Her husband and taken it and hid it. She flipped out, a fight started and a week later they separated.
As they were going through a divorce she started calling in sick to stay home and play and she would stay up so late that she would oversleep and be late. She was missing enough work that she was falling behind on her bills.
Eventually her friends and family pulled a full on intervention with her. When she heard her kids tell her the game was more important to her than they were and her boss told her he was right on the verge of firing her she finally realized she had a problem and quit.