World of Warcraft comes alive (Why you should pay attention to MMORPGs)

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) are fascinating. Adoption by players has been astonishingly fast. The number of hours players spend in their virtual worlds keeps growing. Entire, working economies have emerged, to the point where you can make your living (in the ‘real’ world) by living a life in a virtual world.

Estimates put Blizzard’s annual revenues from World of Warcraft, one of the most popular examples of the genre at three quarters of a BILLION dollars. No joke. And that’s after the customer’s plunked down $40-$50 to buy the game at the store.

MMORPGs are shaping how a new generation interacts with each other. Several people I’ve spoken to have told me that most of the time they spend in the game isn’t solitary play–it’s time hanging out with friends, usually friends who live or go to school far away. It makes sense, of course. It’s still not quite okay for your average 19-year-old guy to call up his friends from high school to ‘catch up’ every few days, even if he wants to. But chatting while slaying monsters? That works.

One of the most interesting recent developments? Disease. Online, simulated disease that’s apparently not the intended product of the game publisher (Blizzard, in this case), but the outcome of the millions of variables and players interacting in ways no one could have predicted. Rather similar to that thing we call ‘life’ in the real world.

Blizzard recently added the Zul’Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it’s a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn’t be shocking when some players come back and haven’t been cured.

And that’s exactly what’s happened. Players are returning from this instance to towns with the diseases, spreading it, and Blizzard’s in a panic to keep things under control. GM’s have started to quarantine players in an effort to control the spreading, but players keep leaving the quarantine areas.

[Ref: Read more at 1Up]