I've avoided playing World of Warcraft because many people enjoy it so much that they neglect other things in their life.
Does that make sense?
How about cocaine?
How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.
ADDED: Lots of interesting discussion, but no one is getting at some points of particular interest to me. Most answers assume that you have important stuff to do, and you need to decide whether WoW will prevent you from getting that important stuff done. They also assume that your brain usually errs on the side of telling you to do "non-important" stuff (WoW) at the expense of "important stuff".
One question is whether there is any evidence that your brain is biased in this way. I think your reflective self greatly overestimates the probability of success at the "important stuff". I have worked very hard, twelve hours a day, 7 days a week, on "important stuff" for most of the past 30 years. The important stuff never pans out. So it appears that when my brain told me to play Freecell rather than work on that important paper on artificial intelligence that got pulled from the book the day before publication due to petty office politics, or to watch Buffy rather than do another test run of the demo I spent three months preparing for DARPA that no one from DARPA ever watched because the program officer was too busy to supervise his program, or to go hiking instead of spending another weekend working on the project for NASA that was eventually so big and successful that my boss took it over and then tried to get me fired1, or to go dancing rather than work on the natural-language processing approach that got shelved because my boss felt it emphasized the skills of mathematicians more than his own, or to LARP rather than put in another weekend on my approach using principal component analysis for early cancer detection that it turned out some guy from the FDA had already published 6 months earlier, or the technique for choosing siRNA sequences that a professor from George Mason already had a paper in press on - all those times, my brain was using a better estimate of success than my reflective self was.
Another question is why the "important stuff" is important. Fun is fun. On the surface, we are saying something like, "I have a part of my utility function that values contributions to the world, because I evolved to be altruistic." If we really believe that, then for any contribution to the world, there exists some quantity of fun that would outweigh it. And people use language like, "WoW may be fun, but it has little lasting effect." But when you contribute something to the world, if the relevant motivating factor to us is how our utility function evaluates that contribution, then that also has little lasting effect. If you do something great for the world, it may have a lasting effect on the world; but the time you spend feeling good about it is not as great - probably less time, and a less intense emotion, than if you had spent all the time accomplishing it playing WoW instead. So this question is about whether we really believe the stories we tell ourselves about our utility functions.
1. He got to award himself all of the department's yearly bonus money that wasn't awarded to his subordinates, so any obvious success by his subordinates was money out of his pocket.
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.
High-end play will teach you a fair amount about teamwork, coordination, and group politics. If you're in charge of the group, you'll gain some decent management experience - actual employees are a LOT easier to manage than WOW players. I was a manager for a couple years, and fairly highly rated within the company, and I relied a lot on my gaming experience to get me started :)
It's probably not the best environment, but for people who are otherwise fairly socially isolated, it can... (read more)