Copyright, October 2002, by Nicholas Yee.
Text and data excerpts should be attributed to:

"Ariadne - Understanding MMORPG Addiction"
by Nicholas Yee, October 2002
http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/home.html

All questions and comments should be directed to contact@nickyee.com.

Note (added 02/22/2006) - It's been a little over 3 years since I wrote this essay, and I wanted to put up a short note on how my thinking has since changed on the issue. While I believe that problematic usage is an important issue to discuss, I've come to feel that it is also a very distracting issue, much like the focus on violence and aggression in video game research. When the media incessantly claims that "EverCrack will eat your babies", it traps us in the defensive and prevents us from talking about other much more interesting things happening in online games.

More importantly, I have come to believe that "addiction" is simply the wrong word to label what we are seeing, and simply fuels paranoia about online games. At the same time, much of the more recent findings do support the holistic and player-centric approach presented in this essay. Certain people seem more likely to develop dependencies on online gaming, but behavioral dependencies are not a novel phenomenon unique to online gaming. Instead, they are a general problem that may tether on to many other potential kinds of behaviors. The media likes to claim that this is a very new problem, but I would argue that it's in fact a very old problem. And no, online games will not eat your babies.