WoW Makes You Fat

We've all heard stories of people playing WOW and packing on enough pounds to audition for "The Biggest Loser" in as short as a few months. That's not exactly an exaggeration folks. I personally know a guy who put on 20 kilos in a matter of eight months. Saying that he was about 80 kilos to begin with, that was a nice 25 percent boost to his body weight. That's phat, pun intended, with a nice topping of sarcasm on top of it.

Whether gamers want to admit it or not, two facts cannot be denied. Firstly, there are a lot of people who became obese after playing WOW. Secondly, WOW probably has more real-life tragedies linked to it than any other MMORPG. There is definitely a correlation between the playing of WOW and the rate at which the lives of people go south really quick. To be fair, WOW isn't the first obsession to do this and definitely won't be the last. But it's bad enough that people should sit up and start doing something about it.


Everyone seems to know that certain WOW players are addicted beyond belief. You've seen the pictures of the shirtless 350 pound man sitting in a chair that is too small to contain his rolls of blubber playing the damn game. But no one has really tried to do anything about it. To be fair there isn't a lot that people can do. Video gaming is like sex. You can't really stop it from happening. But you can damn right try to cut it down. Unfortunately, that's going to be on Blizzard. The simplest and most obvious way to cut down the casualties is to cut down the total number of players.

I mean, if you have only 100 people playing WOW, you can't have a 101 fat and obese WOW players, can you? Raising the price will do that to some extent. And I don't mean a sissy 5 dollar raise. I'm talking doubling or even tripling the price of the monthly subscriptions. Problem is that firstly, Blizzard is going to take a stab in the foot for that. Actually, I take that back. There are enough WOW players that are rich enough and hardcore enough to continue playing. Blizzard might actually earn a nice profit from that. But that leads to the second problem.


If Blizzard is earning a greater profit even though it has raised the price of WOW substantially, that means that the majority of the gamers are still playing. There will be a tipping point, but honestly, how much can you expect the good folks at Blizzard to raise the price at one go? These guys are still going to play, and that means that they are still going to remain fat and lifeless, like Cartman was in that South Park WOW episode (one of my personal favorites). What Blizzard has done is simply just remove the poorer and casual gamers from its servers, which every good MMO has to have. You can't have just a bunch of psycho hardcore players that speak in acronyms more than they do in words. It doesn't work out too well.


The other solution that I can think up now is, amusing as it sounds with the economic and environmental problems we have right now, is for the government to instill some form of control on gamers. Not just WOW players. I'm talking everything. For every WOW player that is slaving over his computer (okay, maybe for every two. Or three), there is a player slaving over his Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 playing Street Fighter or Prototype. It obviously seems to be a waste, and to me, it is. But something has to be done about addiction. For the younger generation, parents can step in. But for those 30 year old guys playing WOW, there isn't really anybody who can stop them. Maybe a girlfriend, but if you play that much, I doubt you have one. Maybe friends, but if you play that much, your friends are probably doing the same thing as well.


Someone just has to go to these guys and tell them that however great the World of Warcraft is, it is not really a world. Even if you define it as one, it pales in comparison to the real world. The World of Warcraft is just a game, but some people don't get it. Maybe they do, but they are too into it right now to pull themselves out. It's like what I call "living in the past syndrome". You know that nothing good is coming out of it. In fact, it does more harm than good. But you can't stop yourself, simply because you either have nothing else or you are too weak to pull yourself out of your daydream, or both. Unlike the real world, WOW gives a lot of second chances. Unlike the real world, you can log off if you guild master (boss) is giving you a hard time. But, unlike the real world, what you do in WOW doesn't really matter. Which is a lesson I think some people simply don't want to learn.

By Thana Lee

source:http://news.mmosite.com