20,000 hours from 2004 to 2009. Wow.
The shocker here isn’t “moron filed stupid lawsuit” but instead the fact that a judge held the claims are actually viable. Some enterprising class action lawyers should be rushing to file suits against Blizzard in this court.
Damn, i knew i shouldn’t have quit wow…
4000 hours per year? Heck, even if we count from Jan 1 2004 to Dec. 31 2009, that’s over 3000 hours per year. That’s more than 8 hours per day.
Anyway: tort laws are stupid. News at 11.
Back in the day I had put more hours than that into EverQuest during a similar time frame. My life is not any better for it, I should file suit against 989 Studios, Verant and Sony.
It’s possible that this is an “activist” judge who believes that there is a government lack of legislation in providing mandatory gaming time during the day to the populace.
People are going to play games whether you like it or not and it is not their fault if there are bad consequences as a result.
Obviously, this judge feels that the government’s “War On Gaming” is a failure.
At any rate, judging from the post counts of some members here, Mr. Chick should get a lawyer on retainer ASAP…
Well, I know that I can quit whenever I want!
…I just don’t want to right now.
Yeah during the first 2 years of wow I played 8 hours a day on average. Sure I could have been doing much better things, but there are a lot of worse ways to spend your time too. I don’t regret it.
Your honor, no reasonable observer would conclude that our shitty game is addictive.
That’s 11 hours a day for every day of that 5 year span. Doesn’t this man work?
Reading the refutation, apparently at some point he had been banned for RMT essentially and had attempted to get his account back without much success. So it’s entirely possible it’s retaliation for that. There’s also something about terms of service and click-throughs in the state of Texas but I didn’t really pay too much attention to it. Much of the refutation is (not surprisingly) refuting the statement paragraph by paragraph.
Jeez though, the guys lives in Hawaii. Don’t you people have better things to do then spend on average 9+ hours a day playing L2? In fact I could have sworn that L2 contains periodic warnings the longer you are longed in (“You’ve been playing for 5 hours. Please take a break!”). And 2009 was right around the time they altered the game to reduce a lot of the grind, as well as add an idle bonus like WoW.
— Alan
Edit: 6 years technically speaking, 2004-2009 is six full years.
Hawaii is an amazingly expensive place to live. I’d really like to know how he supported that kind of time habit.
Dread. Absolutely dread.
Shouldn’t the court send him to jail for contempt of the court’s IQ, wasting court’s time and tax-payer’s money over trivialities and lack of self-control?
I wasted my entire youth and most of my adult life playing on-line games, even being as dumb as to stay up late, show up late for work, grind for another hour or call off an appointment to stay and help the guild win a major battle…but I never blamed anyone but myself for making these wholly conscious faulty decisions the consequences of which I was fully aware.
If this is what it comes to I can see the future of MMOs being one where you have to sign and FAX over a NDA-esque EULA + scan of your ID Card before you’re allowed to play.
I honestly hope the government reposses his house as penalty for filing this whence he loses.
Well, true about being responsible and all, but don’t gambling sites (even international ones) have to show gamblers’ anonymous/addiction type material on every page these days? I’m sure to most, if not all, it’s just lip service, but still there. Maybe MMO addiction is not that far off. Admittedly beer and liquor don’t have AA notices all over them…
Parents -> Basement -> Instant Savings would be my guess about the cost.
— Alan
First they need to established the connection between high risk and high reward as they do with gambling and even then there has to be a lot of psychology and sociology before you can compare the virtual-gain of virtual-currency/fame/items to those who gain actual tangible real money (RMT and ebaying notwithstanding) in gambling.
Look, I’m not going to stand and argue that games don’t trigger certain chemicals in the brain and that there is absolutely nothing at all what-so-ever addictive about them, in some of them, in the way they’re played or the social aspect of it all…
But it is still far from being something akin to Gambling, and definitely lacks any physically consumed substance as one could label across such.
To say that the plaintiff was not “adaquetely warned of the dangers of addiction” is complete bull-effin’-shit.
You play a game, you over-play a game, you know damn well what you’re doing, you know it’s wrong, you do it anyway.
You know smoking drugs is wrong before you smoke drugs. You know playing with matches is wrong before you play with matches. And you know damn very well that staying another hour up, or not getting up to pee and drink and eat just to finish yet another quest is HELLUVA WRONG, yet you still do it anyway.
Why? I don’t know, I’ll let the neurologist experts tackle that one, but you still make a very well aware and conscious decision to keep at the bad “habit” despite knowing better.
Yeah, not exactly good examples, but still…the point is that unlike addictive materials you still have full control over yourself and you know exactly what you’re doing, if it’s wrong and how it’ll affect you and you HAVE the ability to pull out at any moment.
It shouldn’t be game’s developer fault if your will power is too weak to do what’s right, I never bought that excuse for anything else in life.
You don’t see people sue their jobplaces because they were too weak to stand up to the boss and let themselves get pushed around, you don’t see people sue banks because they’re fools to sign for more loans, CCs or what have you shit deals that banks, insurance and what not offer you, or push to you even. Or because the Wallmart had 10% off discount week and you went in and bought 50 items you really have no need for or wouldn’t otherwise.
The Force has strong influence on the weak minded, go get mind control herded into highway traffine lane and get hit by a truck and do the human race a favor before you start breeding the stupid onwards. =/
Well, the smoking drugs analogy won’t hold cause it’s illegal… which MMOing is not. And I think it’s easy to make the case that MMOs (and social) games is all about reward–that’s how you get people coming back. That’s what leveling up is. Which can be addictive. It’s easy to connect the dots in a simplistic fashion.
— Alan
Smoking tabacco deriviative products, then?
Sadly, logic and simplicity don’t hold much up in court as much as legislation or, rather, loopholes thereof.
frumple
Well I experienced being addicted to a MMO myself for a couple of years(WoW).
I spent too much time in it and disappointed people by not going out anymore making excuses (lying) etc. (though I never didn’t show up when I promised I will).
However I would never try to sue Blizzard for making such a kickass game that totally hooked me! It was my failing and not theirs.
In the end I managed to get out + I have a much better understanding of addicts of any kind now (I was never addicted to something bad before like smoking, alcohol or other drugs).
In general I’m pretty pissed about people trying to mark anyone playing games as “addict” since those same people usually watch shit on tv their whole evenings themselves and it’s questionable what is worse…
This guy should face his own failing / weakness and learn from that instead of going after some company that “hooked” him up!
It’s an easy way to excuse his own issues (and spending that much time in a game certainly shows he has them).
There’s a whole generation of people who will have underachieved because they spent a significant portion of their time hooked to mmorpgs. Missed promotions, lower grades, lower test scores, missed networking opportunites, poorer health, etc.
The feeling of snapping out of it, looking around at your contemporaries and realizing how far behind you are and how much you gave up has to be amazing.