Liz Lawley I blame you! :-)

Have Patrick join the We Know guild (Eitrigg). My son, Sean, should be able to do the same in a few months if he doesn't mess up his grade. The idea is to leverage WoW addiction for better grade. If having WoW play time reduced to a mere trickle doesn't scare kids into studying, I don't know what will.

And there is an opportunity to teach as well. When my son kept wailing about all the gold I threw away when I stopped playing WoW, I told him that goods bought with unearned gold has no glitter. I am also looking forward to teaching him about economy, market, timing, and value system using the Auction House.

I've played warcraft for about two years now, and while it goes through phases of being utterly addicting and just a way of avoiding work, one thing definitely stays the same. Warcraft, and other mmorpgs, is really a collection of communities forming. If you were looking at it from the outside, you wouldn't think so, but there's the potential for a social networking within here, possibly because the demographic is generally your age rather than patrick's age.

It's habit forming and personal and entirely uncapitalized upon. I love it.
However, I'd love it even more if instead of paying a monthly service fee, the different regions were branded (you know, instead of going to Darnassus, I went to Starbucks. I wonder how that business model would change the gameplay.

heh. I went through the same thing this weekend: http://blogs.technet.com/adamca/archive/2007/02...

Oh no! This is not good. World of Warcraft is a great game but when people become addicted to it, it is not a pretty scene. Trust me my friends used be addicted. (they have gotten much better though) My friends and I that don't play make fun of our friends who do play by saying wow with a big O mouth and putting three fingers about on both sides so that they are Ws. Now, Robert I do not want to hear about you playing WOW at all and getting addicted.

Scoble is this any good or have you heard anything about eve.

http://www.eve-online.com/

EVE!!!!

Eve-Online is definitely the ultimate geek MMORPG. It takes alot more thought than WOW and has some amazing depth. I've been playing for about a year and I still haven't seen half the game.

Vanguard just came out, and it is pretty fun too. Sort of a hybrid of WoW, EQ, EQ2, and UO.

Well, Wow is a great game, the problem with MMO's recently IMHO is the population of the people who play it. Don't get me wrong, i enjoy the company of children sometimes, but what I want in an online social escape is not some spoiled 12 year old yelling this or that at me.

Now, i've been attached in some way or another to these MMO's for a very long time.

1. It started a long time ago on good old AOL with something called Never Winter Nights. This was the first thing I ever considered a MMO. (you could only play online, back when AOL cost you 3-4 bucks an hour.

2. UO Ultima Online. Richard Garriot creates the first and one of the best MMO's ever. Still runs on a 2d engine and this is a raw form of an MMO at the time, many things hadn't been hashed out as far as how these games could go, you could potentially kill someone, and take from them, possessions which took them an entire year of their real life to possess. Greifers and "PKers" were rampant.

3. EQ the first game to really put the word MMO on the map, this game was created by one of the great minds of MMO's who based Everquest on the muds of old. Brad Mcquaid just put out Vanguard Saga of Heroes recently which is really his first post Everquest game he put out.

4. Many lame-good games.

5. Second life. A new concept that becomes popular for all different reasons. An idea before it's time, now struggling because of it's age to attract and retain people.

6. WOW - MMO becomes a household word. The first and only true world wide MMO. My brother has ran a guild on this game since beta. He puts so much time into it that I wonder how he keeps a job and runs a business. His character and gulid are super powerful and I play a character at times in his guild but have been mostly playing Vanguard.

That's my history involvement in MMO's if you care--one thing I beleive is that in the future, we will see more and more of these types of games simply because they stop dead piracy and give a constant source of income to devs that can make a quality title. The only thing which has kept this from becoming true even by now is the sheer effort it takes to pull one of these games together.

Scoble, give Vanguard a try, or tell patrick to do so, it's a great alternative to the WOW machine. (if he gets bored or if it doesn't work to keep his grades up anymore)

Bwahahahaha. My evil plan has succeeded!

:)

For what it's worth, Lane and Alex both still play, but only intermittently. They're not nearly as into the game as I am. (My priest turned 69 tonight...)