Posted on September 1st, 2008 by admin
MMO Addiction: A Big Secret
According to a recent study by a US-based psychiatrist, admitting to sex-addiction is preferable to revealing one’s addiction to MMOs. Dr. Jerald Block has even gone so far as to press the American Psychiatric Association to enter “Internet Addiction” as a new diagnostic term.
BLOCK: As a society we understand that porn is something people do, and you can see a psychiatrist and get treated for it. But gaming is hard to describe to anyone else. So these people can’t explain their situation to friends. In fact, it’s hard to give you an example of what my clients talk about, because gaming is enormously complicated.
IDEAS: Well, give it a try.
BLOCK: OK, there was a man engaged in a game called Eve Online. He was one of the most powerful characters in the universe of this game. He had played for years and accumulated great wealth; he would have been worth about $17,000 if he sold his character and all his virtual assets on
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Posted on September 1st, 2008 by admin
World of Warcraft not only dwarfs all other massively-multiplayer games, it dwarfs a good number of countries — not silly countries like Monaco and Greenland, either, but perfectly sensible ones. Like Sweden, say, or Israel. But how do the holdings of this legion of players compare to the corporate giants of the world?
Determining what actually is the world’s largest company is far from an exact science. Do you measure it by annual revenue, in which case it’s ExxonMobil, which pulled in about $400 billion in 2007? Perhaps counting number of employees makes more sense, in which case it’s Wal-Mart, which has 1.7 million blue-vested souls on its books. Maybe market capitalization, a measure of the public opinion of the value of a company, is what matters most, in which case it’s probably ExxonMobil again.
No matter how you slice it, most of the same names come up time and again — a cabal of the world’s most powerful private economic entities.
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