Love In The Time of Warcraft

Via Edge Online, an article at the Wall Street Journal talking about the process of finding love in an MMOG. From the article: "Nick Yee, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who studies online games, found in a survey earlier this year that 29% of women players and 8% of men said they had gone on to date someone they met in a game. He says the games are filled with scenarios that shed light on players' personalities. A risky raid on a dungeon, for example, can reveal whether someone is a team player. 'These are trust-building exercises,' he says. Players 'are constantly having to make decisions like, Do I run out and save myself or help the others survive?' Situations that reveal so much about someone's character are less common in the real world, he thinks. Yankee Group, a Boston technology-research firm, estimates that MMOGs, which can be played simultaneously by thousands of people using the Internet, are played by 25 million to 30 million people world-wide."