{"id":454,"date":"2006-09-05T14:27:21","date_gmt":"2006-09-05T21:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/?p=454"},"modified":"2006-09-05T14:27:21","modified_gmt":"2006-09-05T21:27:21","slug":"w-o-w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/05\/w-o-w\/","title":{"rendered":"W.O.W."},"content":{"rendered":"

To the fans of Opus and Anthony, let me start by saying I am not talking about “Whip’em Out Wednesdays” in this post. W.O.W. in this case stands for World of Warcraft, a game that has redefined the massively-multiplayer online role playing game category, aka MMORPG or MMO for short. As the article states, “There were massively-multiplayer games before World of Warcraft, just as there were MP3 players before Apple\u2019s iPod. Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category.” I don’t think I’ve written about MMO’s before and the time is long overdue. Essentially, its an online computer role-playing game (RPG) in which a large (or massive) number of players interact with one another in a virtual world.
\nI think its important to talk about because W.O.W. is first global video game sensation since Pac-Man as over 7 million players world wide are actively participating. Pac-Man came out over 20 years ago folks so that is really saying something. The interesting thing about this stat is that the Asian piracy problem was circumvented – in fact there are 3 million players in China – by the fact that the software is given away for free. The real cost is the monthly subscription fee which is impossible to get around. You want to play, you have to pay. It’s that simple.
\nThere are whole industries that have sprung up around MMO’s. There are bots that troll all day, auto-playing characters to build them up and farmers (real people) who collect experience points, weapons and\/or gold for those that don’t have the time to earn them for themselves. Virtual items or even characters are sold on eBay for real-world dollars – in some cases for hundreds if not thousands of bucks. It’s actually astounding what people will do in and for the game. I for one haven’t played one because I fear I will lose my life to it. My friend Chris has written alot about his World of Warcraft addiction<\/a> and I know myself so I have a good reason to be scared.
\nAfter the jump, read about it courtesey of the Times.
\nOnline Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe<\/strong> by Seth Schiesel, 9\/5\/06
\nSEOUL, South Korea \u2014 At 10:43 p.m. one recent Saturday, in a smoky basement gaming parlor under a bank in this sprawling city\u2019s expensive Daechi neighborhood, Yoon Chang Joon, a 25-year-old orc hunter known online as Prodigy, led his troops into battle. \u201cMove, move!\u201d he barked into a microphone around his neck as a strike team of some 40 people seated at computer terminals tapped at keyboards and stormed the refuge of the evil plague lord Heigan, fingers flying.
\nAs Mr. Yoon\u2019s orders echoed from speakers around the room, Heigan reeled under an onslaught of spells and swords. In six minutes he lay dead. The online gaming guild called the Chosen had taken another step in World of Warcraft, the online fantasy game whose virtual, three-dimensional environment has become a global entertainment phenomenon among the cybersavvy and one of the most successful video games ever made.
\nLess than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.
\nAnd while games stamped \u201cMade in the U.S.A.\u201d have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980\u2019s.
\nThe game has more players in China, where it has engaged in co-promotions with major brands like Coca-Cola, than in the United States. (There are more than three million players in China, and slightly fewer than two million in the United States. And as with most video games, a clear majority of players worldwide are male.)
\nThere is a rabid legion of fans here in South Korea, which has the world\u2019s most fervent gaming culture, and more than a million people play in Europe. Most World of Warcraft players pay around $14 a month for access.
\n\u201cWorld of Warcraft is an incredibly polished entertainment experience that appeals to more sorts of different players than any game I\u2019ve seen,\u201d said Rich Wickham, who heads Microsoft\u2019s Windows games unit. \u201cIt\u2019s fun for both casual players and for the hard-core players for whom the game is more just than a game: it\u2019s a lifestyle. Just as important, Blizzard has made a game that has a broader global appeal than what we\u2019ve seen before.\u201d
\nPerhaps more than pop music or Hollywood blockbusters, even the top video games traditionally have been limited in their appeal to the specific regional culture that produced them. For example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe. Meanwhile many Japanese games, with their distinctively cutesy anime visual style, often fall flat in North America.
\nOne of the main reasons Western software companies of all kinds have had difficulty in Asia is that piracy is still rampant across the region. Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly.
\nSince the game\u2019s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.
\n\u201cUltimately, what I\u2019d like is for the user to feel like they are having a very polished entertainment experience,\u201d said Mike Morhaime, 38, Blizzard\u2019s president (and a gamer since he first encountered Pong in 1976). \u201cWe\u2019d like players to associate our name with quality, so if they see a box on the shelf and it says Blizzard Entertainment, they don\u2019t need to know anything more than that.\u201d
\nThe basic genre that World of Warcraft belongs to is called the massively-multiplayer online game, or M.M.O. The \u201cmassive\u201d refers to the fact that in an M.M.O., thousands of players simultaneously occupy one vast virtual 3-D world. (In a more traditional online game like Quake or Counter-Strike, there are generally fewer than a dozen people in each arena.)
\nBlizzard runs hundreds of copies of the Worlds of Warcraft universe, known as servers, and there might be a few thousand players on any server at any given time. There are servers customized for six written languages: English, both simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, German and French. Spanish is in development.
\nTo begin, a player creates an avatar, or character, customizing its physical appearance as well as race and profession, each of which has different skills and abilities. An elf druid might specialize in healing, for example, while an orc rogue could be an expert in stealth and backstabbing. The player is then set loose in a huge colorful fantasy world with cities, plains, oceans, mountains, forests, rivers, jungles, deserts and of course dungeons.
\nThe players can explore on their own or team up with others to conquer more imposing challenges. As a character completes quests and defeats monsters, it gains new abilities and collects more powerful magical equipment that in turn allow it to progress to the next set of challenges. Players can fight other players if they choose, but much of the focus is on teaming up with other users in guilds like the Chosen to battle automated foes.
\nThere were massively-multiplayer games before World of Warcraft, just as there were MP3 players before Apple\u2019s iPod. Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category.
\n\u201cI think the real key to WOW\u2019s success has been the sheer variety and amount of things to do, and how easy it is to get into them,\u201d said Kim Daejoong, 29, a doctor of traditional herbal medicine in Iksan, Korea, who had traveled to Seoul for one of the Chosen\u2019s regular in-person sessions.
\n\u201cHard-core gamers will play anything, no matter how difficult it is,\u201d Mr. Kim said. \u201cBut in order to be a mainstream game for the general public, it has to be easily accessible, and there have to be lots of things for you to do, even alone. What WOW has done better than other games is be able to appeal to both audiences \u2014 hard-core players and more casual players \u2014 all within one game and bring them together. That\u2019s why you\u2019ve seen people all over the world get into the game.\u201d
\nHours after the Chosen finished their raid in Seoul, a United States guild called Violent stormed Blackwing Lair, home of the black dragon Nefarian and his minions.
\nOne of the players was Jason Pinsky, 33, the chief technology officer for an apparel company in Manhattan. Mr. Pinsky is not unusual among serious players in that he has logged more than 125 days (3,000 hours) on his main character, a hunter.
\n\u201cI play this game six nights a week from 8 p.m. to midnight,\u201d he said in a telephone interview. \u201cWhen I say that to people, sometimes they look at me a little funny. But then I point out that most people watch TV at least that much, and television is a totally mindless experience.
\n\u201cInstead of watching \u2018The Lord of the Rings\u2019 as a three-hour experience, I am now participating in the epic adventure.\u201d
\nIt is rare for guilds in North America and Europe to get together in real life, partly because of geographic distance and partly because of the social stigma often associated with gaming in the West.
\nIn Asia, however, online players like those in the Chosen often want to meet in the flesh to put a real face on the digital characters they have been having fun with. Even in the United States, more and more players are coming to see online games as a way to preserve and build human connections, even if it is mostly through a keyboard or microphone.
\n\u201cThink about it: I\u2019m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way,\u201d Mr. Pinsky said. \u201cI can\u2019t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I\u2019ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I\u2019ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don\u2019t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the fans of Opus and Anthony, let me start by saying I am not talking about “Whip’em Out Wednesdays” in this post. W.O.W. in this case stands for World of Warcraft, a game that has redefined the massively-multiplayer online role playing game category, aka MMORPG or MMO for short. As the article states, “There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[437,630,677,715],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-nerd","tag-tech","tag-videogames","tag-wow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}