Online Gaming

Most guys, at least those I know, between the ages of 10 and 25 seem to participate in a large amounting of ‘gaming’. Whether it’s on a platform system like x-box or playstation, or computers, gaming seems to be the common interest almost all guys can share. I have long been into online computer gaming and have had a few different games that I played extensively for different periods of time. The first game I really got into would have to have been Diablo II. This game went under the classification of a role-playing game, a game that puts you into a specific character which you build up with skills and experience, outfit with different types of gear, and move through a world where the difficulty increases along with that characters growth. The newest, and by far most interesting genre of games, is the mmorpg. This stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game, and in these games everyone that is playing is in the same ‘world’ online. They interact with each other, form groups to take on more challenging opponents, create guilds, and even have their own economies. There can be thousands of people online in the same game world. These online worlds can be huge, some of them taking hours to walk across in the game. These games have created some very strange debates and legal troubles. People can spend hundreds of hours searching through the game for certain items that are very rare, or they can buy them from other people on sites like ebay. People will pay actual money for the ‘owner’ of the particular item, to give them that item in the game. The legal trouble comes in over who actually owns this imaginary item. Most game developers argue that anything created or found in the game is the property of the game developers, while people selling the items argue that they are performing a service, and not actually selling the imaginary item. People even sell accounts of characters that are high levels and full of gear. Games like Diablo, Everquest, or World of Warcraft, create markets where people can make thousands of dollars selling these imaginary items.