What is normative for gamers nowadays?

So i recently wrote a paper about computer game addiction, and the gamers we interviewed all played more than 24 hours per week, and they all played World of Warcraft.
Like these players i have been there, playing maybe even more than they did. I know the feeling when you "offline" friends asks you what you did during the weekend or if you want to go play basket... you lie.
It seems perfectly innocent when you do it, just a white lie, no one gets hurt... well only you perception of yourself. Shame of playing computer games is so wide spread among the gamers I know that it has become a norm to lie about your habits all the time.
And that is where we come back to the gamers we interviewed, the interview was suppose to uncover their thoughts on the term "computer game addiction" and if they thought it was a real thing. Of course some of them went on defense, denying that there was a problem with their habits and claiming to be totally in self control of the use of games. And that might have been our fault as interviewers, since we did send them a rather critical survey by another researcher before the interview and had them fill it out.
But after the interviews were done and we had analyzed the data, I found out that one of the interviewees had lied and downplayed his use of computer games. The newest expansion of World of Warcraft was recently released, after the interviews, and the interviewee had told us that he was done with the game and that he had to focus on his education now. But as it turned out that was not quite true, him and two of the other interviewees was members of a guild, that within a short period of time reached top 15 in the world. Being at such a level of the game requires an enormous amount of time spend on it, in an interview with one player at the same level, he reveals that they sleep 7 hours a day and plays the rest.
And now you might ask "but what is the problem here", and the problem here is not that the interviewee plays that much, at least not form my point of view. The problem is that he feels that he need to lie to us about it, it is sneered on to play that much computer games apparently. And that makes it difficult for us as researchers to properly identify habits amongst these gamers, since we are not sure that they are true or false.