Asperger's Syndrome vs. World of Warcraft: How My Roommate Failed Out Of UCLA

I played WoW for something like 7 years, doing the high-end stuff like the high-difficulty PVE content and high-end PVP, got married, had kids, and launched a startup while doing it. I quit because I got bored with the game, and my interests moved on to other things. It's not inherently evil and guaranteed to destroy your life. The danger is that it offers a relatively quick and easy work-and-reward cycle, and can give you the illusion of accomplishment. If you let that illusion substitute for actual accomplishment in the real world, that's when you get into trouble. Having and keeping goals is a great inoculation against that sort of thing.

Lots of kids are getting too used to highly curated, manually disciplined classroom settings. They are used to the teacher reminding them that they haven't turned in that assignment. The reason they don't skip is because the school will call their parents. They aren't allowed anything other than limited access to technology, because it's "distracting".

When they get to college, they just aren't ready for independence. Without the nannie-teachers and the parents, they don't have a support system that can point them in the right direction. Aspergers would have no doubt exacerbated the situation, but I am not on the spectrum and have very similar addictive tendencies that caused me to nearly fail my course as well.