JN asks: “I was wondering if you have any links that can help me to help my sponsored child get away from the World of Warcraft game Do you know if there is anything that the Church has put out there on this subject?”

Pope Benedict XVI has indeed decried the use of violent video games – and so have a lot of other people such as former gamers and addiction experts who say the World of Warcraft video game series is “the crack cocaine of the computer gaming world.”

As this Telegraph article explains, a 15 year-old boy in Sweden went into convulsions after playing the game for 24 hours straight. It is extremely addictive and experts at Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation say there is not a single case of game addiction they’ve seen in which World of Warcraft did not play some part. 

So what makes World of Warcraft so addicting? According to this review by Commonsense Media, the series was created by Blizzard Entertainment and contains spectacular graphics. It’s based on the story of the world of Azeroth which is divided into two factions – the Alliance which consists of humans, night-elves, dwarves and gnomes, and the Horde with its orcs, trolls and undead. Violent battles frequently break out between the two factions. Because the game is conducted online, it may involve chatting with unknown players. There is much violence, some of it bloody, references to alcohol and occasional subtle sexual innuendos.

“Parents need to know that this game is incredibly fun to play and spectacular in terms of its beauty and creativity, but it requires adult involvement to be a positive and safe experience for teens,” Commonsense Media recommends. “Also, parents should set time limits for gameplay: With endless exploration and no clearly defined levels, it is easy to get hooked.”

One former player, Ryan van Cleave, wrote a book about how his addiction to World of Warcraft cost him a job and nearly his family. He’s one of many whose testimonies are easily found on-line. 

Even more chilling is a book written by Lt. Col. David Grossman in which he describes how recruits are taught to “unlearn” their hesitation to kill by playing video games much like those kids play for kicks in order to desensitize themselves to killing others.

“Retired Lt. Col. David Grossman spent over twenty-five years in the military studying how to transform new recruits into men who could kill,” writes Barbara Nicolosi in this article about the dangers of video gaming.

“In his book, On Killing, Grossman relates that killing is not a natural behavior for human beings. Grossman explains that the psychological conditioning techniques used to train soldiers out of their natural resistance to killing, are the very same techniques used in today’s violent video games. Soldiers are taught to ‘war game’ to desensitize them into thinking about killing more in terms of strategy and challenges and less in terms of the actual loss of an irreplaceable human life.”

Can children learn the same skills from the games they play? Absolutely. As Grossman writes in his book: “Children don’t naturally kill; they learn it from violence in the home, and most pervasively from violence as entertainment in television, movies, and interactive video games.”

Pope Benedict XVI has minced no words in condemning video games such as these.

“Any trend to produce programs and products – including animated films and video games – which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion, all the more repulsive when these programs are directed at children and adolescents,” the pope said in his 2007 World Communications Day Message.

He decried such “entertainment” directed to adolescents as an affront “to the countless innocent young people who actually suffer violence, exploitation and abuse.”

My advice would be to introduce your sponsored child to actual testimonies from World of Warcraft gamers. He/she may be more inclined to hear it from them rather than from a parent figure.

We’ll keep your situation in our prayers!