If you’ve seen the Emmy Award-winning South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, you’ll have a pretty good idea how the mainstream media predominantly portrays online gamers.

From 21-hour daily sessions hunting boars just to level up; through acne, obesity and a descent into the use of “noob” and “pwned” in everyday, impenetrable conversation; to Cartman relieving himself at his PC into a bedpan held by his mother, it plays on pretty much every preconceived idea of online gamers. And it’s very, very funny.

Of course, this stereotype doesn’t quite hold up when you look at the sheer size of the subscriber base of games like World of Warcraft. The various massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) currently running boast more than 16 million subscribers worldwide, with around 10 million of those active in Blizzard’s unstoppable behemoth.

But that media portrayal will inevitably live on, and it seems to be having an effect on the gamers themselves. Dr. Jerald Block, a US psychiatrist who specialises in patients suffering from internet addiction (or “pathological computer use” as he prefers to call it) has found that men would rather admit to an addiction to porn than playing online games.

“Some people come in for trouble with Internet porn,” explains Block. “But the computer gamers tend to be harder to treat. People feel a lot of shame around computer games, whereas it’s socially acceptable to have a porn problem.”

He goes on to imply that the problem gets worse with age, and with the expectation of moving on to more serious pursuits. “It’s much more acceptable for kids to talk about game use, whereas adults keep it a secret. Rather than having sex, or arguing with their wife or husband, or feeding their children, these adults are playing games.”

After a brief stint mining in the mind-numbing Entropia Universe, then a slightly longer attempt to ingratiate myself to the all too serious pilots of EVE Online, I’ve come to the conclusion that MMOGs require a little more dedication than I can muster. But I know a number of perfectly well-rounded individuals who regularly enter the world of Guild Wars – and they don’t do it dressed in their pants with the curtains drawn.

Have we really reached the point where people would rather their friends think they’re a porn addict than an online gamer? Will we start seeing a new version of those panic buttons that close your web browser and open Excel when you see the boss coming – but one which closes WoW and opens up www.bigjugs.com?

“Gaming at work? Not me, sir. Now can you come back in two minutes?”

The internet has changed society in countless ways, mostly for the better. But while both online gaming and the adult sector continue to grow in leaps and bounds, it seems one is losing its stigma far more rapidly than the other.