Well i don't know what people your talking to?, but most people i know are either young professionals / old professional or not professional but still have full time jobs active lives or they are students studying to be professionals. I'm not saying there isn't a small fraction of people that don't have any irl friends or lives. But the majority of people i know do have lives families jobs and other hobbies. It's a bit of a sweeping statement to generalise every online player as some sort of social misfit that can't/won't interact with people irl?
Jamhot
Hear hear.
To the best of my knowledge I don't know anyone who would fit either Mr. Humphry's nor Rumsponge's description.
Most people I know, and have known during my 5 years in this game, have good education, good jobs, families and an active social life outside the game world. There's probably reasonable to believe that the population in EU actually to a great extent reflects the similar stats in real life. There is of course the odd character in this game, as well as in real life, but no accurate conclusions can be drawn from the meeting of the occational odd ball.
But Mr. Humphrys does exactly that.
What I turn against in this article is the gross generalization Mr. Humphrys indulge in, naturally putting himself above the hoi polloi, insulting several millions of people in one sloppy-crafted and highly bias text.
I could not understand how perfectly intelligent people with apparently busy lives could spend even ten minutes engaging in such childish pursuits.
John Humphrys ,age 64, has made a late career in generalization journalism in for instance criticizing of the 'dumbing down' of British television and branding all politicians as liars. Eventhough this may be accurate to a certain extent, it's of course not valid for all and everything - and it is of course not appropriate for any journalist or member of the Fourth Estate to make such claims, unless he in fact is a fraud. On 6 September 2005, Humphrys was censured by the Corporation for his use of "inappropriate and misguided" language. Humphrys has also been widely criticized for taking shares in the poll organization YouGov for which he wrote a column. Humphrys of course denied that there was a conflict of interest between his role as newscaster and that of shareholder of a company, the reports of which are often cited in the news on the BBC.
This article is not a work of objective, serious journalism - this is the personal uptight arch-conservative thoughts of a 64 year old man.
The whole article is about how potentially dangerous and unwholesome internet virtual worlds are. However, the only thing Humphrys actually succeed in proving is that real life issues, urges and problems are being reflected in the virtual world,
since there are living people behind the avatars.
But in a most preposterous line of arguing, he uses isolated singular situations - like for instance the web cam suicide of Kevin Whitrick, as horror enhancement for his own argumentation. What he fails to report is that Whitrick was a divorced, deeply depressed heavy drinking man, who was severely suicidal whether he had joined a battering site or not. I might also add that the chat in question Whitrick participated in (Paltalk) at the time of his sad death, has absolutly
nothing to do with any of the named games - except it's located on the internet and that it has the possibility to chat. But that is obviously quite sufficient "correlation" according to Mr. Humphrys standards as journalist.
These "tabloid proof" together with Mr. Humphrys highly personal and subjective thoughts and fears, are in fact what's builds this sad excuse for an "article".
but still just some junk to fill their junk newspaper with.
I'm not sure what's worse, the paper or the people who take what's written in the paper as the gospel 
