Drug addiction, alcoholism, cyberdependence? ...WoW!

Enhanced internet access and inexpensive amounts of bandwidth is bound to boost small and large businesses, not to mention the endless opportunities it will have on our education and healthcare facilities.

This is exciting news for our YouTube fanatics - streaming videos and downloading audio files will now be painless and fast!

Then there is gaming...

Over the years online games such as World of Warcraft have come up in discussions amongst recruiters worldwide (except SA).

Now most of us would see this as just another game right?

Since debuting in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft (Activision Blizzard) has become the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) around the world. The game exceeds 11 million players worldwide.

"MMORPG" is the most instantly gripping, involving and demanding entertainment technology ever invented. The addiction rate appears to be about twice that of crack.

Employers (US, Europe and Asia) are specifically instructing recruiters not to send them World of Warcraft players. There is a belief that WoW players are not focused on their work and distracted most of the time...

This was the opposite sentiment a few years ago when Yahoo! employed a Senior Director who was an avid World of Warcraft player and according to Wired magazine:

“The process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.”

Dr Orzack, a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and founder of the Computer Addiction Service, says: "These games are very elaborately designed to ease you in gently, entice you, and keep you there. And it's a cycle: people begin to spend too much time playing and their careers and personal relationships begin to deteriorate."

At the end of the day, when hiring, most recruiters and companies will never be 100% sure whether they are hiring a drug, alcohol, porn, gambling or game addict. A candidate's personal life is confidential and unless it directly affects his/her performance, no one will or should have the right to discriminate against an individual's personal vices.

This is a risk that is taken every day when making that employment offer; the question is - should we be worried?