Despite all the stories of people abandoning or ignoring their jobs, families, and free time to immerse themselves in the game World of Warcraft, I don't fault Blizzard Entertainment. They provide a deeply involving, multi-faceted and rich game environment steeped in quality control and innovation.

But I also admit that I've come close to exceeding sane amounts of daily and weekly time dedicated to building my characters. But now I'm back to working two jobs, and getting bills paid off and things done around the house. Here's how I've come back from what could easily have been a point of difficult or no return:

1. Leave your raiding guild. The moment you log on, any guild member (read: potential co-addict) who's near an uncleared dungeon might ask you to vaporize up to a few hours traveling to, waiting in and then maybe fighting through one or more dungeons. If you really have to gear up, or do achievements, just use general chat in a major city, This way you won't be bombarded with invites 24/7 from equally addictive people. Enjoy the peace of mind you get from being invisible, so you can enjoy whatever you choose to do in-game that much faster, and sign out sooner.

2. Think about what you've done with the week's time online, and what you could have done with it if you put it all together. Try to do (or start) what you missed out on today. I know this week I could be just about caught up on my ShoeMoney Extreme Marketing Course, but as is I'm three weeks behind. Two hours a day on WoW may not seem much, but that's over a half a day out of my week, and I want to build my site horrormedia.net with what I should have learned. Unfortunately the domain's sitting completely undeveloped, so tonight I'm just shutting the computer down, writing up a to-do list, and going right to my web browser later.

3. Break the spell. In the middle of the most absorbing, wild fighting of your gaming session, just absent-mindedly hit the red X in the upper right of the WoW interface. Tell yourself you'll get right back to your game in a second, as soon as you just hit that red X. Then take a minute to look at your desktop screen, experience the non-interaction of a blank screen, and realize: you're free to get up and do what you want and need to do now. Go do it, quickly, before you log back in. See a girlfriend or boyfriend. Help around the house. Get out and go for a walk.

4. Use parental controls. If you have to be your own mom or dad to discipline yourself about character usage time, have a friend change the parental controls password or, better yet, randomly generate it. Cut your daily time down to give yourself enough freedom to do the things you want and need to.

5. Use the alarm clock, and customize the alarm message to remind you of something you've been putting off. If the alarm starts flashing after being ignored, reset it for 5 minutes from now with a new message until it finally sinks in.

6. Think about how completely pointless your achievements are outside of the game. So you've used a Frostweave Bandage on a friend with 2% life after cutting an epic gem in between the third and fourth forms of a heroic-level holiday-only dungeon boss while wearing all red armor and rez-sick. SO WHAT.

7. Read "The Four Hour Work Week"'s section on cutting out excess information from your life. Limiting the inflow of the all the world's information increases your creativity and flow of mental output. Fretting over every point of base stats, shortcut optimization, stat buffs, achievements, your guild standing and everything else consumes the finite amount of mental energy you can apply each day to live your real life to the fullest.

8. Volunteer somewhere: tutor a student, run a soup kitchen, help someone online with a question. Helping a person in real need can be far more satisfying than killing pixels and hustling dots. And if it's not, and you really want to shake your overplaying, keep at it till it is.

9. Before firing up your game sometime, stand up, shut down the computer, and spend an hour or two doing the things you miss doing, or something you know you should. Spending time with family or friends who miss you, working on neglected projects, and catching up on ignored responsibilities are all good examples. Go back and play for a bit, but only after you can see the appreciation from those around you for putting first things first.

10. If all else fails, visit http://wowdetox.com. You'll be able to hear from a lot of people who ended their addictions and either cut way back or walked away free.

World of Warcraft is rivalled only by a handful of games for its quality, size, depth and immersion. Given the wide variances in the mental health of its users, its effects can range from simple, responsibly consumed entertainment to frighteningly disruptive changes in physical and mental well-being, job status, and family cohesion. I'm not telling anyone to outright quit -- that's up to you -- but If you find you've been overplaying WoW or, to be fair to Blizzard, any other thoroughly time-consuming game, please try these tips until at least one of them works.

Take it from a would-be gaming junkie.