Thursday, May 6, 2010

A New Level of Online Addiction

Two of the most addictive substances on earth might be coffee and nicotine, but with 400 million users, some would argue that Facebook deserves to be on that list of addictions as well.

But when it comes to wasting hours and hours at a time online, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) is at the top of the list. WoW has over 12 million monthly subscribers, most of whom aren't afraid of spending the night in front of their computer screens to succeed.

In fact, I personally know at least 4 people who flunked out of college due to spending too much time on World of Warcraft.

That's why I'm interested (and a little afraid) of the news last night that Blizzard, the maker of this Internet fixation, will be integrating its service with Facebook.

This is huge news in the gaming community, who can now have their WoW and other Blizzard game updates post on Facebook.

And although it's too early to tell how World of Warcraft players will respond, I'm sure that anyone who is already addicted to the online game will have an even tougher time getting that multiplayer monkey off their backs.