The vast majority of the time you're playing World of Warcraft, you probably aren't actually going to be enjoying it. If you experience similar numbness during sex, you probably shouldn't engage in that, either. (This is probably the simplest of several correct answers to the question, but it applies even if you don't get addicted.)
How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.
I have the sense that you're putting this up as a reductio ad absurdum. Yet celibacy (the voluntary sort, not merely not being able to get any, hinted at here) is recommended in most traditions of searching for enlightenment, and not only religious ones. Socrates said that in old age he was glad of the diminishing of sexual desire, as becoming free of a slave driver. Darwin gave careful thought to the pros and cons of marriage -- the time lost from scientific work to maintaining it, against the support available from it. And Eliezer wrote some years back that working on FAI was too important to leave time for a girlfriend (although that seems to have backfired).
So yes, sex should definitely be on the line as a recreation whose usefulness must be seriously weighed, more seriously than you seem to have intended.
[ETA: Socrates' metaphor was actually that of being dragged about by a wild animal.]
This is a long comment constructed entirely of disclosure and discussion of personal data. Read at your own risk.
In the fall of 2009, I started using the program hamster to track first all the time I spent wearing pants, and beginning in 2011, all my time, 24/7. I initially did this because I felt I spent too much time on Reddit, on my feed reader, and on email lists, and in general, wasting time. I thought that by tracking my time, I could quantify how much time I wasted, and reduce it over time. This didn't work out, but I still enjoy having the data and can occasionally do cool things with it.
Reddit dwarfed the other activities in my waste category, and even my time usage at large (the single-most activity in 2010 is reddit, at 281.5 hours -- spending time with my romantic partner was second at 273.4 hours). My reddit usage peaked in August of 2010, when I spent 39.75 hours on reddit.
At this point, I quick reddit cold-turkey (I spent five minutes on reddit in december of 2010). I assumed that since I now had the single-largest waste time activity eliminated, I would be hugely more productive. This didn't turn out to be the case. As I stopped using Reddit, I started playing video...
Sure, play WoW. It will prepare you for life as an upload.
Seriously: I play WoW about 15 hours per week. I find the game to be a most pleasant way to relax, better than, say, TV, which I only watch for 1-2 hours per week.
But the game is designed to "reward" time spent playing (you can find plenty of info on that on the web), and I know that many people do get sucked in and spend countless hours doing mindless, repetitive tasks to get some minor advantage (of which there is a practically inexhaustible list). These are the kind of people who look back with shock and horror on broken relationships, stagnating careers, flabby physiques and quite rightly attribute that on 10'000++ hours over 5+ years playing WoW.
So I think it all comes down to: what will you be giving up to find time to play? If it is TV, lolcats, porn etc - fine. If it is study, exercise, and good company - do not do it.
I have the feeling that WoW, online MMORPGs in general, and all Zynga games optimize for wanting instead of liking. If I get into them, I try to notice when I'm not enjoying myself, and just stop--but it can be difficult. I tend to stick to "liking"-optimized games like Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Bioshock, et. al.
Lukeprog wrote rather extensively about this distinction :
Basically, wanting and liking are quite separate in human minds. It is easy to like something you don't want, and want something you don't like.
I have reason to expect myself to be biased when it comes to dealing with MMORPGs, but my impression is that most MMORPGs, WOW included, are designed to encourage wanting to play more than liking to play.
The important stuff never pans out.
Many of my "important" projects have. Here are some differences between my examples and yours:
You might want to try my approach, before giving up on "important stuff" altogether.
Playing WoW comes down to what you want out of it.
As a game, WoW just isn't very good. It's designed around the fun to win (rather than fun to play) paradigm like most MMOs, except there is no ultimate victory condition a player can ever reach, so they keep playing, sustained by small and temporary "wins" along the way that are ultimately unsatisfying. This results in something like the Sunk Cost fallacy combined with a Belief In Enjoyment, that drives them to keep playing towards that fun of winning that they'll never actually reach, which is often mistaken for addiction.
As a social platform it's better, at least on the realms that have established communities that are friendly to newcomers. To a lot of players its a role-playing platform first and a game second.
As a virtual environment it's among the very best. You can spend an amazing amount of time just flying around and taking screenshots of the scenery, and everything has a story behind it. As a fan-fiction writer, it may even be the optimal fictional universe, since it is rich and diverse enough to support pretty much any story one might wish to tell. And have you seen the machinima?
A data-point: Me.
I used to play Everquest. I would describe myself as addicted: I would play so late I had hours less sleep than optimal several nights a week, get up for work tired, go through my work day tired, drive home on the motorway nodding off to sleep (Sometimes I'd have micro-sleeps and swerve. Dangerous!, I must have been crazy!) but as soon as I got home to EQ, I'd suddenly be alert enough to play until the wee small hours again....
I was like that for... over a year, which couldn't have been good, even discounting the risk of killing myself in a crash.
After I stopped playing EQ, (I got forced to quit by circumstances) I played several other MMORPGs over the next few years, culminating in WoW. None of them got me anywhere near as addicted as EQ - maybe my mental immune system had learned to protect me? I dunno, but I do sometimes wish for that 'high' that kept me playing EQ with that intensity, even though I know that it would be bad for me.
I don't know if there's a lesson or a moral in that, but like I said at the top, it is at least a data-point for you.
No, you should not play and your reasoning makes sense. Games like WoW are designed to be superstimuli. They are the mental equivalent of an addictive drug. Some people will get highly addicted, while others will be able to do just a bit every now and then. But the risk level of addiction is high enough that avoiding them makes sense.
An addiction is something you want, but don't like or approve of. The good stuff is what you like and approve of.
Depends on your utility function. WoW doesn't seem to build a significant corpus of micro-skills or anything; it seems of mere transient enjoyment. It's fun in the moment, but then later you regret having wasted your time. It's dangerous though, and not simply because it's a waste of time. Plenty of things are a waste of time, but once you realize that, you quit. WoW is different; it's addictive super-stimuli.
You were asking what the difference is between being addictive and simply being really, really good. Well here's an example: being in the midst of an...
The important stuff never pans out... petty office politics... DARPA .... NASA ... FDA ... my boss took it over and then tried to get me fired... already had a paper in press on
It seems like your are using a bad strategy for choosing projects - specifically, you choose projects that are highly vulnerable to socio-political interference (and I imagine your talents, while impressive, do not include socio-political maneuvering).
Phil, I would like it if you promised that when you ask a question you're sincerely interested in the answers, and that when you advance an argument, you sincerely believe it valid.
Because there's been some recent post and comments of yours (some comments here, your post about simulations+Christianity, the one about the "National Institute of Theology"), that I have trouble believing you truly mean; I find it likely you may be saying absurd stuff just to amuse yourself or "promote discussion" or whatever other purpose you may have.
But i...
I almost always forego WoW, cocaine, and sex in favor of doing things with a decent chance of helping all of humanity. This makes me much happier with my life than WoW, cocaine, or sex generally would, though the sex option is at least competitive. Doing things that are clearly connected to your values is both motivating and satisfying.
Does this mean that once friendly AI reigns over humanity your most valued activity will be uncalled-for?
If doing things that help save the world is satisfying and then you actually succeed in saving the world it seems like you should feel entitled to be satisfied. Permanently. Then you can do all the other intrinsically rewarding tasks with the added pleasure of knowing that you get to do them because you saved the @#$% world.
Should I play World of Warcraft?
No.
I've avoided playing World of Warcraft because many people enjoy it so much that they neglect other things in their life.
Enjoyment is not the thing that makes behaviors addictive. Reinforcement is (to a large extent) a biological process distinct from enjoyment.
How about cocaine?
No.
How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.
Yes.
This line of questioning is not deep. It is silly. While there is a similarity between the things in the list {WoW, cocaine, sex} it is not strong enough or of the right kind to m...
Regarding the addition:
I don't really understand your insistence on radically simplifying the experience of making decisions and moral judgments. Obviously my 'utility function' doesn't work by releasing dopamine in magnitudes corresponding to the 'goodness' of my actions. When people say "WoW may be fun, but it has little lasting effect" they are not commenting on the duration of the increase of pleasurable neurotransmitters-- they mean complicated and confusing things like "WoW may be fun but I won't be proud of myself the way I would if I...
I'll comment again to note that I am struck by the relevance of Tom McCabe's post Levels of Action. Tom noted that we can think of some actions as "additively" improving the world and others as "multiplicatively" improving the world. Your choosing to take up WoW would definitely additively improve the world insofar as it's the most enjoyable thing you can be doing at the times you play it (whether that's true depends on a couple of other factors, but stipulate that). But it would almost certainly not multiplicatively improve the world—o...
If your expected lifespan is more than six months, cocaine is a bad source of hedons; over time, your brain chemistry will adjust to the presence of cocaine and recalibrate itself so that instead of feeling good on cocaine and normal otherwise, you'll feel normal on cocaine and bad otherwise.
As for WoW and other MMOs, well, I've heard the horror stories, but I also know plenty of counterexamples. My personal experience was that I played WoW for a while and got bored with it. I'm probably not quite like most MMO players; I was a little disappointed at how fast I could level if I tried, and I spent quite a bit of time doing quests I was overleveled for.
I enjoy playing a lot of video games, but I found the time my SO and I played WoW boring. In a real video game (lately for me: TF2, FIFA, ME), when you fail you have thoughts like "next time I'll try a different approach" or "Oops! I herped when I should have derped." Winning is genuinely satisfying because the challenges involve more than measuring your sunk cost against an arbitrary number of hours.
When you fail at WoW, it's because you picked a fight several gameplay hours too soon. When you win, it just means you get to move on to the collection quest.
There might be more cerebral challenge in the upper levels, but I was bored by the month-and-a-half I invested into it.
And in regards to World of Warcraft: I don't regret taking a single character from start all the way to the top levels and following the questlines, and seeing all the lands and so forth. That content entertained me well enough, that I consider it time as well-spent as any other entertainment option.
But I do regret the time I spent on raids and instances, though; which at some point I realized I just wasn't enjoying nearly enough compared to the time I had to waste on them.
What would you be doing in your spare time otherwise? A few years from now, if you looked back at a nontrivial proportion of your spare time having been spent playing WoW instead of the other things you'd have done, assuming that you had enjoyed your time playing the game but derived no especially lasting benefit from it, would you be happy (or at least indifferent) about it?
Presumably your value computation includes values other than "enjoying doing something". For example given the explicit choice between getting to enjoy delicious food for the next 5 years at the expense of having a child starve, versus having average food and letting the child live, most people would choose the latter - even if they were extremely confident that there were no ulterior consequences of any kind and the food would contain additives to surgically neuter any guilt they might otherwise feel.
The case regarding your playing WoW instead o...
For that game, the sunk-costs fallacy and the training-to-do-random-things-infinitely phenomenon may help in speculating about why so many sink and cont...
WoW is pretty fun if you find a guild of friendly folks and voice chat with them while playing together. I haven't found WoW to interfere with the other things in my life. Most of the people in my guild also have careers/classes and family, and don't neglect them.
Fun is important to me.
Interesting addition to the OP. There's a monumental amount of evidence that our brains are biased in that way. It's called addiction, akrasia, procrastination, etc. An example is when short-term indicators such as how something tastes mis-align with long-term ones like whether later you get a stomach ache, nausea, dizziness, etc. For example, you may eat a donut now because of how great it tastes, but then regret it later because you end up feeling sick and nauseous.
I consider this a modern world problem. I assume that all these indicators are supposed to...
You should not play WoW in order to enjoy your free time, mostly for reasons already stated in the responses.
However, it contributes significantly to our culture, so it might be remiss to ignore it entirely if you care about experiencing relevant parts of the zeitgeist.
If you choose to go that route, take the same sorts of mental/social precautions you might take before 'trying' intravenous heroin.
What precautions would you take before trying heroin?
I'd prepare a schedule of upper-bounds on usage, including a scheduled, externally enforced hard stop date and detox period. For milder drugs, I use a "day, week, month" rule - one day out of every week, one week out of every month, and one month out of every year the drug is not allowed. For something as addictive as heroin, I'd strengthen this considerably - probably including a 3 month scheduled no-use period to extinguish the habit, just long enough after starting to get the data on whether it's resuming after the 3 months. And I'd set things up such that if I broke my own rules, my friends would notice and intervene. (Note that this means the withdrawal periods have to be counted on the 'cost' side of a cost/benefit analysis, and that almost certainly means not using strongly-addictive substances at all).
In the case of World of Warcraft, I'd set a scheduled uninstall-and-cancel-subscription date, then resume months later. I believe they offer a free trial period, the end of which would be a natural time to do this. (But be sure to keep repeating the detox periods!)
How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.
I have the sense that you're putting this up as a reductio ad absurdum. Yet celibacy (the voluntary sort, not merely not being able to get any, hinted at here) is recommended in most traditions of searching for enlightenment, and not only religious ones. Socrates said that in old age he was glad of the diminishing of sexual desire, as becoming free of a slave driver. Darwin gave careful thought to the pros and cons of marriage -- the time lost from scientific work to maintaining it, against the support available from it. And Eliezer wrote some years back that working on FAI was too important to leave time for a girlfriend (although that seems to have backfired).
So yes, sex should definitely be on the line as a recreation whose usefulness must be seriously weighed, more seriously than you seem to have intended.
[ETA: Socrates' metaphor was actually that of being dragged about by a wild animal.]
It seems to me that dating is an open-ended resource drain, but sex is unlikely to become dangerously addictive due to built-in upper limits on the percentage of one's time spent on it (fatigue, etc.)
I've avoided playing World of Warcraft because many people enjoy it so much that they neglect other things in their life.
Does that make sense?
How about cocaine?
How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.
ADDED: Lots of interesting discussion, but no one is getting at some points of particular interest to me. Most answers assume that you have important stuff to do, and you need to decide whether WoW will prevent you from getting that important stuff done. They also assume that your brain usually errs on the side of telling you to do "non-important" stuff (WoW) at the expense of "important stuff".
One question is whether there is any evidence that your brain is biased in this way. I think your reflective self greatly overestimates the probability of success at the "important stuff". I have worked very hard, twelve hours a day, 7 days a week, on "important stuff" for most of the past 30 years. The important stuff never pans out. So it appears that when my brain told me to play Freecell rather than work on that important paper on artificial intelligence that got pulled from the book the day before publication due to petty office politics, or to watch Buffy rather than do another test run of the demo I spent three months preparing for DARPA that no one from DARPA ever watched because the program officer was too busy to supervise his program, or to go hiking instead of spending another weekend working on the project for NASA that was eventually so big and successful that my boss took it over and then tried to get me fired1, or to go dancing rather than work on the natural-language processing approach that got shelved because my boss felt it emphasized the skills of mathematicians more than his own, or to LARP rather than put in another weekend on my approach using principal component analysis for early cancer detection that it turned out some guy from the FDA had already published 6 months earlier, or the technique for choosing siRNA sequences that a professor from George Mason already had a paper in press on - all those times, my brain was using a better estimate of success than my reflective self was.
Another question is why the "important stuff" is important. Fun is fun. On the surface, we are saying something like, "I have a part of my utility function that values contributions to the world, because I evolved to be altruistic." If we really believe that, then for any contribution to the world, there exists some quantity of fun that would outweigh it. And people use language like, "WoW may be fun, but it has little lasting effect." But when you contribute something to the world, if the relevant motivating factor to us is how our utility function evaluates that contribution, then that also has little lasting effect. If you do something great for the world, it may have a lasting effect on the world; but the time you spend feeling good about it is not as great - probably less time, and a less intense emotion, than if you had spent all the time accomplishing it playing WoW instead. So this question is about whether we really believe the stories we tell ourselves about our utility functions.
1. He got to award himself all of the department's yearly bonus money that wasn't awarded to his subordinates, so any obvious success by his subordinates was money out of his pocket.