WoWed to Death

One of the things I've been greeted with since I got home is that a lot of my friends are now big WoW fans. It's not so much a geek thing, it's more that there isn't much to do out in regional Australia. And at least we get broadband coverage. And computer violence is much better than street violence (though, they still occasionally still practice that).

I'm not going anywhere near anything as beautiful as WoW until I have a job. I would get addicted way to quickly without anything else to root me down. But I have been doing research. And it does look cool. It means I can't play Anarchy Online anymore (even though its free).

But alarming is a spate of deaths related to WoW addiction and obsession. Whether its age old catass-ing, violence springing from online disputes (okay link is not WoW),or probably the most disturbing one I came across was a South Korean couple who let their baby starve to death while they went out for "or just an hour or two" to the local Internet Cafe for WoW, and instead ended up staying there over 24 hours. Say What?

And they laugh at me when I say I'm a bit wary to start playing it just yet.

(Side note: a lot of these incidents come out of Asia - I don't know if this says something about people's growing addiction to technology there, or that they more likely to be crazy urban legends)