Should I play World of Warcraft?

If only playing World of Warcraft had a refractory period.

The vast majority of the time you're playing World of Warcraft, you probably aren't actually going to be enjoying it. If you experience similar numbness during sex, you probably shouldn't engage in that, either. (This is probably the simplest of several correct answers to the question, but it applies even if you don't get addicted.)

How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.

I have the sense that you're putting this up as a reductio ad absurdum. Yet celibacy (the voluntary sort, not merely not being able to get any, hinted at here) is recommended in most traditions of searching for enlightenment, and not only religious ones. Socrates said that in old age he was glad of the diminishing of sexual desire, as becoming free of a slave driver. Darwin gave careful thought to the pros and cons of marriage -- the time lost from scientific work to maintaining it, against the support available from it. And Eliezer wrote some years back that working on FAI was too important to leave time for a girlfriend (although that seems to have backfired).

So yes, sex should definitely be on the line as a recreation whose usefulness must be seriously weighed, more seriously than you seem to have intended.

[ETA: Socrates' metaphor was actually that of being dragged about by a wild animal.]

This is a long comment constructed entirely of disclosure and discussion of personal data. Read at your own risk.

In the fall of 2009, I started using the program hamster to track first all the time I spent wearing pants, and beginning in 2011, all my time, 24/7. I initially did this because I felt I spent too much time on Reddit, on my feed reader, and on email lists, and in general, wasting time. I thought that by tracking my time, I could quantify how much time I wasted, and reduce it over time. This didn't work out, but I still enjoy having the data and can occasionally do cool things with it.

Reddit dwarfed the other activities in my waste category, and even my time usage at large (the single-most activity in 2010 is reddit, at 281.5 hours -- spending time with my romantic partner was second at 273.4 hours). My reddit usage peaked in August of 2010, when I spent 39.75 hours on reddit.

At this point, I quick reddit cold-turkey (I spent five minutes on reddit in december of 2010). I assumed that since I now had the single-largest waste time activity eliminated, I would be hugely more productive. This didn't turn out to be the case. As I stopped using Reddit, I started playing video games with friends I lived with. I've spent much more time playing video games than I ever spent on Reddit -- from 2010 to now, I spent 287 hours on Reddit, and 724 hours playing video games. I rationalize this by saying that most of this (534.4 hours) is "social" -- that is, I'm playing video games sitting next to someone in meatspace. But ultimately, I'm still wasting time.

The lesson I've learned from this is that it's futile to try to optimize away all waste time. Humans are not resilient enough to be productive 16 hours a day with current productivity systems. If I could find a way to accomplish meaningful work while playing Halo: Reach or browsing Reddit, I possibly do lots of good things. But I still wouldn't move through my todo list any faster.

Together, video games and my main romantic partner account for 1,571 hours of my time from 2010 to now out of a total of 9,888 hours total (time spent sleeping is only tracked starting 01/01/2011 and accounts for 2,075 hours). While it's easy for me to think of these things as non-productive, they're probably essential to my life as it is now. My romantic partner is incredibly important to me, and video games are the primary way of bonding with the people I live with (especially since I don't drink). Without those things, I think my life would be worse off.

This data is probably incomplete -- a better metric would be the rate that I go through items on my todo list. Since I haven't found any task software that's as good at what it does as Hamster is (I use Getting Things GNOME! now, the daily builds are tolerable), I can't examine that data. But if you're actually concerned about misusing your scarce resources, track how you use them and decide based on actual data, not based on how high-status sex, drugs, and World of Warcraft are on websites.

Sure, play WoW. It will prepare you for life as an upload.

Seriously: I play WoW about 15 hours per week. I find the game to be a most pleasant way to relax, better than, say, TV, which I only watch for 1-2 hours per week.

But the game is designed to "reward" time spent playing (you can find plenty of info on that on the web), and I know that many people do get sucked in and spend countless hours doing mindless, repetitive tasks to get some minor advantage (of which there is a practically inexhaustible list). These are the kind of people who look back with shock and horror on broken relationships, stagnating careers, flabby physiques and quite rightly attribute that on 10'000++ hours over 5+ years playing WoW.

So I think it all comes down to: what will you be giving up to find time to play? If it is TV, lolcats, porn etc - fine. If it is study, exercise, and good company - do not do it.

I have reason to expect myself to be biased when it comes to dealing with MMORPGs, but my impression is that most MMORPGs, WOW included, are designed to encourage wanting to play more than liking to play.

The important stuff never pans out.

Many of my "important" projects have. Here are some differences between my examples and yours:

1. I didn't do my important projects under a boss.
2. I didn't try to publish papers, but instead just discussed my ideas on forums and mailing lists.
3. I never worked "twelve hours a day, 7 days a week" on a project unless I found the work itself fun. (During one of the project that I did mostly for financial reasons, I played WoW a lot, and it still worked out pretty well.)

You might want to try my approach, before giving up on "important stuff" altogether.

Playing WoW comes down to what you want out of it.

As a game, WoW just isn't very good. It's designed around the fun to win (rather than fun to play) paradigm like most MMOs, except there is no ultimate victory condition a player can ever reach, so they keep playing, sustained by small and temporary "wins" along the way that are ultimately unsatisfying. This results in something like the Sunk Cost fallacy combined with a Belief In Enjoyment, that drives them to keep playing towards that fun of winning that they'll never actually reach, which is often mistaken for addiction.

As a social platform it's better, at least on the realms that have established communities that are friendly to newcomers. To a lot of players its a role-playing platform first and a game second.

As a virtual environment it's among the very best. You can spend an amazing amount of time just flying around and taking screenshots of the scenery, and everything has a story behind it. As a fan-fiction writer, it may even be the optimal fictional universe, since it is rich and diverse enough to support pretty much any story one might wish to tell. And have you seen the machinima?

A data-point: Me.

I used to play Everquest. I would describe myself as addicted: I would play so late I had hours less sleep than optimal several nights a week, get up for work tired, go through my work day tired, drive home on the motorway nodding off to sleep (Sometimes I'd have micro-sleeps and swerve. Dangerous!, I must have been crazy!) but as soon as I got home to EQ, I'd suddenly be alert enough to play until the wee small hours again....

I was like that for... over a year, which couldn't have been good, even discounting the risk of killing myself in a crash.

After I stopped playing EQ, (I got forced to quit by circumstances) I played several other MMORPGs over the next few years, culminating in WoW. None of them got me anywhere near as addicted as EQ - maybe my mental immune system had learned to protect me? I dunno, but I do sometimes wish for that 'high' that kept me playing EQ with that intensity, even though I know that it would be bad for me.

I don't know if there's a lesson or a moral in that, but like I said at the top, it is at least a data-point for you.

No, you should not play and your reasoning makes sense. Games like WoW are designed to be superstimuli. They are the mental equivalent of an addictive drug. Some people will get highly addicted, while others will be able to do just a bit every now and then. But the risk level of addiction is high enough that avoiding them makes sense.

Depends on your utility function. WoW doesn't seem to build a significant corpus of micro-skills or anything; it seems of mere transient enjoyment. It's fun in the moment, but then later you regret having wasted your time. It's dangerous though, and not simply because it's a waste of time. Plenty of things are a waste of time, but once you realize that, you quit. WoW is different; it's addictive super-stimuli.

You were asking what the difference is between being addictive and simply being really, really good. Well here's an example: being in the midst of an indulge-regret cycle is one way to experience addiction. Think of somebody who eats three donuts each night, but always regrets it the next morning. Or someone who, well, every night stays up way too late playing WoW, and then every morning hates himself for it. Or somebody who whiles away his weekends or evenings playing it, and then always regrets it when at work. The indulge-regret cycle; a species of akrasia.

WoW is addictive for the same reason donuts are; it's super-stimuli for a certain part of our built-in reward system. It's hard to resist, yet useful to resist (at least for somebody with a utility function sufficiently similar to mine), because it plays on certain emotions and indicators and not on others. Or it affects one part of our motivational system so strongly that the natural stimuli for other parts becomes boring. And of course natural stimuli for that part gets boring too. And that's bad because you start picking WoW (or whatever the super-stimuli is), over a ton of stuff of long-term importance. Like activity related to physical or mental health. Or your finances.

We're built with a reward system that constantly feeds us inherently-compelling information. Taste, emotion, etc. But of course this system gets hijacked left and right in the modern environment. It's built to motivate us in the moment, but designed to be in a harmony of interests with our future selves. Something is supposed to taste good to make you eat it now, to be healthy later. Not so anymore! Now we have junk food, and that creates a potential conflict of interests among our different selves over time. You want to eat it now, but you'll regret it later... So you try to summon that precious will-power, but of course that rarely works.

WoW will hijack your reward system, destroy your motivation to do things that in the future you'll regret having not done, etc. It's not mind safe. Not for somebody with my utility function, anyway. I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Sorry this was so rambling.

The important stuff never pans out... petty office politics... DARPA .... NASA ... FDA ... my boss took it over and then tried to get me fired... already had a paper in press on

It seems like your are using a bad strategy for choosing projects - specifically, you choose projects that are highly vulnerable to socio-political interference (and I imagine your talents, while impressive, do not include socio-political maneuvering).

Phil, I would like it if you promised that when you ask a question you're sincerely interested in the answers, and that when you advance an argument, you sincerely believe it valid.

Because there's been some recent post and comments of yours (some comments here, your post about simulations+Christianity, the one about the "National Institute of Theology"), that I have trouble believing you truly mean; I find it likely you may be saying absurd stuff just to amuse yourself or "promote discussion" or whatever other purpose you may have.

But if you're doing this I have no interest in participating: For me it's tiring and exhausting to argue with someone who has just decided they will argue for the sake of arguing. Nor is it truly promoting discussion, when someone advances fake arguments and pretends not to budge -- that's called trolling, not discussing, and it's harmful for the quality of a forum, not beneficial.

So can you promise that you're debating in good faith with arguments you consider valid, not just to amuse yourself in our expense?

I almost always forego WoW, cocaine, and sex in favor of doing things with a decent chance of helping all of humanity. This makes me much happier with my life than WoW, cocaine, or sex generally would, though the sex option is at least competitive. Doing things that are clearly connected to your values is both motivating and satisfying.

Should I play World of Warcraft?

No.

I've avoided playing World of Warcraft because many people enjoy it so much that they neglect other things in their life.

Enjoyment is not the thing that makes behaviors addictive. Reinforcement is (to a large extent) a biological process distinct from enjoyment.

How about cocaine?

No.

How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.

Yes.

This line of questioning is not deep. It is silly. While there is a similarity between the things in the list {WoW, cocaine, sex} it is not strong enough or of the right kind to make it sensible to generalize from 'WoW bad' to 'therefore enjoyable things bad or WoW good'.

Just look at the expected consequences of the mentioned activities. Roughly speaking it goes {'slight positive, large negative', 'just lots of negative', 'huge amounts of positive'}. Act accordingly.

Regarding the addition:

I don't really understand your insistence on radically simplifying the experience of making decisions and moral judgments. Obviously my 'utility function' doesn't work by releasing dopamine in magnitudes corresponding to the 'goodness' of my actions. When people say "WoW may be fun, but it has little lasting effect" they are not commenting on the duration of the increase of pleasurable neurotransmitters-- they mean complicated and confusing things like "WoW may be fun but I won't be proud of myself the way I would if I spent that time helping people" or "WoW may be fun but it won't give me self-respect" or "I'll feel better about myself accomplishing things in real life". No one thinks altruism feels like WoW but lasts longer-- it's an attempt to express what internally feels like a different sort of utility.

On occasion it is a distinction that leads people to say mysterious sounding spiritual things-- perhaps part of why some theists have trouble seeing how an atheist would act moral. And 'God' as a shared mental entity has often been something like an externalization of far-mode thinking that seems to, in some people, give them greater control over their near-self.

The main thing though, is that 'selfish pleasure' and 'moral rightness' feel different in my brain-- I suspect they be less distinct in some brains and more distinct in others. But treating them the same way for all people just gets the phenomenology of decision making wrong at least for a large class of humans.

Again, it's far self vs. near self and this post is exactly the confusion treating those selves as a unitary utility function creates.

Addiction vs. feelings giving accurate feedback.

Before you do, read this.

I'll comment again to note that I am struck by the relevance of Tom McCabe's post Levels of Action. Tom noted that we can think of some actions as "additively" improving the world and others as "multiplicatively" improving the world. Your choosing to take up WoW would definitely additively improve the world insofar as it's the most enjoyable thing you can be doing at the times you play it (whether that's true depends on a couple of other factors, but stipulate that). But it would almost certainly not multiplicatively improve the world—or even multiplicatively improve your total enjoyment of the world, if you were a pure hedonist—and that is the standard you should be applying when evaluating the opportunity costs.

(This should be read as a followup to my comment here.)

If your expected lifespan is more than six months, cocaine is a bad source of hedons; over time, your brain chemistry will adjust to the presence of cocaine and recalibrate itself so that instead of feeling good on cocaine and normal otherwise, you'll feel normal on cocaine and bad otherwise.

As for WoW and other MMOs, well, I've heard the horror stories, but I also know plenty of counterexamples. My personal experience was that I played WoW for a while and got bored with it. I'm probably not quite like most MMO players; I was a little disappointed at how fast I could level if I tried, and I spent quite a bit of time doing quests I was overleveled for.

I enjoy playing a lot of video games, but I found the time my SO and I played WoW boring. In a real video game (lately for me: TF2, FIFA, ME), when you fail you have thoughts like "next time I'll try a different approach" or "Oops! I herped when I should have derped." Winning is genuinely satisfying because the challenges involve more than measuring your sunk cost against an arbitrary number of hours.

When you fail at WoW, it's because you picked a fight several gameplay hours too soon. When you win, it just means you get to move on to the collection quest.

There might be more cerebral challenge in the upper levels, but I was bored by the month-and-a-half I invested into it.

And in regards to World of Warcraft: I don't regret taking a single character from start all the way to the top levels and following the questlines, and seeing all the lands and so forth. That content entertained me well enough, that I consider it time as well-spent as any other entertainment option.

But I do regret the time I spent on raids and instances, though; which at some point I realized I just wasn't enjoying nearly enough compared to the time I had to waste on them.

Upvoted for leading to interesting discussion.

What would you be doing in your spare time otherwise? A few years from now, if you looked back at a nontrivial proportion of your spare time having been spent playing WoW instead of the other things you'd have done, assuming that you had enjoyed your time playing the game but derived no especially lasting benefit from it, would you be happy (or at least indifferent) about it?

Yes. WoW destroys lives...

Presumably your value computation includes values other than "enjoying doing something". For example given the explicit choice between getting to enjoy delicious food for the next 5 years at the expense of having a child starve, versus having average food and letting the child live, most people would choose the latter - even if they were extremely confident that there were no ulterior consequences of any kind and the food would contain additives to surgically neuter any guilt they might otherwise feel.

The case regarding your playing WoW instead of doing something else may be less clear cut than that, but one example is enough to prove that there is nothing unusual about valuing something more strongly than one's own enjoyment of some activity. A related Less Wrong trope is "orgasmium", which is considered by most to be an undesirable future for humanity despite its being defined as a state of optimal bliss.

Whether or not playing WoW is actually what you should do depends on your what your other values are, besides wanting to enjoy WoW - and you probably know more than anyone else here about those values; although since humans generally possess similar values, depending on your ability to introspect and imagine your response to certain arguments and stimuli you might not. After all, shouldness is a two-place function that takes as one of its arguments your own brain. It also depends on how accurate your model of reality apart from your value computation is (for example, if you had never taken drugs you might be unaware of how pleasurable, or displeasurable, that is).

But as far as your values are similar to the majority of humans, WoW loses out to other, stronger values a lot of the time because:

a) it is inconsequential and unproductive

b) it is seen as a solitary activity

c) it is aesthetically displeasing in lots of other, small ways, e.g. the physical position of the human, his lack of attention to the environment, the narrow range of emotion, the pandering to the lowest common denominator/ mass consumption, the dependency on interacting with someone else's software cynically created to maximise addiction instead of beauty or inventiveness...

d) it is time-consuming, compared to many other hedonistic activities

Also consider the distinction between wanting and liking - although most people are not explicitly aware of this distinction, they probably have some intuitive feeling that they do not "enjoy" WoW so much as they cannot help but do it.

• In general, make decisions according to the furtherance of your current set of priorities.
• Personally, though I enjoy certain persistant-world games for their content and lasting internal advantages, the impression I've gotten from reading others' accounts of World of Warcraft compared to other games is that it takes up a disproportionate amount of time/effort/money compared to other sources of pleasure.

For that game, the sunk-costs fallacy and the training-to-do-random-things-infinitely phenomenon may help in speculating about why so many sink and continue to sink time into it. I've noticed that people who bite the bullet and quit speak not as though they were dependent and longing to relapse into remembered joy, but rather as though horrified in retrospect at how they let themselves get used to essentially playing to work, that is doing something which in theory they enjoyed yet which in practice was itself a source of considerable stress/boredom/frustration. (Again, I have had no direct experience with the game.)

For cocaine, straightforwardly there's the expectation that it would do bad things to your receptors (as well as your nose lining...) such that you would gain dependency and require it for normality, as with caffeine and nicotine and alcohol. Your priorities would be forcibly changed to a state incompatible with your current priorities, thus it is worth avoiding. If there were a form or similar thing which in fact had no long-term neurological effects, that is one which actually gave you the high without causing any dependency (is that even theoretically possible, though, considering how the brain works? Well, if dropped to the level of most things then instead, say...), it might be worth trying in the same way that music is helpful to cheer oneself up (if it cost less as well?), or perhaps sweet foods would be a better example there.

The standard answer for sex is that it's already part of your system of priorities, and so there's little helping it. Practically speaking, it would probably be far easier if one could just turn off one's interest in that regard and focus one's energy elsewhere--particularly, in terms of the various psychological/physiological health benefits, if one already cannot experience it yet is near-futilely driven to seek it. Again though, there one more wants to turn off 'the impulse to have sex' rather than sex itself, since there are advantages if you want to have sex and do compared to if you want to and can't, and also advantages if you don't want to and don't compared to if you want to and can't.

Hm... returning to the original question wording, if one treats World of Warcraft as a potentially-addictive use of time that may truly or otherwise effectively rewire one's sytem of priorities to the point of interference with one's current priorities, then it is likely reasonable to avoid it for that reason. It's again important to note which priorities are true priorities (such as improvement of the world?) that one wishes to whole-heartedly support, and which are priorities which, when stopped to think about, don't have a particularly reason to value (such as the sex drive issue, which actually doesn't have much going for it compared to other ways of pursuing pleasure).

(Species-wide reproductive advantages are acknowledged.)

WoW is pretty fun if you find a guild of friendly folks and voice chat with them while playing together. I haven't found WoW to interfere with the other things in my life. Most of the people in my guild also have careers/classes and family, and don't neglect them.

Fun is important to me.

Interesting addition to the OP. There's a monumental amount of evidence that our brains are biased in that way. It's called addiction, akrasia, procrastination, etc. An example is when short-term indicators such as how something tastes mis-align with long-term ones like whether later you get a stomach ache, nausea, dizziness, etc. For example, you may eat a donut now because of how great it tastes, but then regret it later because you end up feeling sick and nauseous.

I consider this a modern world problem. I assume that all these indicators are supposed to be in harmony, but the modern environment breaks this delicate balance. We end up with a conflict of interests among our different selves over time. Perhaps the most famous and familiar example would be night guy vs. morning guy. It would be one thing if you went to sleep too late one night, found yourself miserable the next day, and then made sure to not make that mistake again... but it's another one entirely to do this systematically--day in and day out.

This phenomenon of the internal conflict between night guy and morning guy is another indicator problem. Your signals for going to sleep mis-align with those of whether you got enough sleep by the time the next morning morning rolls around. This conflict is intractable. Your night self wants to stay up, but it's not him that pays the damages; it's your morning self. What's the cause of this internal conflict? Artificial lights, unnatural lack of exercise, comfortable chairs, TV, computers, the internet, etc. Once again, the modern world breaks a delicate system.

So what about WoW? Well, is staying up super late unmitigated enjoyment? Is refreshing LW and your email 85 times per hour as fun as your revealed preferences would suggest? No. They blow. There are many downsides. The LW refresh cycles that last until 4 AM usually include their fair share of FML. Fun is fun, but it stops being worth it when "FML!!" gets too interspersed between those moments of fun. Or later when you find that you've lost your health, your girlfriend, your job, etc.

I find that every kind of super-stimuli (e.g., junk food, music, WoW) has a slew of disadvantages. They do damage to your health, your social life, your work, your emotional sanity, and so on, whether directly or through causing you to neglect other areas of your life. If these things don't matter to you, then fine. But I really doubt that. Being healthy, happy, etc... that is fun. Going emotionally insane, being sleep deprived, losing your health, not getting any face-to-face social contact... that blows almost no matter how you slice it.

If you can play WoW in moderation and enjoy it and not feel any bad cognitive effects or hits to your health, that's great. But it's very addictive in that it will send an overwhelming shock-wave through the rest of your natural reward system, and your brain will start equating the health of your character with your own. This is scary shit. Your identity will become unstable, and looking at yourself in the mirror after a long WoW session will be a bizarre experience. This might well advance until the day you admit to yourself that you've gone completely insane.

WoW is not mind safe. Again, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. I can get raw enjoyment out of things that won't threaten to destroy my health, drive me insane, wreck me emotionally, etc. And many of those things will build a whole slew of skills that I will be able to use to have even more fun in the future. WoW may well build some important skills, but the downsides and cognitive hazards are just too massive.

You should not play WoW in order to enjoy your free time, mostly for reasons already stated in the responses.

However, it contributes significantly to our culture, so it might be remiss to ignore it entirely if you care about experiencing relevant parts of the zeitgeist.

If you choose to go that route, take the same sorts of mental/social precautions you might take before 'trying' intravenous heroin.

No.