My brother who was intellectually handicapped chose a similar escape from society. He died in his twenties of a pulmonary embolism. It was likely caused by a lack of exercise due to his excessive gaming habit.
An important counterpoint.
Heavy multiplayer gaming is just coming into the mainstream. I never even got into it for its unsavory vibe, much like I never got into one-armed bandits and weed. I knew early alarmist reports were wrong, but speedy mainstreamization (along the lines of what's going on with weed too) is bound to erase previous criticism.
Despite not being a gamer this story touched me -- enough that it made me suspend the slower more rational critical "loop" temporarily. But people do get disable kids all the time, a cousin just got an autism diagnosis for her nonverbal 3-year old; and it's not good to enter gaming into the annals of it-can't-harm-at-least alternative medicine.
> people do get disable kids all the time
struck me (a profoundly disabled person) as very dehumanizing.
I regularly trade quality for quantity of life. Socialising in ways that allow ways of relating I otherwise cannot access is not 'alternative medicine', it is living.
I respectfully suggest a bit more humility. Listen to disabled gamers before you firm up your opinion.
(Racists and other bad-faith actors may have ruined the "can't even raise the question" routine. It's unfortunate -- we're quickly losing the ability to think critically; and you know what the great men have said about the unexamined life.)