This is an excellent, interesting and informative article. It makes many interesting points, with there being one point that I want to comment further on. As far as becoming immersed in a virtual world by allowing our perception of the real world to start coming from what we see on the screen, that can potentially happen to some extent with any video game. Although games like MMORPGs (e.g., WoW) are much more immersive than regular video games, I have found that I can focus so intently on certain simple video games (e.g., 3-D Pinball and Minesweeper) that I can almost completely ignore the real world with this very limited "virtual world" that I see in front of me. I believe that is what largely made video games, rather than other things like alcohol and drugs, be addictive to me as a way to temporarily escape reality. Part of my recovery was to really, truly admit to myself that this did not solve any of my real world troubles since they usually just got worse. Instead, as difficult and unpleasant as it was at times, I had to spend time and energy in the real world to deal with these problems.