What are your thoughts on men who play games like World of Warcraft or RuneScape?

[Anonymous]

[NamerOfStars]

Here's the thing: video games are, viewed as a hobby, no different from any other. Yes, you can dive too deeply into them and wind up addicted, but that's true of books or movies or anything else, too.

But the devil, as the say, is in the details. Both of those games belong to a genre known as "massively multiplayer online role-playing games", or MMORPGs (or just MMOs, because that's more efficient). As the name suggests, these are online games, but in which you're playing in a group of hundreds if not thousands of people in a single interconnected world, not just a handful of buddies within a state or two.

Why does that matter? Well, as you might imagine, running a system that size requires not just an incredible amount of computing power, but an incredible amount of bandwidth, too; no big deal today, but the first graphical MMO came out in 1996, before even the 56k era, when modems dialed in over phone lines and loading the front page of GAG would probably have taken over a minute.

So what the hell does this have to do with your question? Well, that kind of infrastructure is expensive, and the dawn of the MMO as a genre meant new ways of monetization were needed, and so the subscription fees began. Hardly unreasonable; it's not like cable TV wasn't a thing, but to keep people paying, you needed to keep them playing- and that meant delivering an experience engineered from the ground up to hook people. To be addictive, plain and simple. There's a REASON World of Warcraft, which will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this November, still has over 1.2 MILLION players logging in every day. Estimates that haven't adjusted for inflation put the game's lifetime revenue (so far) at $9.23 billion. Its methods, whatever you may think of them, WORK.

All this means that you need to be careful, with games like that. Regularly pause and check to make sure you're not being drawn in farther than you mean to go. They're intended to be revenue-generating Skinner boxes as much as means of recreation or art.

[Unit1]

I actively avoid those games, that require endless hours of grinding. It's really just pissing life away for a lack of better expression. Those are terrible games.

This is how addictions are born if one is not selectful about their choices.

[normalice]

It's fine. I used to play world of warcraft but it got boring around the fifth cashgra... I mean expansion.

[jarkitor20]

Used to play them and I don't think they're bad as long as they keep a healthy balance

[AnusDestroyer3169]

I am one of them

[shortster]

Seems like a good hobby

[Worst]

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