WOW and all that cal

My personal experience with World of Warcraft (a.k.a. WOW) has led me to believe that games can ruin lives. While this genre of online role-playing games is an amazing technological feat, it's far too easy to get sucked in. I once lived with two guys who played WOW 12+ hours a day--no exaggeration. A trust-fund kid and a waiter, they would start playing around noon--by which time I had already left for work--and continue until about 7 am (the waiter would go to work for about 5 hours, then start right up again). These guys had spent years perfecting the skills of their characters, buying and building property, and forming "guilds" which acted like gangs terrorizing the other players in the game. During the occasional Sunday morning breakfast my roommates would tell me stories about the housewife in Oregon who joined their guild and helped them lead raids, and the basement-dwelling crew of 30-somethings in Nevada who became their rival guild. As amazed as I was to discover that thousands of people across the country seemed to spend as much time doing this as my former roommates, the most shocking revelation was that people actually buy and sell items in this game on e-bay, for real money! They pay real money for things that don't actually exist in the physical world!
There are those who would argue that money doesn't "actually exist" either, but I think that this trend is the beginning of something very bad. In Second Life where major "real" companies are selling their virtual wares on the game, I think I have found the epitome of wastefullness and excess. In some countries people work 60 hour weeks for a couple dollars, but in the western world we're so obsessed with becoming the God and master of our own virtual universe that we'll spend hundreds of dollars on....nothing, via e-bay.