Slate article on video game addiction

Josh Levin's Slate.com article says that computer solitaire is our "secret shame," the "easy punch line, most often cited as the preferred hobby of the office slacker or the intellectual playground of dullards." But I've played it too, and in fairly large numbers. Levin pooh-poohs the "bogus" studies where it's claimed that we're losing 800 trillion dollars a year or some such, thanks to wasted time on Freecell, Minesweeper, and preloaded Windows games. He goes on to argue, too, that they might provide much-needed breaks from work that keeps the actually time we put into work more productive. Hmmm. In a perfect world, that seems fine. But computer addiction expert Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who first opened a clinic for computer addiction in 1996, was hooked herself way back when. On what? Solitaire. "I kept playing solitaire more and more," she wrote in a 2006 Washington Post chat, "my late husband would find me asleep at the computer. I was missing deadlines. I knew something had to be done."

Sounds a lot like how people, myself included, get with MMOGs. I'm not sure if I feel better or worse that others seem as equally captivated by a low-tech computer game like Solitaire as I was with an immersive digital experience like WoW.