The Rabid Paladin

I’m a Facebook convert. It took me a while to get into the full swing of things, but I find that I like to check Facebook periodically throughout the day. It’s a low-intensity way to keep track of people I know. It makes me feel like I am still connected to them without all the overhead of, you know, actually connecting with them.

About a month ago I discovered Facebook games. I admit I went a bit nuts there at first. Once I developed a pattern, though, I found it pretty easy to keep up with five or six games in short spurts a couple times a day without affecting my productivity. Much.

Facebook Game Design

There’s a genre of Facebook games that are heavily RPG-inspired and designed to be played for a couple of minutes a day. Indeed, they have mechanisms built in to achieve a few specific behaviors:

• Encourage you to return at least once a day.
• Encourage long-term involvement by restricting how much you can accomplish on each visit.
• Have competing uses for game resources.
• Optional elite items available mainly by mechanisms that send the game company cash.
• Encourage you to sign your friends up.

I’m pretty sure that we’re a couple of iterations in because it looks like variations on a very few core designs have pretty much taken over the player space, most of them by a company called Zynga.

Most of those elements together make up what I found so intriguing in these games. Resource management, building up over time, being able to play for very short periods of time. These are all wins.

Gang vs. Gang

Unfortunately, the main mechanism to encourage you to sign your friends up is to enable unrestricted player vs. player (PvP) activity and make your PvP power dependent on how many players are in your “group”. A player who can only recruit 15 of his friends to play will be trounced by someone who can amass a group of, say, 50.

The effects of PvP vary, but are all annoying when you’re the loser. Generally something along the lines of health, wealth, and eventual XP loss. Logging in to find that you’ve been attacked a couple of times by other players is a minor annoyance. Logging in to find that an individual attacked you a half-dozen times is more of a major annoyance. Having someone attack you just before you make a major purchase (thus stealing a large amount of your cash and reducing your carefully precise change below the applicable cost) is downright infuriating.

And the real problem is that your options here are few. You can develop a thick hide and simply not care—chalk it up to the cost of playing. You can look for people who play the game and invite them to be your friend so that they’ll be part of your group. You can brow-beat your existing friends to play so that you’ll have a bigger group. That’s pretty much it.

Anger Management

Well, I don’t like losing, and I like pimping my friends even less. And the kinds of people who will accept random friend invites in order to increase their game group size aren’t really all that friendly. Which leaves me a little option-less here.

In the last week or two, I find that I dread checking on my games because of the chance that I’ll have been hit by some jerk with inadequate socialization. The anger on finding that some moron went to town on my character like a dog with a particularly tasty bone has become too big a weight to carry. It’s certainly not a weight I’ll carry voluntarily.

It’s too bad that the experience of playing these games is ruined so thoroughly for me by a small contingency of jerks. That said, all the jerks in the world wouldn’t matter if the games weren’t built to encourage, even privilege, jerk behavior.

Well, I don’t like being angry and my personality is such that it isn’t something I’m going to learn to just accept. Which is my way of working up to saying that I won’t play games with unrestricted PvP any longer.

Reporting Abusive Behavior

A word about the palliative offered in some Zynga games in the form of a link on player profiles to report “abuse”. Zynga support is a marvel of incompetence in and of itself (which you’d discover if you ever tried to report a bug or error). This goes double for their “solution” for abuse reporting. Once you dig out the place where you can actually report abuse, an endeavor fraught with peril and misdirection, the report process places a huge burden on the player to “document” (aka clear unnecessary hurdles) the event. Even then, the first two responses you’ll get are quotes from their faq that have no bearing on your actual report. If you press, and you do have to press, their eventual response will be that they can’t tell you anything more due to “privacy issues”. Which is double-speak for “take your palliative and go away.”

My experiences with Zynga were so bad that I’ll be avoiding them and their products in future just on the principle of limiting the impact of incompetence in the universe.

Melissa has been grooving on the jewelry thing for a couple of years now. It’s an activity she enjoys, both the design/layout/planning and the actual act of putting it all together. Which is a good thing, even though it removes an entire category of things I can safely buy for her.

Well, she now has more than any single non-rap “singer” can reasonably wear in a lifetime so instead of despair and waste, she has begun offering her skill to the masses. Or to discerning individuals at any rate. You can view her shop at Etsy, Rogue Impressions, if you want to see what she has made available.

My personal favorite are the crystal-form d8 sets. I don’t see the earrings listed, but she’s done those as well. She has a whole section dedicated to her designs using gaming dice—each named after a character from our roleplaying games (uh, I hope that wasn’t a secret. I guess I’ll find out...)

 This post is the result of a school assignment Teleri had. The original assignment was to write a "letter to the editor". She modified the assignment to be a blog post. The topic, position, and composition are her own.

I really hate it when I hear someone argue that certain video games should be banned because they are EEEEVIL. Okay, they don’t use that word, but that’s what it comes down to. They might say “kids who play video games are more violent” or “video games make kids more likely to shoot someone.” Or they might say “video games encourage kids to be loners” or “gamers have no friends in real life.” They seem to think that video games only have negative effects on the people who play them.

With all the school shootings and violence going on these days, it makes sense that some people—especially parents—are concerned about how kids are behaving. Video games, especially violent video games, didn’t exist when they were kids, and neither did all this violence. So it makes sense for them to make a connection between the two. And because they think video games are the cause of the problem, it also makes sense that they want to ban them.

The thing is, I myself am a gamer girl. I’m almost fourteen years old and I have yet to shoot someone, let alone go on a shooting spree at the mall. I’m not any more violent than I was before I started playing video games. I have many friends and have no trouble making more friends. So either I am unique among all young gamers, or the assumptions people make about games are wrong. Based on the research done on video games and the people who play them, it turns out that the latter is true.

There have been studies that seem to prove that video games make people more violent. However, much of the research that says this has been proven inconclusive, or in some cases is actually flawed. The studies that are scientifically accurate and peer-reviewed tell a different story. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study examined the effects of playing a violent video game and compared the results to a control group that did not play. They found that the players weren’t any more likely to argue with their friends and partners than the non-players, and they weren’t any more aggressive in general. This is the same result most studies are getting: there’s no causal relationship between violence and video games. MIT professor Henry Jenkins says “No research has found that video games are a primary factor or that violent video game play could turn an otherwise normal person into a killer.”

But what about all those shootings? Well, according to Jenkins, violent crime is actually lower than it used to be—even though 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls are playing video games. The reason we think there is so much violence is that we only find out about shootings because they’re covered in the news, and we hear about those relatively rare incidents a lot more than we used to. The kids who commit these crimes probably have personal or psychological issues that don’t come from playing video games; if video games didn’t exist, they might still have committed those crimes. And Jenkins also says that “researchers find that those serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population” (emphasis added). So video games aren’t to be blamed for crime. (Personally, I think gamers are just too busy to commit violence; it would cut into their game-play time.)

Another claim made by video game opponents is that children can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. In other words, a video game might teach them that it’s okay to shoot someone, so they might believe that shooting a person in real life is just a game and doesn’t really hurt them. But when you ask kids about this, they all say they know what the difference is. Game designer and play theorist Eric Zimmerman says that when people play, they enter what he calls the “magic circle,” which is how they distinguish between the game and reality. What happens while they are in the “magic circle” is always just a game, with only the smallest bit of reality to make it believable. Kids who would never hurt another person in real life have no trouble shooting bad guys in a video game, because they know it’s not real—it’s just a way of keeping score in the game.

But even people who don’t believe video games make kids more violent may still think video games have a bad influence on them. They might think that video games take up too much time and energy, or that they make kids isolated and unable to make friends or have a normal social life. If you’ve ever seen a kid staring bug-eyed at the screen while he shoots aliens, these arguments might seem valid. And it’s true that kids can spend a lot of time on the computer or the console with a favorite game. But that’s something that can be controlled by parents who are aware of their kids’ activities and work with their kids to figure out how much play time is appropriate. Just because there are games in the house, doesn’t mean that they have to play them all the time.

The other point—about gamers having a lack of social skills or being isolated—is so far from being true it’s almost funny. More than half of all gamers play their games with another real live person—often a family member. When you’re playing with another person, it’s usually as a team, and you both have to work together and strategize in order to succeed. This is the opposite of being isolated. Additionally, the hugely popular massively multiplayer online games encourage you to make friends and work with other people in order to have fun. Non-gamers often think that because you never meet these people in real life, it’s not a real friendship. But the hundreds of thousands of people who have participated in online guilds and other organizations would disagree.

What many people don’t realize as they’re focusing on these negative points is that video games can have very positive effects on players. One of these is how games encourage you to strategize and solve problems. These are skills that often come into use in real life. James Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, says that gamers are “active problem solvers who see mistakes as opportunities to learn and are encouraged to test new ideas.” Instead of thinking of mistakes as personal flaws, gamers often think of them as something to learn from. Another positive thing about video games is that they let children express feelings and impulses they wouldn’t be able to act on in real life. It’s better for them to work out anger by beating up a computer opponent than if they just went out and beat up a classmate who made them mad.

If you’re one of those people who think that video games are dangerous, I think you’re probably just worried about the safety of children. That’s a good thing to care about. But banning video games isn’t the way to keep kids safe. What I suggest is that you spend some time playing your kids’ favorite games. Get to know what games they like and why they like them. Your kids will think you are pretty cool if you do. You may find that there are some games that aren’t as awful as you thought just from the title or the box art. You’ll be much better informed about video games than if you just jump to conclusions. Who knows—maybe you’ll discover some games you like playing!

Two developments in two different life aspects both went live today. On a personal level, an article by a friend of mine in an online gaming magazine mentions me by name. Also, I’m the one with the post-digested d6, though I think it was my sister and not daughter who did the not-quite-digesting. I say "I think" because my memory is truly terrible and I’m never sure about anything that happened that long ago (even the interesting stuff).

Second, on a professional level, I recently joined a jolly band of rogue developers on a relatively new group blog called The Runtime. I’ve liked some of the current authors there for a while, so I’m pleased as punch (to steal a phrase from days long gone by) about being there. I’ll likely cross-post to my lone development blog, but it’s nice to be accepted into the club, join the discussions there, and maybe gain some readers.

I've noticed that most people don't tend to use their inspirations much in City of Heroes. That's too bad, really, because those boosts, while temporary, are quite handy. I've developed a technique that I use with my inspirations that makes this much less of a problem.

It's simple, really, I just make sure that I leave one slot open at all times. Yeah, I'll keep a couple of the "good ones" in stock because when you need them, you really need them. If you fill up all your slots, though, the end effect is that you don't really use them at all... ever.

The real trick is getting used to thinking in terms of having one or two less inspiration slots than you actually do. That way, whenever that last slot fills up, I'll just use it right then (or give it to a teammate if I know they might want it).

Not much of a tip, but I find it keeps those bonuses hopping. Plus, if you pay attention, you can keep the big versions for actual emergencies while using the smaller ones.

For many significant events in my life, I remember when they occurred by where my family was living at the time. We were in an un-air-conditioned house in Phoenix, Arizona in the summer I first read the Lord of the Rings. I clearly recall both the library and the corner I'd sit in at home while I read it. I devoured the whole trilogy in a couple of days and I remember that it as a friend in an area where I had none.

It'll come as no surprise, then, that I jumped at the chance to play the new MMOG, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. I have to say, Turbine has done an incredible job bringing Middle-Earth alive.

The Good

There's a lot of good things in this game. Turbine learned a lot from their predecessors and have implemented many of the things that keep a game from sucking.

Stealing From World of Warcraft

First off, LotRO lifted some of the best ideas from WoW. Bonus XP from time spent offline, an easy death penalty, blanketing the world in quests, mailboxes, global auction houses, and easy point-to-point transportation all found their way into the game. Essentially, all of those things that make it easy for casual players to feel welcome for the half-hour chunks of time they can afford to spend in a game.

This is a noticeable difference from the attitude of Vanguard where the harder-core you are the better they like it.

No Whack-a-Mole

I would think this would be a given in new MMOGs, but apparently it isn't so I'll just state here that there is no wanton killing of innocent wildlife required in LotRO. There are not only plenty of quests of your level to ensure that you never have to wander aimlessly killing stuff to make that next level, but your quests are easy to find because your mini-map has markers for quest-givers. I had no idea how much of a pain it is having to search for people who have a quest for you or what a difference it makes that people with something for you to do are clearly marked on the overhead map.

Even boring whack-a-mole quests are few and far between. This isn't an accident. I played a week or two in beta around Christmas last year. One of the things that struck me then was how solid the game was so far from release. More interesting was that completing quests often popped up a questionnaire asking how fun that quest was with both a 1-5 scale and a place for comments. What a concept! I've played other betas and can't recall ever seeing anything like it. The fruits are obvious, but only in contrast from having played both then and now. They seem to have spent a not insignificant amount of time fine-tuning the fun. This is a good idea that I hope it gets copied.

Minor Innovations

In addition to the tried-and-true, LotRO does some interesting new things.

The Bunny Slope

The most notable is the use of separate spaces in the beginning game. Your first quest is entirely solo and gets you into the story based on your beginning race. After that first quest, you enter a noob area for characters levels 1-6(ish). There are actually two of these staging areas, one for dwarves and elves and one for the hobbits and humans. After you finish this area, you hit another solo quest. It's only after this second solo quest that you end up in your race-segregated "global" starting area.

Cutting up your experience in this way would feel arbitrary if it weren't for what Turbine does with the story. The troll frozen by Gandalf in your first solo adventure is a statue when you later explore that cave on a quest. The village you only just managed to save (but not before it was almost destroyed by bandits) is a shadow of its former self later as it rebuilds. One of the farmers you warned to enter the safety of the city walls is being mourned by his comrades.

It's not a truly dynamic world, but it's light-years more dynamic than other MMOGs. This story-based growth makes you feel like a part of the history of the world in a remarkable way.

Tank-Healer-Mage

The other thing LotRO does well is mess around with some of what we've come to expect from class build-out. Healing, tanking, and blasting are pretty well split up among the classes in a way that is internally consistent but that doesn't follow the pattern other games use to force certain roles on grouping. What this means is that you don't have people looking for a healer or a tank, they're just looking for others to fill out their group.

This is a good thing.

Best Use of Licensed Content

 By far Turbine's greatest success is in their use of the license, though. This is most noticeable if you play a hobbit, but all of the races do an excellent job with their quests lending to what you'd expect if you were to step into the books. The elves are full of existential ennui, the dwarves with active distrust of all things non-dwarfish, the humans with restless energy, and the hobbits with home, hearth, and village.

In addition, the writing is good. Good intentions aren't always assumed nor are successful quest results un-alloyed or cloying—sometimes the widow has to be told that her son really did run off to become a bandit.

Also, how cool is it to hang with Aragorn?

The Bad

No game is going to be an unmitigated success—not to a reviewer at any rate. LotRO is no exception.

A License Cuts Two Ways

If you don't like the books, then this game isn't for you. Further, if the traits of a specific race annoy you, don't, under any circumstances, play that race. If you don't want to deal with petty jealousies, self-important trivialities, and a preoccupation with food, don't play a hobbit. I enjoyed it, but that's because the writing was so evocative of the settings in the books and the quests were extremely creative. Meeting Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is not a treat. Samwise's Gaffer is kind of a pathetic whiner. Delivering mail on a deadline while dodging nosey hobbits is a new kind of quest, but one not everyone is going to enjoy (it was my favorite, though).

Inconsistently Inconvenient Commodities

Many of the things you want in the game are spread out in non-obvious places. Trainers are clustered in one village which can be inconvenient when all your quests are a village or two away. Auction houses are hard to find for any race over 5 feet tall as are banking facilities. I hate looking like a noob and having to ask if anyone can point me to a convenient resource.

Crafting is Half-baked

I can see that they were trying to be original like they were with classes, but their changes are a humongous PITA for crafters. Bundling crafts in groups of three is only charming in the first minute or two. Particularly when you discover that your bundle doesn't include the ability to gather the resources one of your crafts needs. Add the difficulty in finding an auction house and you have a recipe for frustration.

Also, my favorite craft had beginning items that you can't use until level 15. You start crafting around level 7.

White Guys Can't Jump

I've seen people trash the graphics in the game, but I think they're actually just fine (and in places magnificent). What sucks, though, is the animations. Your feet don't seem to quite touch the ground. Running seems uncannily, uh, smooth. I actively avoid paying attention any time my character has to jump because it just looks so awkward. It's an unfortunate contrast to go from playing my Tauren Hunter in WoW to a dwarf in LotRO. The Tauren just seems to have such weight.

The Conclusion

I'll keep this subscription until I get tired of it—aka the foreseeable future. What I'm looking for more than anything else is how it progresses from here. How often are updates? How comprehensive? Will they improve the crafting (please)? There's a lot I still want to explore. I haven't played any character past level 11 and I haven't done a lot of grouping (because pick-up groups suck and I haven't found a guild/kinship yet). There are some interesting kinks with traits, deeds and kinships I want to explore as well.

I'd definitely put it on the recommend list.

Good friend and Indie game developer Jay Barnson has just taken game development in a new direction: Developing in Public. He sounds a little nervous about it, which makes sense. Unlike those who have previously attempted this feat, though, I think Jay stands a good chance of pulling it off, and with good style.

There are two things that are likely to make this interesting. First, Jay's about ready to release his second indie game, Apocalypse Cow—So we're likely to see this through all the way to a completed game. Second, he's an honest and engaging writer.

It's that second that makes me eager to eavesdrop on the development of his new game. I know he'll present it warts and all and that it'll be entertaining along the way.

I just ran into what has to be the buggiest piece of software... ever. Bear in mind that I predate DOS games and have had experience getting games to run in Win 3.1 and even Win ME--some of them games that push the limit of the "Minimum Recommended System Requirements". Maybe time has softened old wounds, but nothing in my  memory comes even close to the horror that is Dark and Light. Seriously. Couple all those bugs with the worst "support" I can remember and you get an experience that is simply best forgotten. Or better, best never begun.

I mean, I've been in alpha tests that were smoother and more consistent. Who ever heard of a launcher that breaks when IE 7 is installed? Seriously, what dependency does your license query have that will hang just because a user has installed IE 7? How does an upgrade to IE 7 cause a simple dialog box with "Accept" and "Decline" buttons on it to consume 80% of my CPU capacity indefinitely (or at least, for the 25 minutes I allocated for what-the-heck-let's-see-what-happens time)? Also, what company posts a message to their support forums that says merely "the devs say they have fixed this" and then nothing more for weeks when it remains, obviously, unfixed?

And here's the thing: even once I got it working (on an older machine--that's right, a game where I had to effectively downgrade my system to get it to run), the game is possibly the worst MMO I've ever played. I admit that I didn't play long before wiping the travesty off my network. Still, that's going to leave a lasting worst-case benchmark for some time to come.

It's not just that it'd be an insult to High School students to say that it's as if the quests were written by one. It's not just that the translation into English (I'm guessing from French due to the number of prepositional insertions involved) could have been done better by the junior varsity football team after a particularly boisterous homecoming celebration. It's not just that key marketing features were mentioned enough by quest NPCs to be intrusive (mentioning how "big" the world is that often leaves me wondering what they're compensating for). And it's not even just the most generic recycled noob monsters imaginable (seriously, rats, badgers, and bees, oh my! And I suspect the badgers were a desperate late addition, inserted by scaling the rat and giving it a different label).

It's that when you take all these together with a game offering fairies as a playable race, you just know that you have reached depths of crap that will (hopefully) never be repeated in my lifetime. It's like a bunch of executives sat down around a table and generated a list of "features" that they could create to take advantage of this great new kind of game the kids are all playing these days and then went out and hired the cheapest programmers they could find to design and implement it. Seriously, if I were a programmer on that project, I'd slip that one down the ole memory hole and invent some lie to put on my resume in its place--something more respectable like, say, time in the state penitentiary for koala bear poaching.

To entice people into this crap-pile, the publisher has introduced a "Discovery Mode" where you can play to level 10 for free. That's an indication of desperation, make no mistake. I feel for the (possibly) earnest people who put this thing together, but it has to be acknowledged as one of the bigger wastes of money ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting planet. I'd like to say something snide about it being a French production, but seriously, you'd think that'd be enough punishment on its own.

UPDATE: If for some inexplicable reason you have inflicted D&L on yourself and need something to redeem the entire clone concept, Shamus Young has an interesting post on a Diablo II clone that doesn't suck.

Jack Thompson (unhinged anti-gaming activist attorney) shows that his capacity for self-parody is boundless. Here's his fax to the makers of Bully, a game scheduled for release shortly:

Take-Two has until five o’clock p.m., Eastern time, Monday, August 14, 2006, to inform me in writing that it will forthwith provide me with a copy of Bully so that I and others can analyze it to determine whether it still poses a threat of copycat violence in our schools (See Miami-Dade School Board’s unanimous Resolution), or the following will occur:

I shall file a lawsuit against your respective companies to stop the game’s October 1 release.

If I were Take-Two, my whole response would be "It takes one to know one, Jack." Or maybe a retail box that contains only a hand-mirror. The thing is, you just know that Jack is going to sue them regardless of anything they do. They may as well get a dig in while they can.

Some busy-body is trying to create a new mental disorder of "Game Addiction." Now, there may be those who play games too much. They may even need professional help. but I have a couple of problems with this Dr. Orzack and what she is trying to do.

Obvious Self-Interest

My first issue is the same one I had back in 1998 and 1999 with the wide-spread Y2K hysteria. Talking with experts who have an obvious self-interest in an issue is problematic (at best). The first tip-off that this is a problem in the analysis is her "estimation" that some 40% of World of Warcraft players are addicted. It's hard to figure how she has arrived at this number. She goes from mentioning that WoW has around 6 million subscribers and moves right into the 40% figure. Is it de facto addictive because it is popular? Or is 40% what you'd expect to find for any game? Or just for online games?

I can't help doing the money math here. If there are over a million people with this addiction and she is busy setting herself up as the expert who can cure it, that constitutes a pretty significant bid for patients. It bugs me that the media is so credulous in these things. I mean, in a world where journalists were actually, you know, capable of rational thought, the headline might have read "Psychiatrist seeks millions of new patients". I mean, the interviewer was sharp enough to do the math, but seems to have bypassed considering the implications inherent in such a radical statement.

Further, rational thought would have pointed out the blatant anti-business bias displayed by Dr. Orzack (I find myself fighting the impulse to use scare quotes every time I use her title)--a bias that leads to some really bad claims of intent. What, exactly, does she think that Blizzard gains from having players who are addicted? In other words, why would anybody want to design an online game that is addictive? She doesn't seem to have thought about the fact that MMORPGs are inherently different from other types of games because they carry an incremental increase in cost based on use. Indeed, in my opinion the reason that Blizzard is such a success is because they actively court more casual players. That is certainly a key to my own continued play. It's a classic win-win where the casual players have a game that is fun without needing to be connected 24/7 and Blizzard collects their monthly subscription for an account that uses fewer resources than hard-core players use. If anything, business self-interest would seek content that keeps people interested enough to maintain their subscription, but not so interesting that players feel they have to be logged in all the time or risk missing the good stuff.

In fact, when stated like that you can see ways that Blizzard is taking pains to reduce the need to be logged in. Periodic monthly events (as opposed to random and constantly changing events) for example, encourage you to drop in when you have time. The Auction House is great for selling stuff without having to be logged in--as the in-game email system enables you to transfer money and items to friends without having to be online at the same time. People don't feel that they're missing an opportunity that might otherwise pass them by. Aggregating a number of servers for battlegrounds is another example. If I have a greater chance of getting into a battleground any time I want to, I'm not going to be hanging out during peak hours hoping to find one open.

Online Community

Another difference you have to be careful of in an MMORPG is the "MM". When I was tempting a friend of mine into EverQuest (back in the day), I had had enough experience to give him a simple warning. I'd gone through a couple of guild tantrums so I prepared him by telling him "don't let anybody tell you this is just a game." Yeah, you're playing a game, but never let yourself forget that those are other people on the other end of the connection. The relationships you'll build online will have many of the same characteristics of relationships anywhere else. You'll form emotional ties, good and bad, with those people. And don't forget that your actions will affect other live human beings--which means that there are not insignificant real moral dimensions in your dealings with them as well.

Which is why I don't see the problem when Dr. Orzack says "[one] 18-year-old individual was miserable. He didn't get along with any of his family members and kept withdrawing into the game." An 18-year-old in a painful family situation seeking another community seems like a natural (and possibly healthy depending on the family situation--in this case a divorce and related trauma) thing to me. This privileging of face-to-face community is suspect to me and not just because I'm something of a recluse myself. After all, in-person communities aren't all beneficial. I'd much prefer that a troubled teen find himself mugging murlocks in Hillsbrad Foothills (I hate those things) than some shopper in a parking lot.

By ignoring that playing MMORPGs necessarily means being connected to other people, Dr. Orzack ignores things that contradict her addiction hypothesis. After all, I'm not seeing a huge difference between someone joining a football team and signing up to play World of Warcraft. If the only difference is sweat, injury, and public exhibition, then I fail to see the danger in playing MMORPGs. I don't know, maybe she considers High School sports programs addictive as well. Or maybe she would if she thought she could con credulous parents into forking out her hourly rate to treat it...