Game addiction has been around since the days of Donkey Kong and Defender... I knew guys who spent $1,000s of dollars in quarters mastering the latest arcade game.

However, I've seen the mmo-style addiction since the days of bbs-based text rpgs. Back in the good old days of GEnie, when play was $12 an hour during the day and $6 at night, I was part of a group that spent most weekends playing tabletop mostly to keep us away from the computers. (There was one legendary individual who tried the brilliant strategy of running up 24 hour play for a few months ... text games were always able to be macro played ... then declaring bankruptcy and skipping out on the tens of thousands of dollars he'd put on his credit cards. Needless to say, the judge didn't quite see it that way. $192 a day for three months is over $15,000.)

Since then I've known many people whose real lives have suffered because of repeatedly being caught online while at work, or simply because of the amount of time spent playing instead of maintaining real life social connections, or being productive in some other fashion.

But on the positive side, it's waaaaaay cheaper than heroin.