Day 60 , Recovering from Warcraft

Ok, so its not like I'm recovering from heroin. Still, for a company with 2 million subscribers paying 15.00 a month ... jumping into Warcraft (and out of SL) was , for me, as a software guy - pretty educational.

How do you make .. millions.. per month? Is it just management, and a good concept and product line? This company will near the billion dollar mark in revenue this year - because it knows how to listen to customers and deliver what they need and want.

But what if I need the perfect drug? Warcraft is a social environment. Its basis and underpinning rests completely in its interaction with other people - an interaction that, unlike SL, is guided, and stripped down - to facilitate the view that the goals that are set out are socially - higher priority than the trivial goals of a video game. Warcraft owes its large base due in part to the fact that those who play it really buy into the idea that being a raider is some kind of personal accomplishment.

For me, speaking in Warcraft parlance, being a successful guild leader, an epic'd character - raider or PVP'er amounts to a personal admission that your private or social life has a gap that holds enough room in it to give the time to a gaming schedule that could take up as much as 20 to even 40 hours a week of play. Even though in-game, you're able to 'talk' to people and 'accomplish' things, one of the best observations anyone ever made regarding this - is sure - you're doing all these really great things, killing dragons - but in the end, you're just a person sitting in a room . Sitting in front of a computer.

Warcraft is a great learning experience. It teaches you some pretty neat things about how to deal with people, work as a member of a team, and about yourself. Its a great game. I might come back to playing it in another five years or so when they lift level cap up to 100 for characters, and progress beyond the current content.

In a discussion group last night, someone mentioned that part of the allure of joining AA or NA is that you remain anonymous. All I can say regarding warcraft is, that if you want to sell your account - and you do it right - you can remain anonymous and get paid for it. If you disagree with the idea that Warcraft should be setting the personal agendas for many impressionable young teens out there - selling your account is a great way to disassemble the machine they have built - levelling and questing are the strongest areas of theme and game play - and once you hit level cap, you can see where the game designers fall off their horse - currency replacement games , reputation grinding - all of that make for lousy play.

And I prefer a different definition of play...