reply to "examples of video game "addiction" around me"

I'd also like to share some "examples" of video game "addiction". I play League of Legends with my friends and we really have become quite a big community while we do this. There are around 20 or so of us in total and we usually take turns depending on who is on to play. One of my friends met her "boyfriend" on another MMOG and they play LoL together as a couple activity. As an addicting game I do think LoL doesn't suck your time up quite as much as MMORPGs as games are usually 20 to 40 minutes long and it is a skills/team based game instead of a game about unlocking items or quests. I feel the game both creates and ruins new friendships because of its competitive nature and the worlds of concern for each of its players. Like Kevin mentioned in the lecture, one of the players (Me) is playing to win while others might be socialising or trying out new builds or just messing around. These worlds of concern collide in very interesting ways and I am looking forward to the lecture about "griefing".

One of the things not really mentioned in lectures is the business side and the sheer scale of some of these games. "As of November 2011, League of Legends had over 32 million registrations and averages millions of players per day, with the number of concurrent users online at any given time peaking over half a million, doubling its player base in 4 months." (Wikipedia) The 32 million players really is a frighteningly large amount of players (8 times the population of New Zealand). Of course the game is free but this really does show that media can be distributed in different ways and still remain profitable and I hope different forms of media can look at this as inspiration.

Jacob Hui