The problem with psychological addiction is that it's a lot trickier to diagnose and quantify. As I said, there's no 'patch' for MMO addiction, no chemical substance we can use to wean ourselves off of the games.

Generally speaking, people who get "addicted" to MMOs are guilty primarily of taking them altogether too seriously. When you look at, say, the WoW forums and bear witness to the invective of the games most vituperative whiners, and how visibly angry certain changes make them... that's where the problem lies.

People will play these games long after they've stopped being fun for them, making them vulnerable to a spiral of bitterness. This is a serious problem, no doubt, as it bizarrely leads these individuals to invest ever more time in the game. No it's not healthy.

It's an addiction in a populist sense, but in a medical sense? That's very tricky to determine. The jury is still out in the field of psychology on whether or not gaming addiction is real or whether the things we *associate* with it are actually something else. Often the root causes of over-involvement have less to do with the properties of the game than particular unresolved psychological issues certain people may have. But this is all very complicated and thus not very good daytime television.

Which is exactly why we need to stop indulging the tabloid press' scare tactics and stand up with reason to say that it ain't all bad. Invariably, these sorts of campaigns focus on the negative, which will have negative consequences for us all.