Joystick Junkies

Daniel Terdiman of Wired magazine has some interesting gamer anecdotes in his recent article about the bleeding of games into reality. Those of you who have experienced your mouse hand twitching in thin air in a futile attempt to zoom in on some interesting object in the street in the real world can identify with this. What is especially frightening is the material about first person shooters and smash 'n crash games. The game developers may want to insert messages that appear in the games when a certain amount of play time per week is exceeded, however, there is a great amount of resistance to these types of intrusions, e.g. "Don't you think you've played enough this week?" is similar to the obxious paper clip which asks "Don't you think this sentence is too long?" Maybe a better solution would be based on free speech rights in games. The reduction of the immersion effect would be beneficial. Perhaps a seriously addicted gamer's friends could do an in-game "intervention"?