WoW stands for World of Warcraft and is the most popular MMORPG on the Internet. The acronym stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game and the 8 million registered players in WoW, not surprisingly, assume various roles and collaborate on quests of one sort or another. I know all this because I set my year 11 computing class to find out as much as they could about online gaming. I'm still assessing what they discovered but I did my own research and was surprised at the numbers of online gamers as well as the huge revenues that the industry generates.
The class is also investigating online gambling and so am I. The graphic above is a screenshot of a slot machine taken from www.freeslots.com where I've been playing on and off. As you may be able to see, I've accumulated 2359 credits but unfortunately this does not represent real money. Compared to the real slot machines that I've played, the returns on this virtual slot machine seem remarkably generous. I've discovered that there are online poker rooms, online casinos and online bingo. Interestingly, the 2003 world poker champion started out playing in one of these virtual poker rooms and in this way secured an invitation to a real world event that he went on to win, much to everyone's surprise.
In my online investigations, I've also come across a site called Second Life where you can lead a virtual second life in addition to your own real world life. You join up and select an avatar, a character to represent you in this virtual world. It doesn't cost any money to join but if you pay money, you can buy virtual real estate and build a house on it and presumably live in it. For purely educational purposes, I've joined Second Life, selected my avatar and am ready to interact in my new virtual world. Unfortunately, not having paid any money, I don't have any virtual money (called Linden dollars) and so I'll be roaming about as a virtual beggar. I still have to download the software from the site so that I can begin my second life but because I've seriously exceeded my monthly download quota, I'm waiting for the new month to dawn. Then I'll be ready for a new adventure.
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