- This one has been floating around for a bit, but is worth linking - Time Magazine's Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates has a piece up called 'Confessions of a 30-Year-Old Gamer', in which he talks about his MMO semi-addiction in pretty bald terms.

I'm not sure labeling himself simply as a 'gamer' is fair to gamers as a whole - this is specifically MMO addiction, as opposed to playing Tetris on the way home - but his MMO experiences are stark, of course: "I retreated to my old haven of video games and purchased Everquest, the forerunner to WoW. The dude at the counter rang me up and laughed as he said "Picking up Evercrack, I see." I didn't fully get the joke until two years later."

Oh? "By then I was playing the game 16 hours a day. I'd gained 30 pounds. I didn't have a job. The end came one weekend when I played a marathon session, which I only interrupted for trips to Dunkin' Donuts. I quit, lost the weight, and put my life back in order." However, he does make a good and fair point in there: "What I came to understand was that WoW was not necessarily an escape, but a surrogate for a community that is harder and harder to find in the real world." So, not a hatchet job, at all - but bald and thought-provoking. It may just be the headline that bothers me? [Via T-I.]