A World not so long ago

I remember when Super Nintendo first came to the shelves 16 years ago when my husband and I purchased our console and game; we sat up night after night for hours trying to beat the game, and each other. It was fun, we did something together but after hours of playing we¡¯d also see our tempers flare when we lost. It was short lived, life went on and the console sat and collected dust until the kids were older and played it themselves.(wow powerleveling)

I remember getting the internet for the first time in the house 8 years ago, our Compaq 486 computer hooked up with dial up connection and a 28 k modem that gave up limited access to the internet with the speed but it did what we needed, checked email and gave surfing abilities for information. Then the 56k modem shortly after enabling us to use chat in Yahoo, something many became addicted to with this new phenomenon of communication. Real time chat, which pushed the age of the divorce rate higher as more people found those with common interest and took the lonely out of sitting at home alone,  myself and my husband fascinated with this new way of communication chatted with people daily mainly from the U.S. learning how to scan and share photos from 35 mm cameras. The age of technology addiction had arrived.(wow gold)

The standard 56 k modem didn¡¯t cut it for too long in the internet world as technology advanced faster then anyone could keep up, cable high-speed hook-up came next and so did the amount of time spent on the internet. Programs within the internet and gaming world became a booming lifestyle, pirated music download sites such as Napster, movie and application download sites such as MIRC became a hit and bandwidth usage took off, on line gaming sites such as Yahoo and MSN Zone along with many others were the rave and the addiction. Sitting down for hours playing your favourite online game against other players as our social lifestyle changed and arguments becoming aggressive as competitions soared, if only we knew then what the technology of gaming was about to explode into.

As my gaming days ended my children¡¯s began with one starting on the Age of Empires an epic real-time strategy game spanning 10,000 years, in which players are the guiding spirit in the evolution of small Stone Age tribes. Starting with minimal resources, players are challenged to build their tribes into great civilizations is how this game is described.

After he conquered the trilogy his next feats would range between the Warcraft trilogy played offline to the Diablo series played online, he then took one step up and asked to register into new gaming world, one we thought harmless called World of Warcraft. The inception of this new virtual world when released in 2004 became a new reality world of problems within families and individuals. His aggressive nature became more apparent with WoW as the wheels were set in motion due to our lack of understanding how addicting this gaming world would be.

¡°WoW succeeded because of Blizzard¡¯s unique ability at creating a mass audience for ¡°hardcore¡± games, especially in the massively multiplayer online game (or MMO) market; at the same time (and this is a very valuable reminder), the game¡¯s astounding success is more complex than usually understood, especially in Asia,¡± Wagner James Au from the site Gigaom explains in 2006 in his article ¡°The How of Wow¡±.

World of Warcraft in 2005 and 2006 was listed as the number 1 PC game in sales, with more then 10 million subscribers world wide by 2008, 5.5 million of those users located in Asia. In 2005, a four month old baby suffocated due to her WoW addicted parents who at the time were playing at a nearby internet caf¨¦, by August of the same year the People¡¯s Republic of China concerned for citizens addiction to this virtual world restricted players to only 3 hours of play time at which they would be booted off the game and in 2006 changed it¡¯s ruling to only apply to those under the age of 18.

In the age of virtual gaming addiction becoming more widespread as our technology progresses in a virtual reality not all of the WoW gaming should be looked at with a negative attitude. Many WoW players participate in a virtual community and come together in creative ways such as fan artwork, comic strip style storytelling and another popular phenomenon in the community called machinima videos.

Blizzard has certainly come under their share of controversy and problems with this Guinness Book of World Record holder of MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) but continues in numbers to grow strong with the WoW¡¯s expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King is set to be released November 13/08.

Unlike with our knowledge of this virtual world but since have come to much understanding of the gaming world, parents should understand all of these games come with Parental Controls which we must as parents learn how to understand and use. Gaming addiction is real for children and adults equally, as gambling addiction is real, drug addiction is real and alcoholism is real, knowledge and education is a must when introducing these games into your own life or the life of your family.

The advancement of technology came in society so quickly with so many areas keeping up with everything and understanding this new virtual world created for entertainment many have suffered and will continue to suffer until we each take responsibility and learn from others mistakes such as my own with my child¡¯s experience.

We have since changed our x-treme high-speed cable internet connection to a satellite connection so WoW is no longer capable of play due to the lag time, this getting our son removed from his addiction, which was no easy task for him, his withdrawals were real and we felt for him as it was us as parents who introduced this lifestyle without using parental controls, feeling us taking it away when things got out of hand was the better way to parentally control his addiction but have since known this is not the case.

The days of Atari and pinball machines are long gone, and that annoying bleep that went back and forth on our television hook-up games has dissolved and evolved into a world I never would have dreamed of ¡­but ¡­ was warned the future would soon become one day.