Want a clue that a pastime has truly caught on? Look no further than the 12-step program designed to help people kick their addiction to it.

I came across an article today on wikiHow explaining How to Break a World of Warcraft Addiction. I haven’t played and don’t know a lot about World of Warcraft, but I don’t doubt that MMORPG games like this can become an all-consuming pastime.

The contributors to this article have taken some pretty creative approaches to curbing addiction. A few of my favorites:

• Take up some sort of martial art that is similar to your character in WoW
• Burn yourself out by finding the ways to cheat
• Sabotage your WoW future (by erasing all the progress you’ve made through hours of time spent playing the game)

If these strategies don’t do the trick, we can take a lesson from the government of China, where they employ a novel strategy for curbing gaming addiction outlined on the offbeat news story site Howl @ The Moon: curfews and virtual penalties.

It works like this (in theory anyway): Kids under 18 (everyone has to register with an ID card) can only play an online game for a max of 3 hours per day without incurring any penalties. The longer they stay on beyond this limit, the more online penalties they incur (in their individual game worlds) and therefore the more they get penalized within the game. For example, a kid breaking the online curfew in World of Warcraft would start to lose experience points rapidly, thus negating the point of playing the game.

Help for sufferers of other online addictions is also available, uh…online:

Center for Internet Addiction Recovery
How to Defeat a MySpace Addiction
How to Control a wikiHow Addiction