How Hard It Is to Quit

Think of trying to pull a bowling ball through a keyhole. Think of mowing a football field with hair clippers. Think of landing a Cessna with your eyes shut. . . on a bridge.

For me, that's how hard it was to stop playing The World of Warcraft. It was the first thing I did every morning. I played for an hour or so--to get "caught up" in the Auction House, the guild stuff, the trade channel--even before showering or taking my daily medicine and vitamins. Then I'd have a quick breakfast (i.e. shoving a few handfuls of Cheerios into my mouth and washing it down with a slug of milk straight from the jug) and was back at it again for an hour or two. Then a quick sandwich or hot dog for lunch, then more early afternoon WoW (a great time to handle certain quests since Azeroth tended to be fairly unpopulated during this time--nothing was worse than being 90% into an escort quest only to have some rogue throw blinding powder in your eyes and start 1-2 stabbing you until you went done). Then it'd be some evening WoW, which meant raiding, big-time dungeon massacres, heroic dungeons, and arena fighting. Somewhere in there, I'd squeak in an hour or two for "real" work, but I'd resent every second of it. And the entire time, I'd be mental WoW-ing my way through Kara, or re-speccing my resto druid, or thinking about a new alt and which professions he could have to best support my main.

There's a host of articles on video game addiction available, and I'll hit on most of them soon enough. Here, though, is a decent place to start. It's an interesting how-to wiki post on breaking an addiction to WoW. I'd particularly recommend (a) the WoW cheating idea to "burn out" your interest quickly, (b) assigning a per-hour dollar figure to your time and using a stopwatch to keep track of what each sessions costs you to play, and (c) deleting the game before you leave for a long vacation (the long vacation part is my idea--for me, breaking the CD and deleting the game then sitting around staring at the computer isn't enough--call me crazy, but I'd probably just buy the download again at the Blizzard site and be up and running in thirty minutes).

I'd love to hear from other people on how they managed to get away from WoW or are still struggling with it. If it's just a fun game for you and you can take it or leave it, terrific. But for the rest of us, it's more than that. Those are the folks I'm most interested in hearing from.