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Travis mentioned an article by Doctor Professor on 'Why I Quit [World of Warcraft] And Started Working Out'. Here's an excerpt.

My cross-country move brought me within a short drive of my guild leader, and one evening she invited me over for a home-cooked meal. The experience irrevocably changed how I saw WoW [World of Warcraft].

She was perfectly nice, and an excellent cook. But it was hard not to notice certain things - no matter how bad I felt for noticing them. It was hard not to notice she lived in a crappy apartment in a crappy neighborhood. It was hard not to notice she was fat. It was hard not to notice that despite her dreams of going back to school and becoming a paramedic, she just worked part-time at a local pizza joint.

She marveled at one point that she'd been playing WoW for four and a half years, ever since the beta. And she'd spent a good chunk of that leading a substantial, successful guild - itself nearly a full-time job.

What, exactly, did she have to show for all the time and work she'd poured into this game? The rest of her life was just the same as it'd been when she'd started. If she'd instead spent the last four and a half years working on her dream, she would be a paramedic by now. Easily.

. . .

I didn't want to look around one day and discover I'd turned into my guild leader, dreams on the horizon but unachieved because my days added up to nothing. The idea frightened and depressed me.

So I quit. I quit hard enough that the way the game had pulled me in the last time wasn't an option anymore. And instead of spending an hour every day doing my daily quests in-game, I spent an hour every day doing "daily quests" in real life - I started working out. I started leveling my actual skills and stats.

I started small - some push ups, some bicep curls, some jogging. Nobody told me I'd gained 50 reputation and 100 experience. And without visible feedback, I had to rely on internal motivation. Whenever I thought to myself, "I could just skip today. It's just one day; it's not that big of a deal," I remembered my guild leader, and I thought about how every day is a decision.

. . .

Before too long, I was seeing real results. I was doing more push ups, lifting heavier weights, running faster for longer. And my appearance improved too. I'm hot now. I feel better and have more energy and confidence. It extends into every aspect of my life. It's far, far more satisfying than hitting Exalted with some faction and earning the right to buy their tabard and mount. The only problem, in fact, is that now I need to buy tighter clothes.

So why do people throw so much time into WoW? Because it's very cleverly designed to hook you, to addict you, and to trick you.

. . .

WoW isn't the only game to hook people this way. It's becoming increasingly commonplace. The same tricks form the foundation of an even more popular game: Farmville.

. . .

Although WoW is a much better game than Farmville, with a substantially different business model, their tactics are fundamentally the same: use your social obligations to keep you clicking. Exploit your friendships, sense of reciprocity, and the joy of being part of a group with shared goals. Turn it all from something commendable to something frivolous that serves mainly to increase the game developer's profits.

This is the trap which caught my guild leader. The same desire to help people that made her want to be a paramedic is exactly what was caught and shamelessly exploited by WoW, holding her in a useless cycle of fake altruism. But tug the thread and it all unravels - all she's really helping people do is play a game. She isn't saving lives. She's just helping people kill time.

How do you avoid this trap? How do you prevent WoW (or games like it) from hooking you into a shadow of what you really want? The answer is simple: don't play blindly. Consider what it is you get out of WoW. Nearly everything the game provides can be found better and more real elsewhere.

. . .

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself: do you want to do something real or something fake? You can't do both at once. Every day you face this decision.

What do you want to do today?

There's more at the link. Doctor Professor encapsulates all of my misgivings about such time-, energy- and resource-consuming games, and adds a few wrinkles about which I hadn't thought. I've never joined either WoW or Farmville, and now I have even more reasons not to do so!

Then, Roberta X linked to an article on Wondermark. I followed the link, and browsed around there for a while when I was done. I came across this wonderfully funny article published in the New York Times in 1890. It describes the commotion (aural, social and legal) caused by the unveiling (or should that be 'unleashing'?) of a steam trombone in Scranton, PA. Here's an extract.

Archaeologists have identified the trombone as the Scriptural 'sackbut' ... Perhaps a future revision of the Old Testament will show that it was not a harp but a sackbut which incited the sick SAUL to give a practical and exemplary turn to his musical criticism. In that case he displayed upon the whole a most commendable moderation. Whosoever has inhabited an apartment near to that in which a practitioner upon the trombone has struggled with the difficulties of the instrument will agree that nailing the student to the wall with a javelin is about the mildest form of expostulation that is appropriate to the offense.

But a steam trombone, a steam trombone of two hundred horsepower, even as a freak of the imagination, shows a terrible malignity, and the embodiment of such cynicism in actual brass, and the pouring through it of volumes of sonorous steam, show what the statute defining murder describes as a depraved mind regardless of human life.

. . .

It is asserted that the appliance of torture introduced by this miscreant in Scranton, against the peace of the people of that town and their dignity, is as much more cacophonous than the more familiar calliope as the calliope is than any instrument properly called musical ... The arrangement of music for an instrument of such requirements is calculated to unsettle the human intellect, while the performance must make the reason of the hearer to totter on its throne.

. . .

It is almost a proof of poverty of spirit that the owner of the awful engine is still alive and at large, and that his victims have gone about to abate his trombone by the mild process of injunction, instead of the more appropriate and effective form of a public riot, which should not have left a foot of brass in the tubing of the instrument, nor one limb upon another of its cruel and unusual proprietor.

There's more at the link. It's so over-the-top, in an utterly genteel way . . . marvelously done! I think H. L. Mencken (who was only ten years old at the time) must surely have derived some inspiration from it. Wondermark has also published a follow-up to the original post, giving more details about the steam trombone and the objections to it. Worthwhile reading.

Thanks to Travis and Roberta for linking to some highly entertaining and thought-provoking reading.

Peter