1. League of Legends
Remember the days when your sons were playing football for the local team? When your daughter was reading chirpy Harry Potter books? When your boyfriend bought you a bunch of roses every week? Those days are now gone. Instead of playing football, they are playing League of Legends. Instead of reading books, they are reading strategy guides for League of Legends. Instead of buying their partners presents, they are spending money on upgrades for League of Legends (or more likely don't have partners at all). My brother plays this game, and casually walked up to me one night, and said he just finished a 45-minute game on League of Legends. Did you just say that you spent nearly an hour doing the same exact thing over and over again, and by that I mean kill a ton of minions, before avoiding attacking the other online gamers until you are 100% certain they won't get you first. My mates at university could recite for me the entire list of characters, their advantages, disadvantages, and the perfect order to unlock all their attributes. Yet, these people fail to tell me how they are going to pay for the computer they play on when they fail the degrees they didn't revise for. I'm not a fan of the game, but due to how many people have been sucked into this experience, it is clear that many others are fans. The addiction doesn't limit itself to the actual (repetitive) gameplay and an enticement to the pathetic graphics. The game recently hosted its World Championship Season, which won the victors $1,000,000 and attracted a global unique audience of 8.2 million. To WATCH people play the same thing that they could be playing. People are now able to make some sort of career out of this video game, such is its popularity. I guess these tournaments are a nerds equivalent to the NBA play-offs, and like basketball has the same verbose nature that manages to keep certain people glued to their screens for hours. My friend watched one of the live games and would jump up like somebody had scored the Champions League winning goal. Although many people are addicted to sports in the same manner, they at least encourage people to work hard, train and get healthy to reach their level of success. Whereas League of Legends only encourages people to sit at the same screen for hours, suffering the same monotonous experience, desperately fighting off the commonplace occurence of RSI.