Is a friend or a member of your family addicted to World of Warcraft, or is pathalogically playing the game?
There’s a more formal test for this, but if it is causing you anxiety and stress, it’s clearly an issue.

Gaming habits do not appear overnight, they develop steadily over a period of time.
Lines are not often quickly crossed, mostly they are moved. You may be seeing things now which you would not have allowed to happen 6 months ago.

I would never play in front of my partner.  I would try to move the line by playing while she was there, and judge her reaction.  Her reaction was always cold and firm in these situations.  This reinforced her position of not wanting me to play.  This lead me to going around the line by playing while she was asleep.  This is how the mind of the gamer works.

Friends I played with would have no problem playing in front of their partner.  The nagging and shouting seemed to be part of it for them.  Different people have different tollerances.

It’s a hard place to be, and can feel very frustrating, I see that now.  Gamers who are playing obessively have tunnel vision.  They are often so heavily focused on the game, when they can play next, the next objectives within the game, when the next raid is and so on, the rest of life becomes a blur.  As an outsider, all you see is the back of a head.

Part of your task is that of understanding.  You need to understand, in part, the game they are playing (I don’t mean also playing it with them, or encouraging them to play).  You should know for example, the nature of World of Warcraft.  It is a massive, multi-player game, with many different Realms, or game servers.  All of these servers are the same world, but support different players.  It is a subscription-based service, which means it requires an ongoing fee in order to play.  The game can be played alone, or with other players.  Players within the game form guilds, which are teams of players working together towards similar goals.

It’s a social game, unlike more traditional computer games.  The human interaction takes the potential to a different level, which is why it is far more compelling and potentially addictive by nature.

This information is not useful as material for nagging, spying or emotional blackmail, but try to understand what they are doing and why.  It’s useful to see where they are at in terms of their relationship with the game, which can help to tailor a response.

This site aims to provide you with an advice network and support in dealing with obsessive gaming.  Hopefully the situations of others will be encouraging and useful.  It’s not an “us vs. them” situation.  Nagging and emotional blackmail may work for some, but I have found that in the main it drives further distance between you and will only encourage more dishonestly and anger.

In the main, if the gamer is a self-supporting adult, it is necessary for them to come to their own realisation that gaming is causing problems in their life.
For younger adults and children, the situation can be different.
As this site and forums develop, further resources will be available for this wide variety of situations.

Overall, keep in mind that you will often be asking someone who has build a reputation within a game, with power and recognition, to come back to a real world, where things look a lot more bleak.  More on this to follow, plus additional resources and articles are available throughout the site.

At this time, we really want to hear your story, please tell it in the forums.