The Federal Communications Commission has a bone to pick with Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of the smash hit video game, World of Warcraft. Deborah Taylor Tate, is one the five commissioners overseeing regulation of TV, Radio and all things pertaining to the media in the US stated: "You might find it alarming that one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the US is online gaming addiction - such as World of Warcraft - which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide."

Strong words indeed, and by no means the first to attack the gaming culture.

While I'm sure that countless millions hours are 'lost in space' escaping into the world filled of orcs, trolls and dwarfs it just seems to me to be the latest in a long line of 'distractions' that we as a society are looking to blame for a collective apathy with reality. Not that you can blame this need for escapism, after all it does seem that reality is ever more bleak these days with the 24/7 news cycle from around the globe many stories weirder and far more disturbing than anything Blizzard could come up with. Just keep the statement by the FCC on this phenomenon in perspective, that this is the same institution that blamed Elvis' gyrating pelvis, and the Beatles with their 'devil music' for the collapse of western civilization.

Tate made the claim shortly after a student adviser at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Vince Repesh, told his local paper that he'd seen students with severe academic and personal problems. "I accused one of them of coming in loaded from smoking dope, he looked so bad," Repesh said in the Duluth News-Tribune. He also said that he had seen student grades drop from A's to F's and attributed it directly with time lost to video gaming.

To be honest maybe the natural selection process of eliminating the 'addicted' gamers from colleges will just make the job pool a little less frightening come the summer time. On the other hand, those that spent their time gaming away at college will probably and perhaps ironically land a top-paying job or start a multi-million dollar company in Silicon Valley or South Korea and have the last laugh. Just ask Mr Bill Gates if he completed college!

The FCC state that the student drop-out rate and the fall in grade levels across the US is due to the fact that the virtual reality games are inherently addictive, just as with the potential for the abuse of recreational psychotropic drugs and alcohol, but the FCC need to point out that this habit forming is not universal and that the games cannot be solely blamed for the decreases.

The real reality is that college is beyond expensive, and is way out of control in terms of inflation. In these difficult economic times, where colleges across the nation have seen a drop in applicantions we may have to re-think the entire higher education system. Some people have suggested lowering the high-school graduation age—most European nations graduate high schoolers at 16 but then again it seems they get to do everything earlier! We should consider encouraging apprenticeship programs for the less academically inclined to keep the trades and craft industries from being outsourced overseas. Perhaps another idea would be having a uniform system where a pass actually means something come graduation day and not just the pomp and circumstance of handing out caps and gowns to those that turn up.

I think the FCC position is possibly a reflection of the quality of the higher education on offer. Are the lessons so dull and mundane that our youth have to fend off a myriad of orcs in World of Warcraft? Is the game that good? Maybe if more students were to pay for their own higher-education they would value their time more, especially when it came to paying off the student loans rather than just expecting another check from mom and dad. Perhaps as with everything else these days, more and more students will obtain their qualifications by attending colleges online. The bricks-and-mortar colleges may have to revaluate their fee structure if the demand continues to drop and as state budgets are slashed before they start blaming video games for their plight.

I obviously missed the dawn of the online computer gaming culture while I attended art college. We had plenty of other distractions to tempt us away from our work, but that is another story.

Just so you know my early exposure to video games began, as with many of my generation, with Atari's ground-breaking Pong which a friend of mine had back in the late 70's (I still love the graphic minimalism). Then we progressed to Asteroids, Tank, Pac-Man and the timeless classic, Space Invaders. The gaming machines were located in grubby arcades, or at the local fish 'n' chip shop or pub, where we forced into social interaction. Negotiating a gaming schedule and remembering who owed you money for the games from the previous day. Even then, we had decide whether or not we were going to spend our lunch money to try and get the high score which was often the case. Later on, the domination of Nintendo's ubiquitous Super Mario Bros games never did much for me nor for that matter the confounding isolation of Riven's Myst, or id Software's perpetual Doom series.

What goes around comes around as they say, as now I face the gaming recreation/addiction dilemma on a daily basis with my two teenage sons who like nothing more than to blast away at a galaxy full of imperial orcs for hours on their laptops. I think it is perfectly fine for them to escape reality, healthy in fact, especially as they implicitly know that they face an ire far worse than the wrath of any Lich King, or Prince of Darkness can muster if they haven't completed their earthly assignments here in the real world.

Recently, I must confess that I have rediscovered the far less fashionable and ancient game of chess through Yahoo's online gaming rooms, and while I'm certainly no Bobby Fischer or Anatoly Karpov, by any stretch of the imagination, I find the online format simultaneously, both therapeutic and entertaining. Online chess can certainly eat up some 'free' time and maybe I too am in danger of becoming an addicted gamer.

I like the online format for the same reasons WoW gamers like the web based paltform. I play with real people of all ages from all around the world which makes it far more interactive than merely pitting my skills against a computer program. The games are free and from what I can tell, from being frequently bumped off the servers, remain very popular. Sure they have to run banner ads, which is a tad annoying, but at least I can play from the comfort of my home. I suppose rather than fighting intergallactic battles I prefer the structure of chess, the timelessness simplicity of it, 64 chequered squares, no need for orcs or dwarfs, as my knights and rooks, will suffice.

A Gaming Anecdote

After the recent holidays, my youngest complained about my Wii Sports tennis skills, or lack thereof, so this weekend I planned to take him out onto a real tennis court and show him my cross court forehand, just to keep him quiet. Alas, the great outdoors in this wondrous golden state comes with its own carefully disguised pitfalls and invisible demons. During a hike on New Years' Day I encountered a California nightmare in the form of Poison Oak. My sons, begrudgingly—so they say—laughed at my swollen and grotesque facial features, which were somewhat reminiscent of John Hurt's portrayal of John Merrick in the classic film the Elephant Man, so hideous and grotesque was my appearance that they have since requested that I drop them off far away from the school entrance and the madding crowd.

How I wish we had stayed in the great indoors and played video games.