A lot of buzz has been going around lately about video games being (falsely, for the most part) linked to violence in young adults and teens. One of the more vicious of the recent cases is one where a young man killed his parents "because they took away his Halo", though the media failed to draw any attention to the obviously serious underlying psychological issues the young man must have had.

But still, not all of what the media is saying about modern gaming is necessarily false and shouldnt be brushed off automatically just because the source has a distinct bias. There are many documented cases of people becoming addicted to games, primarily MMOs like World of Warcraft but also to a lesser extent other multiplayer games like Halo and Call of Duty, with an emphasis on the word multiplayer. A common theme running through almost every case of "game addiction" is that the game has partially or entirely replaced the subject's social lives.

Games like World of Warcraft can act as surrogate communities for people who feel out of place in the "real world". Commonly it's those of us who are poorly adjusted, awkward and anti-social that feel the desire to fully immerse themselves in an alternate reality in an attempt to escape their own; you never hear of the popular football player spending 20 hours a day playing Warhammer Online, but rather you hear about the misunderstood outcast pouring all of his time into World of Warcraft.

I guess my point is, just because the media says that video games promote addictive behavior doesnt make it untrue. Violent behavior, on the other hand, still remains to be proven.