[Milawe]

It depends on the people you meet, and the people you end up gaming with. To say that all MMO players are immature, speak in ugly chatspeak, and have inflated egos would be like saying that all MUDs have intelligent, well-versed, and creative people. Both statements are laughably untrue. The crux of the problem probably has very little to do with the game and much more to do with parenting styles (or lack of parenting at all). I know what goes into raiding. For a 12-13 year old to be doing it requires extremely lack of parenting.

Now, college kids do that a lot, too, but honestly, I feel that college kids are better off raiding than boozing it up, banging everything in sight, or inhaling any drug they can get their hands on. Granted, you can be doing that WHILE raiding, but you're not going to have a good raid for long.

Do you ever remember a time when you got really into something? My Little Ponies. Smurfs. TMNT. Transformers. Comic books. DnD. Unicorns. Toy guns. Swimming. Kids have pretty simple lives, and if they're left to their own devices, they'll just latch onto something and really get into it. It gives them a sense of control in the world where they can memorize all the things in a collection, or name every single toy they own. Treating this like some "disease" is deflecting from the real problem, in my opinion, which would be their own parents not exposing them to other things. WoW makes a really good babysitter for a 13 year old kid. Demonizing the games shifts the responsibility from the parents to the game companies, and I think that once you crush the gaming companies, you'll find those same kids doing other really bad things because their parents will still be looking for something else to babysit their kids.

Again, a kid doesn't get fat from playing video games. He gets fat from his diet and lack of exercise. Again, whose responsibility is that? Not the video game designers.