I think in general dedicated MMO players don’t like to talk about “game addiction”. It’s bad press for our already much-maligned hobby, and it turns our image of MMOs as an interactive, social passtime to that of rats compulsively hitting a button for food. We play because our games are fun, dammit, and not because our brain chemistry tells us we must!

Unfortunately, in private, I think we can all admit that this isn’t always true.

I certainly have experienced an unhealthy attachment to MMOs. I started WoW in 2006, and almost immediately fell down the rabbit hole for the following year or two. I was online most hours of the day, occasionally even falling asleep in my computer chair while in-game then waking up and starting all over again. I felt incredibly guilty when offline, and in fact doing stuff in the real world just didn’t seem as important any more. When out and about I would feel an urge to go home and log in again, and I definitely turned down face-to-face meetings with friends in favor of more contact with elves.

It wasn’t all the game, of course — I was, as it turns out, pretty clinically depressed at the time and the game just became my way of ignoring it. However the fact is that modern MMOs are designed to keep us engaged on a neurological level. The design goes beyond a general concept of “let’s make the game so fun people won’t stop playing” and veers into hard behaviourial science. There’s a reason that “gamification” is a big buzz word in application development now, and that’s because MMOs in particular are extrememly effective at engaging users and encouraging certain behavior on a near daily basis.

I am a lot less emotionally involved in my games across the board now than I once was, but I still find it a struggle on occasion. While I haven’t felt the need to hide in a fantasy world for a long time, my achiever, collector, and socializing natures can still be worked into a twitchy, needy frenzy. Oh god, everyone hit 50 and I’m so far behind. Oh man, I really really need to do a hojillion Darkmoone Faire daily quests because I MUST have X pet. Ugh, I’ve been so busy and I need to check in with my online social group before they forget about me.

Giving in to these dark needs inevitably ends in me feeling bad about myself. Yes, I just played 13 hours straight of RIFT and got my crocodile mount. On the other hand, I’m hungry, it’s dark outside, and I am kind of bitter at both myself and the game. I’m certainly not saying that a gaming bender on the weekend is always something to feel bad about. After all, I work my 40+ hours each week precisely so I can do what I want on the weekend, and sometimes that absolutely means looooooong stretches of gaming. The tipping point I find is when you log on even when you don’t necessarily want to because you feel obligated to by in-game pressures.

So anyway, these are some of the things I do to try and keep the MMO obligation monster inside me at bay:

1) Bring the socializing outside of the game.

How many times have you logged in simply because you didn’t want to lose track of your in-game social contacts? I think people do this more often than they’d like to admit. I’ve tried over the years to connect with people I like outside of the game, even in little ways. Send PMs on your guild site, trade IM information, or heck, even just play something else together too. There’s nothing wrong with using your MMO of choice as a giant fancy IM client (guilty as charged), but again it’s good to have options to get that social fix without feeling obligated to log in.

Also this is obvious but: the people you meet in a game who become true friends will still be your friends if you quit the game or just don’t log on for a bit. Years ago I used to genuinely worry that if my online friends and I didn’t have a raid group in common we would lose all our ties and reasons to hang out, and that turned out to be absolutely and decisively false. Yes, you will lose track of some people, and yes you need to make an effort to find a new common ground, but that can be anything from a mutual love of cooking to watching videos together in a Google+ Hangout to playing Team Fortress 2.

2) Stay on top of game news.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but taking time outside of the game to stay up on in-game events helps me schedule my time better. Just by, say, following MMO-Champion on my Google Reader or listening to an MMO podcast on the way to work once a week, I feel on top of new events, items, features, and so on.

Keeping on top of this stuff prevents that twitchy compulsive collector feeling that I might be missing something cool. I know when there’s a new pet out that I want, and I know how long Event X runs. It also means that I’m likely to have plenty of time to collect my tokens/gold/quests or whatever I need to obtain a special item instead of having to potentially compromise my real life plans and cram everything in at the last minute.

If I lose track of things it is incredibly likely that I will miss out on something, which can send me into a little gaming panic because if I missed that who knows what else I missed out on?! Ahhh, clear my schedule because I have an appointment in Azeroth until Wednesday!

3) Keep pixels in context.

I played one character in World of Warcraft from 2006-2011, that being Liore the Priest. Over the years I accumulated an astounding amount of memorabilia and keepsakes and novelties on Liore, including hundreds of mounts, pets, titles, gear, and weird things that have been unavailable to players for years. I labored to obtain these items, and I occasionally spent time organizing my bank and looking over everything. The idea of giving up my “collection” seemed crazy until one day last year I quit WoW and didn’t log back on for six months.

During that six months I did not spend a single second thinking wistfully of Liore’s, say, Mr. Chilly pet or Hand of A’dal title or legendary Val’anyr. (Okay, look, I won’t lie.. I did at least once think about my pretty pretty Halo of Transcendence, but that’s a virtual hat which as we all know is the most powerful of pixels!) When I eventually logged back into Azeroth I was pleased I had those things, and I certainly wouldn’t choose a new “main” now and lose those items, but they lost a great deal of their draw.

I don’t regret obtaining those items, mind you. I had a lot of fun getting most of them! But pixels are, at the end of the day, still pixels. It is okay to let some of them get away. I have to remind myself about that frequently when I chose to, say, go away for the weekend instead of burning through dailies to get an awesome pet of a cat riding a broom. I probably will never get that pet ever, but does it really matter beyond this brief moment of wanting? Will it make the game any different for me in the long run? Nah.

4) Eat dinner.

And by “dinner” I do not mean “food you can heat in 30 seconds and eat with one hand while you raid”.

My personal rule with SWTOR is that it is not allowed to prevent me from eating a nutritious and healthy dinner. It doesn’t always have to be elaborate, but if I log on right after work almost every night at about 7:30 I excuse myself and take an hour to prepare, cook, and eat dinner. It’s a simple rule, but I find it extremely helpful.

I don’t want to infantilize players and I don’t mean to imply that everyone is like this, but the fact is that MMOs are designed to be technically “addictive”, and many players come to the game with external mental health issues or just simply a personality that is drawn to this kind of behavior. MMO detractors are often overly touchy and hysterical about the role of addiction in gaming, but if you’re naturally inclined to take games a little too seriously I think there’s value to acknowledging the problem and planning around it.