PLATO (computer system)
PLATO was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, multiplayer video games. PLATO was designed and built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework to UIUC students, local schools, other universities. Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, education and primary mathematics; the system included a number of features useful for pedagogy, including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free-text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, feedback designed to respond to alternative answers.
Rights to market PLATO as a commercial product were licensed by Control Data Corporation, the manufacturer on whose mainframe computers the PLATO IV system was built. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world, but found that marketing the system was not as easy as hoped. PLATO built a strong following in certain markets, the last production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006, coincidentally just a month after Norris died. Before the 1944 G. I. Bill that provided free college education to World War II veterans, higher education was limited to a minority of the US population, though only 9% of the population was in the military; the trend towards greater enrollment was notable by the early 1950s, the problem of providing instruction for the many new students was a serious concern to university administrators. To wit, if computerized automation increased factory production, it could do the same for academic instruction; the USSR's 1957 launching of the Sputnik I artificial satellite energized the United States' government into spending more on science and engineering education.
In 1958, the U. S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research had a conference about the topic of computer instruction at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1959 Chalmers W. Sherwin, a physicist at the University of Illinois, suggested a computerised learning system to William Everett, the engineering college dean, who, in turn, recommended that Daniel Alpert, another physicist, convene a meeting about the matter with engineers, administrators and psychologists. After weeks of meetings they were unable to agree on a single design. Before conceding failure, Alpert mentioned the matter to laboratory assistant Donald Bitzer, thinking about the problem, suggesting he could build a demonstration system. Bitzer, regarded as the Father of PLATO, recognized that in order to provide quality computer-based education, good graphics were critical; this at a time when 10-character-per-second teleprinters were the norm. In 1960, the first system, PLATO I, operated on the local ILLIAC I computer, it included a television set for display and a special keyboard for navigating the system's function menus.
The PLATO system was re-designed, between 1963 and 1969. Built on a CDC 1604, given to them by William Norris, PLATO III could run up to 20 terminals, was used by local facilities in Champaign–Urbana that could enter the system with their custom terminals; the only remote PLATO III terminal was located near the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois at Springfield High School. It was connected to the PLATO III system by a video connection and a separate dedicated line for keyboard data. PLATO I, II, III had been funded by small grants from a combined Army-Navy-Air Force funding pool, but by the time PLATO III was in operation, everyone involved was convinced it was worthwhile to scale up the project. Accordingly, in 1967, the National Science Foundation granted the team steady funding, allowing Alpert to set up the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the university. In 1972, a new system named; the PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's orange plasma display invention, which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display.
This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability, ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512 × 512 bitmap, with both vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control; the PLATO IV display included a 16×16 grid infrared touch panel, allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen. It was possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. One such peripheral was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind, a synthesizer that offered four-voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware; this was supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had sixteen voices that could be programmed individually, or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today are known as multimedia experiences
Quartet (video game)
Quartet is a 1986 arcade game by Sega. Quartet allows one to four players to guide a set of characters through a base taken over by an army of robots. Players control either Joe, Lee or Edgar across a number of sideways-scrolling levels; the object of the game is to advance through the level, fighting opponents that come out of portals in the walls, defeat a boss that carries the door key used to open the "exit door" for the level. Players can find various power-ups during play, such as a jet pack that allowed characters to stay airborne, springs to jump higher, speed boots, point bonuses; each character has a separate characteristic weapon type, which can be upgraded by picking up a coloured bouncing orb that bounced across the screen occasionally. Picking up the orb when it is a player's colour gives a weapon power up, while picking up the orb when it is another player's color gives a point bonus; the game was ported to the Sega Master System. However, only Mary and Edgar were playable, with the title confusingly referring to a four-person band that doesn't exist in the game.
Because of this, in Japan the game was retitled Double Target. Mary's character design was altered between regional versions. In the Japanese version Mary had more Asian-like features, whereas in the western versions she has Caucasian features instead; the game was ported to home computers Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The songs "Oki Rap" and "FM Funk" were recycled for 1991's Spider-Man: The Video Game. Quartet 2 is an updated version of Quartet, only released as a conversion kit. While both games were released in the same year, the differences are a two-player mode instead of four, the option to select characters. In addition, new level designs were loaded into Quartet 2, giving the game 32 distinct levels, compared to 16 for the original. Quartet at the Killer List of Videogames Quartet at SpectrumComputing.co.uk Quartet description at arcade-history.com
Spacewar!
Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell, in collaboration with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, programmed by Russell with assistance from others including Bob Saunders and Steve Piner. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After its initial creation, Spacewar was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson, it was spread to many of the few dozen academic, installations of the PDP-1 computer, making Spacewar the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations. The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players; each ship has limited fuel for maneuvering and a limited number of torpedoes, the ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion when the player is not accelerating. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist was a common tactic.
Ships are destroyed when hit by a torpedo, colliding with each other. At any time, the player can engage a hyperspace feature to move to a new, random location on the screen, though each use has an increasing chance of destroying the ship instead; the game was controlled with switches on the PDP-1, though Bob Saunders built an early gamepad to reduce the difficulty and awkwardness of controlling the game. Spacewar is one of the most influential games in the early history of video games, it was popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was ported to other computer systems at the time. It has been recreated in more modern programming languages for PDP-1 emulators, it directly inspired many other electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space, games such as Asteroids. In 2007, Spacewar was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress. During the 1950s, various computer games were created in the context of academic computer and programming research and for demonstrations of computing power after the introduction in the decade of smaller and faster computers on which programs could be created and run in real time as opposed to being executed in batches.
A few programs, while used to showcase the power of the computer they ran on were intended as entertainment products. These interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students and university employees affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, Bob Saunders; the games included Tic-Tac-Toe, which used a light pen to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, Mouse in the Maze, which used a light pen to set up a maze of walls for a virtual mouse to traverse. In the fall of 1961, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer was installed in the "kludge room" on the 2nd floor of Building 26, the location of the MIT Electrical Engineering Department; the PDP-1 was to complement the older TX-0, before its arrival a group of students and university employees had been brainstorming ideas for programs that would demonstrate the new computer's capabilities in a compelling way. Three of them—Steve Russell an employee at Harvard University and a former research assistant at MIT.
"We had this brand new PDP-1", Steve Russell told Rolling Stone in a 1972 interview. "Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, decided that the obvious thing to do was spaceships." The gameplay of Spacewar involves two monochrome spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge", each controlled by a player, attempting to shoot one another while maneuvering on a two-dimensional plane in the gravity well of a star, set against the backdrop of a starfield. The ships fire torpedoes; the ships have a limited number of torpedoes and a limited supply of fuel, used when the player fires his thrusters. Torpedoes are fired one at a time by flipping a toggle switch on the computer or pressing a button on the control pad, there is a cooldown period between launches.
The ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion when the player is not accelerating, though the ships can rotate at a constant rate without inertia. Each player controls one of the ships and must attempt to shoot down the other ship while avoiding a collision with the star or each other. Flying near the star can provide a gravity assist to the player at the risk of misjudging the trajectory and falling into the star. If a ship moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound ef
Gamemaster
A gamemaster is a person who acts as an organizer, officiant for regarding rules and moderator for a multiplayer role-playing game. They are more common in co-operative games in which players work together than in competitive games in which players oppose each other; the act performed by a gamemaster is sometimes referred to as "Gamemastering" or "GM-ing". The role of a gamemaster in a traditional table-top role-playing game is to weave the other participants' player-character stories together, control the non-player aspects of the game, create environments in which the players can interact, solve any player disputes; the basic role of the gamemaster is the same in all traditional role-playing games, although differing rule sets make the specific duties of the gamemaster unique to that system. The role of a gamemaster in an online game is to enforce the game's rules and provide general customer service. Unlike gamemasters in traditional role-playing games, gamemasters for online games in some cases are paid employees.
The term gamemaster and the role associated with it could be found in the postal gaming hobby. In typical play-by-mail games, players control armies or civilizations and mail their chosen actions to the GM; the GM mails the updated game state to all players on a regular basis. Usage in a wargaming context includes Guidon Games 1973 ruleset, Ironclad. In a role-playing game context, it was first used by Dave Arneson while developing his game Blackmoor in 1971, although the first usage in print may have been Chivalry & Sorcery; each gaming system has its own name for the role of the gamemaster, such as "judge", "narrator", "referee", "director", or "storyteller", these terms not only describe the role of the gamemaster in general but help define how the game is intended to be run. For example, the Storyteller System used in White Wolf Game Studio's storytelling games calls its GM the "storyteller", while the rules- and setting-focused Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game calls its GM the "judge".
The cartoon inspired role-playing game Toon calls its GM the "animator". A few games apply system- or setting-specific flavorful names to the GM, such as the Keeper of Arcane Lore; the gamemaster prepares the game session for the players and the characters they play, describes the events taking place and decides on the outcomes of players' decisions. The gamemaster keeps track of non-player characters and random encounters, as well as of the general state of the game world; the game session can be metaphorically described as a play, in which the players are the lead actors, the GM provides the stage, the scenery, the basic plot on which the improvisational script is built, as well as all the bit parts and supporting characters. Gamemasters can be in charge of RPG board games making the events and setting challenges. GMs may choose to run a game based on a published game world, with the maps and history in place. Alternatively, the GM may build their own script their own adventures. A good gamemaster draws the players into the adventure.
Good gamemasters have quick minds, sharp wits, rich imaginations. Gamemasters must maintain game balance: hideously overpowered monsters or players are no fun, it was noted, in 1997, that those who favor their left-brain such as skilled code writers do not make it in the ethereal gamemaster world of storytelling and verse. Author: The GM plans out the plot of the story of which the player characters will become heroes. Director: During the game, while each of the other players controls the actions of one of the player characters, the GM decides the actions of all the NPCs as they are needed; the GM may direct a particular "NPC" that travels with the party, but this may be open to abuse since the Game Master having a "pet" NPC may compromise their neutrality. Referee: In most tabletop RPGs, the rules are supplied to resolve conflicting situations; the GM is expected to provide any necessary interpretation of those rules in fuzzier situations. The GM may approve or provide House Rules in order to cover these corner cases or provide a different gaming experience.
Manager: The least prescribed portion of GMing, thus the part that takes people the most by surprise. The GM is the one to organize the game in the first place, find players, schedule sessions, figure out a place to play, as well as acting as a mediator and having to balance the needs and desires of all participants—sometimes having to divine the real desires of indecisive or inexperienced players. In early virtual worlds gamemasters served as a administrator. Gamemastering in the form found in traditional role-playing games has been used in a semi-automatic virtual worlds. However, human moderation was sometimes considered unfair or out of context in an otherwise automated world; as online games expanded, gamemaster duties expanded to include being a customer service representative for an online community. A gamemaster in s
Internet
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, academic and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies; the Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web, electronic mail and file sharing. Some publications no longer capitalize "internet"; the origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the federal government of the United States in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication with computer networks. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s; the funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, the merger of many networks.
The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was used by academia since the 1980s, commercialization incorporated its services and technologies into every aspect of modern life. Most traditional communication media, including telephony, television, paper mail and newspapers are reshaped, redefined, or bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephony, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, video streaming websites. Newspaper and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators; the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or sell goods and services online.
Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of New Seven Wonders; when the term Internet is used to refer to the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, the word is a proper noun that should be written with an initial capital letter.
In common use and the media, it is erroneously not capitalized, viz. the internet. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective; the Internet is often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. As early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, meaning interconnected or interwoven; the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are used interchangeably in everyday speech. However, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services; the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. As another point of comparison, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language used on the Web for information transfer, yet it is just one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
The term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the early 1960s in the work of Paul Baran and Donald Davies. Packet-switched networks such as the NPL network, ARPANET, the Merit Network, CYCLADES, Telenet were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard Kleinrock, the NLS system at SRI International by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969; the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of
Star Trek: The Original Series
Star Trek is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry that follows the adventures of the starship USS Enterprise and its crew. It acquired the retronym of Star Trek: The Original Series to distinguish the show within the media franchise that it began; the show is set in the Milky Way galaxy during the 2260s. The ship and crew are led by Captain James T. Kirk, First Officer and Science Officer Spock, Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy. Shatner's voice-over introduction during each episode's opening credits stated the starship's purpose: The series was produced from September 1966 to December 1967 by Norway Productions and Desilu Productions, by Paramount Television from January 1968 to June 1969. Star Trek aired on NBC from September 8, 1966, to June 3, 1969, was seen first on September 6, 1966, on Canada's CTV network. Star Trek's Nielsen ratings while on NBC were low, the network canceled it after three seasons and 79 episodes. Several years the series became a bona fide hit in broadcast syndication, remaining so throughout the 1970s, achieving cult classic status and a developing influence on popular culture.
Star Trek spawned a franchise, consisting of six television series, thirteen feature films, numerous books and toys, is now considered one of the most popular and influential television series of all time. The series contains significant elements of Space Western, as described by Roddenberry and the general audience. On March 11, 1964, Gene Roddenberry, a long-time fan of science fiction, drafted a short treatment for a science-fiction television series that he called Star Trek; this was to be set on board a large interstellar spaceship named S. S. Yorktown in the 23rd century bearing a crew dedicated to exploring the Milky Way Galaxy. Roddenberry noted a number of influences on his idea, some of which includes A. E. van Vogt's tales of the spaceship Space Beagle, Eric Frank Russell's Marathon series of stories, the film Forbidden Planet. Some have drawn parallels with the television series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, a space opera which included many of the elements that were integral to Star Trek—the organization, crew relationships, part of the bridge layout, some technology.
Roddenberry drew from C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels that depict a daring sea captain who exercises broad discretionary authority on distant sea missions of noble purpose, he humorously referred to Captain Kirk as "Horatio Hornblower in Space". Roddenberry had extensive experience in writing for series about the Old West, popular television fare in the 1950s and 1960s. Armed with this background, the first draft characterized the new show as "Wagon Train to the stars." Like the familiar Wagon Train, each episode was to be a self-contained adventure story, set within the structure of a continuing voyage through space. Most future television and movie realizations of the franchise adhered to the "Wagon Train" paradigm of the continuing journey, with the notable exception of the serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Discovery, the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise. In Roddenberry's original concept, the protagonist was Captain Robert April of the starship S. S. Yorktown.
This character was developed into Captain Christopher Pike, first portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter. April is listed in the Star Trek Chronology, The Star Trek Encyclopedia and at startrek.com as the Enterprise's first commanding officer, preceding Captain Christopher Pike. The character's only television/movie appearance is in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Counter-Clock Incident" In April 1964, Roddenberry presented the Star Trek draft to Desilu Productions, a leading independent television production company, he met with Desilu's Director of Production. Solow signed a three-year program-development contract with Roddenberry. Lucille Ball, head of Desilu, was not familiar with the nature of the project, but she was instrumental in getting the pilot produced; the idea was extensively revised and fleshed out during this time – "The Cage" pilot filmed in late 1964 differs in many respects from the March 1964 treatment. Solow, for example, added the "stardate" concept. Desilu Productions had a first look deal with CBS.
Oscar Katz, Desilu's Vice President of Production, went with Roddenberry to pitch the series to the network. They refused to purchase the show, as they had a similar show in development, the 1965 Irwin Allen series Lost in Space. In May 1964, who worked at NBC, met with Grant Tinker head of the network's West Coast programming department. Tinker commissioned the first pilot – which became "The Cage". NBC turned down the resulting pilot, stating that it was "too cerebral". However, the NBC executives were still impressed with the concept, they understood that its perceived faults had been because of the script that they had selected themselves. NBC made the unusual decision to pay for a second pilot, using the script called "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Only the character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, was retained from the first pilot, only two cast members, Majel Barrett and Nimoy, were carried forward into the series; this second pilot proved to be satisfactory to NBC, the network selected Star Trek to be in its upcoming television schedule for the fall of 1966.
The second pilot introduced most of the other main characters: Captain Kirk, Chief Engineer Lt. Commander Scott and Lt. Sulu, who served as a physicist on the ship in the second pilot but subsequently became a helmsman throughout the rest of t
Massively multiplayer online game
A massively multiplayer online game is an online game with large numbers of players from hundreds to thousands, on the same server. MMOs feature a huge, persistent open world, although some games differ; these games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices. MMOs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world, they include a variety of gameplay types. The most popular type of MMOG, the subgenre that pioneered the category, is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which descended from university mainframe computer MUD and adventure games such as Rogue and Dungeon on the PDP-10; these games predate the commercial gaming industry and the Internet, but still featured persistent worlds and other elements of MMOGs still used today. The first graphical MMOG, a major milestone in the creation of the genre, was the multiplayer flight combat simulation game Air Warrior by Kesmai on the GEnie online service, which first appeared in 1986.
Kesmai added 3D graphics to the game, making it the first 3D MMO. Commercial MMORPGs gained acceptance in early 1990s; the genre was pioneered by the GemStone series on GEnie created by Kesmai, Neverwinter Nights, the first such game to include graphics, which debuted on AOL in 1991. As video game developers applied MMOG ideas to other computer and video game genres, new acronyms started to develop, such as MMORTS. MMOG emerged as a generic term to cover this growing class of games; the debuts of The Realm Online, Meridian 59, Ultima Online and EverQuest in the late 1990s popularized the MMORPG genre. The growth in technology meant that where Neverwinter Nights in 1991 had been limited to 50 simultaneous players, by the year 2000 a multitude of MMORPGs were each serving thousands of simultaneous players and led the way for games such as World of Warcraft and EVE Online. Despite the genre's focus on multiplayer gaming, AI-controlled characters are still common. NPCs and mobs who give out quests or serve as opponents are typical in MMORPGs.
AI-controlled characters are not as common in action-based MMOGs. The popularity of MMOGs was restricted to the computer game market until the sixth-generation consoles, with the launch of Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast and the emergence and growth of online service Xbox Live. There have been a number of console MMOGs, including EverQuest Online Adventures, the multiconsole Final Fantasy XI. On PCs, the MMOG market has always been dominated by successful fantasy MMORPGs. MMOGs have only begun to break into the mobile phone market; the first, Samurai Romanesque set in feudal Japan, was released in 2001 on NTT DoCoMo's iMode network in Japan. More recent developments are CipSoft's TibiaME and Biting Bit's MicroMonster which features online and bluetooth multiplayer gaming. SmartCell Technology is in development of Shadow of Legend, which will allow gamers to continue their game on their mobile device when away from their PC. Science fiction has been a popular theme, featuring games such as Mankind, Anarchy Online, Eve Online, Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online.
MMOGs emerged from the hard-core gamer community to the mainstream in December 2003 with an analysis in the Financial Times measuring the value of the virtual property in the then-largest MMOG, EverQuest, to result in a per-capita GDP of 2,266 dollars which would have placed the virtual world of EverQuest as the 77th wealthiest nation, on par with Croatia, Tunisia or Vietnam. World of Warcraft is a dominant MMOG with 8-9 million monthly subscribers worldwide; the subscriber base dropped by 1 million after the expansion Wrath of the Lich King, bringing it to 9 million subscribers in 2010, though it remained the most popular Western title among MMOGs. In 2008, Western consumer spending on World of Warcraft represented a 58% share of the subscription MMOG market in 2009; the title has generated over $2.2 billion in cumulative consumer spending on subscriptions from 2005 through 2009. Within a majority of the MMOGs created, there is virtual currency where the player can earn and accumulate money.
The uses vary from game to game. The virtual economies created within MMOGs blur the lines between real and virtual worlds; the result is seen as an unwanted interaction between the real and virtual economies by the players and the provider of the virtual world. This practice is seen in this genre of games; the two seem to come hand in hand with the earliest MMOGs such as Ultima Online having this kind of trade, real money for virtual things. The importance of having a working virtual economy within an MMOG is increasing. A sign of this is CCP Games hiring the first real-life economist for its MMOG Eve Online to assist and analyze the virtual economy and production within this game; the results of this interaction between the virtual economy, our real economy, the interaction between the company that created the game and the third-party companies that want a share of the profits and success of the game. This battle between companies is defended on both sides; the company originating the game and the intellectual property argue that this is in violation of the terms and agreements of the game as well as copyright violation since they own the rights to how the online currency is distributed and through what channels.
The case that the third-party companies and their customers defen
