This article will briefly look at the addictiveness of Football Manager and the possible dangers and effects FM: Live will have.

At times, we become surrounded by this virtual football world and forget about the real world, when all of a sudden we get awaken by a call for food or a friend trying to pry you out of your room.

The more I play Football Manager the more I start to believe that it is the next WoW, with the potential of being worse… The reason for this is with WoW you can only get to level 60 or whatever, with Football Manager there is no limit.

Some of you may not know Xfire but it is an in-game chat client that also keeps stats of how long you play games for, pretty nifty. Anyhow, as I look at profiles of my friends on Xfire… 403 hours, 276 hours, 288 hours… It’s the same story, people who get sucked into the FM craze can’t seem to get out; furthermore it’s a crazy amount of game time for a game that hasn’t even been released a year. Some of you may say that “oh those people just have no life” – Load up your FM game and go to game status and see how much time you’ve been playing at it, most of you will see that it’s been more than one whole day of game time.

Naturally one must take into account the fact that we all do idle things while playing.

So now let’s get to the point, I for one have played 276 hours of Football Manager 2007 this year, the majority of which being from after the exams… I would like to think that 50 of those hours are just me idling away etc. However, I’m probably lying. Do I have a social life you ask? Shockingly yes. Do I at times prefer to stay home and finish off the crunching season decider than go. L Maybe… This brings me to the point, the danger that Football Manager withholds…

-To most of you I’m probably sounding like some obsessed nerd, but I hope there’s the odd one out there which understands me. –

…the time where Football Manager has a greater priority than other things, such as food. I know that I and some of my friends have at times forgotten completely that we were hungry, because we were so entrapped in a virtual world of a videogame. This is probably one of the first signs of you getting a bit too into the game. Then later on, you will find yourself still awake at 4 a.m. knowing well that you have to be up in a couple hours but not giving a damn as you’re only 8 games away from finishing the season. Another great sign of you playing too much FM is that you ramble on about your FM story wherever you can, at the local forum you visit, to one of your friends on MSN etc.

This brings me to my conclusion, when Football Manager is already such an addicting game on its own – completely ignoring the network side to it. What will FM: Live bring to the table? Will there be echoes of the incidents happening in South Korea where WoW gamers die of exhaustion after playing for three days straight? Will SIGames have blood on their hands!? – Maybe not, but it certainly poses a threat as we gamers are moving into a new era of gaming. An era that has already begun, an era where you can compete with people all over the world, and see if you really have what it takes to be the best.

With the FM: Live beta looming in the horizon we can only wait and see what will happen.