I don't really keep up with video cards except when I'm trying to buy one ever 3 or 4 years, but those 8800GTs are like $100 and can run just about anything. $100 isn't cheap but for a card that will let you play every game out right isn't bad, especially when getting that last 10-20% performance increase bumps your price up a few hundred dollars
I'm surprised someone hasn't attempted to make some sort of wikipedia-reader yet. It seems like you could have a firefox extension or seperate program or whatever that could merge articles between wikipedia, deletionpedia, that star wars opedia, conservapedia, whatever else you felt like was appropriate for your 'pedias that would bypass some of the deletion problems. It would probably get complicated as hell when dealing with identical pages and things like that but it would be interesting to see how it worked out,.
So far a lot of the features in e-book readers are focused on making them closer to...real books. The big deal with the kindle is apparently that the screen looks like...paper. Or that you can mark pages and write notes on your e-books, just like a real book, only with a computer interface getting in the way. There is so much convenience in having a real physical paper book where the pages can be written on and flipped through and folded that it is hard for to come up with an electronic design that is as easy to use and still looks like a book.
From what I've seen of e-book readers so far, I can predict that in The Future, the "perfect" e-book reader will be almost identical to a paperback book, only slightly smaller than a real book, with electronic pages, and dozens of seldom-used features like dictionaries and trivia games and thesauruses. And I guess the pages might as well light up too. Maybe it will be useful if there is a paper shortage
On the other hand, the newspaper functionality has potential. Unlike novels, reading the newspaper can be very clumsy and annoying unless you have an entire table to read it on. And the online distribution method is so much more convenient than real newspapers. Of course you can already get news on your cell phone or computer for free, but all the same I think e-book newspapers have some serious advantages over the real thing, which I can't say about the e-novels.
It's interesting to note that this laser actually uses one of the original diffraction gratings from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's petawatt laser, which was later dismantled as mentioned in the blog post.
Those computer chips are pretty damn small. I guess its a problem for laptops, but I could fit probably, hundreds of those little intel processors inside my desktop case and it isn't even that big. If they are running out of room the obvious solution is to just make 'em biggermaybe I should become a computer scientist
He hints at it in his post. Death "penalties" (I hesitate to even call it "penalties" because there's certain things that should just naturally result from dieing...) matter a lot in PvP. If you have some consequences for dieing (instead of just a 5-minute corpse run) people are a lot more careful about being a griefing jackass. And a big battle where everyone can just res and come back for more in a matter of minutes really has no end; it just drags on until everyone's bored with it. There's a lot more to it than that, but that covers a few of the basics.
When someone finally makes an MMORPG that can outsell WoW, it's going to be because they go against this sort of thinking. "I don't want players doing this/I need to balance this element of the gameplay, so lets counteract it with something that totally sucks." is widely accepted in the genre right now but goes against fun gameplay design. If someone can make an MMORPG that's actually fun to play, they won't need to pull players away from WoW because they'll have created a larger market by themselves.
While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.
But then all the runners would end up slowing down to a walk and not get anywhere...I suppose that's sort of how that weird Olympic bike racing works though.
This is the result of schools where teaching science involves nothing more than making kids memorize some facts about what mammals are, what parts are in a cell, the names of the planets. An large number of people seem to believe that, just as God created the world on a whim, now they have "science" creating evolution and the big bang because all of the scientists figured it was a good idea.
Many people just don't understand what science is, and I think this can be partially blamed on lower education.
I feel like the advertisers owe me for the ads I viewed before I installed adblocking devices. I went through way too much annoyance and definitely wasn't getting my money's worth.
On the other hand, I usually won't bother blocking text ads if they come up on the screen. Even image ads wouldn't be annoying if everyone one of them didn't have flashing animations everywhere. That's when the advertisers crossed the line. Now...they owe me a free lifetime of internet!
I see games like The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, that sports thing on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, DDR, all of those Dragon Ball games(that sell tons of copies for some reason).
But there are still so many games where it seems that a huge amount of effort has been put into the video engine. Do many people really buy games because they have bump mapping or HDR or whatever? Does it make such a huge difference to the large casual audience who buy one or two games a year or buy based off franchise names?
It seems like a lot of effort is put into the video engines. Sometimes it still doesn't look good because there apparently weren't any actual artists on the team(all of the strangely shiny and bumpmapped objects in Perfect Dark 0, Everquest 2 in general..). And then, high power engines require more work to avoid making a game that truly looks *bad*(not just from a technological standpoint). Nobody will notice the lack of a state-of-the-art fractal tree generator, or low resolution textures, in Paper Mario.
It makes even less sense to me on the PC. Games like FEAR and Oblivion(maybe Oblivion can be excused because it was built for the Xbox 360). Do the people who make these games realize that even among PC gamers, most will not be able to run them without upgrading their computer? And if most people do try to run them, they'll look like crap and might even crash, which isn't going to make the game look very good for whoever bought it and doesn't know why it won't work right. Its like selling console games that require $200 peripherals to run correctly(a few of these have been made, I'm sure).
I guess they could be assuming that in another 2-3 years, the average PC owner will be able to run the games, but by then unless it was really successful(taking us back to the original problem) the game will be off the shelves and in the bargain bins.
Maybe someone who knows more about the game industry can explain.
[sorry, I forgot that the bold tag wasn't the line break tag]
I see games like The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, that sports thing on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, DDR, all of those Dragon Ball games(that sell tons of copies for some reason).
But there are still so many games where it seems that a huge amount of effort has been put into the video engine. Do many people really buy games because they have bump mapping or HDR or whatever? Does it make such a huge difference to the large casual audience who buy one or two games a year or buy based off franchise names?
It seems like a lot of effort is put into the video engines. Sometimes it still doesn't look good because there apparently weren't any actual artists on the team(all of the strangely shiny and bumpmapped objects in Perfect Dark 0, Everquest 2 in general..). And then, high power engines require more work to avoid making a game that truly looks *bad*(not just from a technological standpoint). Nobody will notice the lack of a state-of-the-art fractal tree generator, or low resolution textures, in Paper Mario.
It makes even less sense to me on the PC. Games like FEAR and Oblivion(maybe Oblivion can be excused because it was built for the Xbox 360). Do the people who make these games realize that even among PC gamers, most will not be able to run them without upgrading their computer? And if most people do try to run them, they'll look like crap and might even crash, which isn't going to make the game look very good for whoever bought it and doesn't know why it won't work right. Its like selling console games that require $200 peripherals to run correctly(a few of these have been made, I'm sure).
I guess they could be assuming that in another 2-3 years, the average PC owner will be able to run the games, but by then unless it was really successful(taking us back to the original problem) the game will be off the shelves and in the bargain bins.
Maybe someone who knows more about the game industry can explain.
That works on roads without a lot of traffic, but if you look at a busy 2-lane section of the interstate you might see a mile long line cars, trucks, semi's, houses being moved etc. all clogged up in the same place. So then you get the people who want to pass them: the ones who want to fly through at 90+mph combined with drivers want to go the speed limit and end up taking 10 minutes before they pass the whole mess and get back in the right lane.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but on a busy section of the road if you tried to actually use the passing lane *only* for passing you'd end up swerving in and out of the traffic all day.
Conclusion: All highways/interstate sections need at least 3 lanes!
I had this same problem in my car. Now whenever an SUV/truck comes up behind me with the headlights I just flip the rear-view mirror up towards the ceiling, I can still see the headlights of all the cars behind me from the secondary reflection(or reflection coming off the surface behind the mirror, whatever) and it isn't nearly as bright. It's not like its possible to see anything past the headlights anyway on a dark road.
Is there some sort of program to read wikipedia and then choose to filter out certain editor's additions from the articles? It would be kind of weird to see what it would look like without some of the obsessive revert war type of people.
It it's a really short game, I'll play through it multiple times, find all the secrets, get high scores and so on. Even the ones without a lot of "replay value".
It's its a very long game(like many modern RPGs) I'll quit playing before I even get to the end.
Either way is fine with me. I play a game until I get bored and then I quit. The only games I generally reach the end of are adventure game types because they're usually relatively short.
better technology = more breakable?
on
Why Do Gadgets Break?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember hearing an engineering professor talking about how a lot of newer products are often lighter and less strong because of the newer tools and computing power available when designing them. Like parts for cars; it used to be that it wasn't worth it to figure out exactly how strong a part needed to be built so you would just do a rough estimation and end up with something that could probably take twice the amount of abuse it was built for. But now all the numbers are just plugged into a computer and it's easy to design things exactly to specification.
I wonder if a similar thing has occurred with technology related devices? With better manufacturing systems and more experience in designing things like MP3 players and laptops, perhaps companies are now building these things to only take a specific amount of abuse that fits into their pricing scheme where before they were overbuilt to take into account unknown factors and manufacturing issues?
What I really hate about MMORPGs. If a quest isn't fun(collect 100 rat eyes) it shouldn't be in the game. I guess they're trying to avoid it in Warhammer by adding more PVP oriented quests. It's seemingly impossible to fill a game with PVE quests that prevent the player from leveling too quickly while not sucking completely.
Maybe PVP objectives are a good way around this. Killing 20 other players(who would also have missions to kill you) would be a lot more fun than killing computer rats, but I'll wait until I see the finished product. It seems like MMORPGs always find some way to turn any meaningful progression into a grind. At this point I feel like the genre itself is broken, it will be interesting to see how it changes in the next 10 years. I realize WoW has a couple million players in the US but I wonder how many total subscribers it's actually gone through?
World of Warcraft does have a pretty complex gameplay system, the problem is that most of the fun parts are pretty much destroyed by the standard MMORPG developer vision of, "Spend time, progress"...I don't mean that grinding in itself is bad.
I played the game for 6 months, and became increasingly aware of this MMORPG mentality, "If Player A spends more time than Player B, Player A should be *guaranteed* x rewards...". There's absolutely no way around it. If you want to get anywhere in the game, you have to follow the exact same path everyone else did.
If Player B is "level 30" and finds a way to defeat Player A who is "Level 60", or finds a way to solo sections of a 40 person dungeon, that's absolutely terrible and will certainly be prevented in the next update(which most of the playerbase is happy to see happen).
It's obvious from the way the combat is structured. In PVP, players have giant red tags over their heads to prevent any sort of hiding(that would avoid the numbers game that is PVP) etc...in PVE any target more than 4 levels above the player is essentially invincible. All of the giant 40 person bosses are immune to all the cool status effects classes can do to foster a sort of "ant colony" mentality in guilds, you'll never your guild member's individual contributions without some sort of data tracking UI mod..
The only MMORPG I've played that attempts to avoid this was EVE Online(a sort of space MMORPG). You could play for a few days and have a ship capable of going just about anywhere, and have a reasonable chance of survival against players with ships worth ten times as much(HOW TERRIBLY UNFAIR!). If you put less time into the game, you don't have as many options as you could otherwise, but you can still easily focus one thing and be pretty capable at doing that.
This isn't a plug for EVE. The atmosphere absolutely sucks. Spaceships are supposed to be sexy. Instead, you are introduced to your character as some foul looking being(its impossible to make one that looks good) who is apparently suspended in a glob of green goop with tubes going up his ass. Not to mention that spaceflight itself is terribly boring. But they had some good ideas as far as giving players real freedom instead of a sort of single-minded time=progress focus like WoW.
I suppose I just hate MMORPGs in general. The whole EARN things with your time just ruins it for me. Games(not just electronic) are about strategy and pushing the game mechanics to the limit, and playing mind-games with your opponents, perfecting your skills. These things are pretty much non-existant in warcraft.
The issue that I'm surprised to see so often overlooked in these "game addiction" articles is the time commitment one wants to give due to other players when they play an MMORPG for any length of time. To explain:
To me, an "addictive" game is a game that is interesting enough that I will choose to play it over other leisure activities and maybe occasionally when I should be doing work. But eventually addicting games lose their novelty and I quit playing except maybe to go back to them every couple of months or whatever.
Looking at World of Warcraft from this perspective, I imagine that someone "addicted" to World of Warcraft to the point that they neglect work/school and wreck their lives is someone with an "addictive personality" or mental problems.
I started playing WoW initially just trying it on a friend's computer. To me it was just an RPG with a lot of players on at once. Initially I did find that same addictive quality that other well-designed games have. It was just a fun game, like Super Mario Brothers or Morrowind or Halo. After playing it for about 200 hours World of Warcraft isn't really the same kind of fun, but you'll see many people continue to play anyway.
From my personal experience, around one hundred something hours into the game some other player asked me if I wanted to join their guild(if you are not familiar with online games this is like a team or organization sort of thing). I figured that was cool, I could use it to find some good people to team up with to do 5 person dungeons. So basically I got to know some of the people in the guild and have fun doing instances with them.
Eventually some of the people in the guild started hitting the maximum level and wanting to do the "end-game" dungeons. Now I felt like I should get to the highest level too, not neccesarily because it was a fun anymore but because I wanted to keep up with the people I had got to know in the guild and do cool end-game dungeons. At this point I was basically trying to find time to set aside so I could level at least a certain amount every week.
At this point my guild started getting more "hardcore". Doing end-game dungeons neccesitated kicking players who weren't at least a certain level, asking people to do at least one guild dungeon run a week, etc. While I didn't completely dislike doing these things, I found myself trying to set aside time and schedule other activities around what my guild was doing; I wanted to help them make progress in the game. Eventually all my college classes and other things were becoming so time consuming I had to stop playing for a few weeks, when I had some free time again I couldn't imagine why I would start playing again.
My point in writing this is that World of Warcraft(and probably any MMORPG) initially comes off like any other game but many people(like me) start out playing an RPG and end up slowly getting sucked into a completely different game based around competitiveness, teamwork, bureaucracy, social interaction that is completely unexpected. It isn't like a rat pushing a lever over and over to get food pellets. I started getting more invested in my progress in the game, and wanted to put more time into it. Not because of the game itself, but because of the other people playing the game. An analogy: You start a club with some friends to watch baseball games every week, and five months later find yourself a member of a competitive baseball team(and of course, there are also people who just love baseball and are fine with setting aside the time to play on a team).
Of course, the huge amount of time needed to make any progress in the game is another completely different, but important issue. Neither a single player version of World of Warcraft, nor a World of Warcraft which didn't require hours of time to progress, would result in so many "addicted" players. This is probably all stating the obvious for anyone who has played an MMORPG but it seems to be ignored in articles about MMORPG addiction.
Computers that look like transformers are going out of style, and scare away girls. Be ironic and show that you don't care by using something like the kitty computer case. =^.^=
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I would imagine every American loses like, a bujillion hours a month watching TV. That probably costs a lot too.
I don't really keep up with video cards except when I'm trying to buy one ever 3 or 4 years, but those 8800GTs are like $100 and can run just about anything. $100 isn't cheap but for a card that will let you play every game out right isn't bad, especially when getting that last 10-20% performance increase bumps your price up a few hundred dollars
I'm surprised someone hasn't attempted to make some sort of wikipedia-reader yet. It seems like you could have a firefox extension or seperate program or whatever that could merge articles between wikipedia, deletionpedia, that star wars opedia, conservapedia, whatever else you felt like was appropriate for your 'pedias that would bypass some of the deletion problems. It would probably get complicated as hell when dealing with identical pages and things like that but it would be interesting to see how it worked out,.
From what I've seen of e-book readers so far, I can predict that in The Future, the "perfect" e-book reader will be almost identical to a paperback book, only slightly smaller than a real book, with electronic pages, and dozens of seldom-used features like dictionaries and trivia games and thesauruses. And I guess the pages might as well light up too. Maybe it will be useful if there is a paper shortage
On the other hand, the newspaper functionality has potential. Unlike novels, reading the newspaper can be very clumsy and annoying unless you have an entire table to read it on. And the online distribution method is so much more convenient than real newspapers. Of course you can already get news on your cell phone or computer for free, but all the same I think e-book newspapers have some serious advantages over the real thing, which I can't say about the e-novels.
It's interesting to note that this laser actually uses one of the original diffraction gratings from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's petawatt laser, which was later dismantled as mentioned in the blog post.
Those computer chips are pretty damn small. I guess its a problem for laptops, but I could fit probably, hundreds of those little intel processors inside my desktop case and it isn't even that big. If they are running out of room the obvious solution is to just make 'em bigger maybe I should become a computer scientist
http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal114/SpaceRace/sec500img/561l6p6.jpg
what if they met on match.com. but then she figured out he had two match.com accounts, like a secret one. then he would be cheating on her.
He hints at it in his post. Death "penalties" (I hesitate to even call it "penalties" because there's certain things that should just naturally result from dieing...) matter a lot in PvP. If you have some consequences for dieing (instead of just a 5-minute corpse run) people are a lot more careful about being a griefing jackass. And a big battle where everyone can just res and come back for more in a matter of minutes really has no end; it just drags on until everyone's bored with it. There's a lot more to it than that, but that covers a few of the basics. When someone finally makes an MMORPG that can outsell WoW, it's going to be because they go against this sort of thinking. "I don't want players doing this/I need to balance this element of the gameplay, so lets counteract it with something that totally sucks." is widely accepted in the genre right now but goes against fun gameplay design. If someone can make an MMORPG that's actually fun to play, they won't need to pull players away from WoW because they'll have created a larger market by themselves.
While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.
But then all the runners would end up slowing down to a walk and not get anywhere...I suppose that's sort of how that weird Olympic bike racing works though.
Many people just don't understand what science is, and I think this can be partially blamed on lower education.
I feel like the advertisers owe me for the ads I viewed before I installed adblocking devices. I went through way too much annoyance and definitely wasn't getting my money's worth.
On the other hand, I usually won't bother blocking text ads if they come up on the screen. Even image ads wouldn't be annoying if everyone one of them didn't have flashing animations everywhere. That's when the advertisers crossed the line. Now...they owe me a free lifetime of internet!
But there are still so many games where it seems that a huge amount of effort has been put into the video engine. Do many people really buy games because they have bump mapping or HDR or whatever? Does it make such a huge difference to the large casual audience who buy one or two games a year or buy based off franchise names?
It seems like a lot of effort is put into the video engines. Sometimes it still doesn't look good because there apparently weren't any actual artists on the team(all of the strangely shiny and bumpmapped objects in Perfect Dark 0, Everquest 2 in general..). And then, high power engines require more work to avoid making a game that truly looks *bad*(not just from a technological standpoint). Nobody will notice the lack of a state-of-the-art fractal tree generator, or low resolution textures, in Paper Mario.
It makes even less sense to me on the PC. Games like FEAR and Oblivion(maybe Oblivion can be excused because it was built for the Xbox 360). Do the people who make these games realize that even among PC gamers, most will not be able to run them without upgrading their computer? And if most people do try to run them, they'll look like crap and might even crash, which isn't going to make the game look very good for whoever bought it and doesn't know why it won't work right. Its like selling console games that require $200 peripherals to run correctly(a few of these have been made, I'm sure).
I guess they could be assuming that in another 2-3 years, the average PC owner will be able to run the games, but by then unless it was really successful(taking us back to the original problem) the game will be off the shelves and in the bargain bins.
Maybe someone who knows more about the game industry can explain.
[sorry, I forgot that the bold tag wasn't the line break tag]
I see games like The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, that sports thing on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, DDR, all of those Dragon Ball games(that sell tons of copies for some reason). But there are still so many games where it seems that a huge amount of effort has been put into the video engine. Do many people really buy games because they have bump mapping or HDR or whatever? Does it make such a huge difference to the large casual audience who buy one or two games a year or buy based off franchise names? It seems like a lot of effort is put into the video engines. Sometimes it still doesn't look good because there apparently weren't any actual artists on the team(all of the strangely shiny and bumpmapped objects in Perfect Dark 0, Everquest 2 in general..). And then, high power engines require more work to avoid making a game that truly looks *bad*(not just from a technological standpoint). Nobody will notice the lack of a state-of-the-art fractal tree generator, or low resolution textures, in Paper Mario. It makes even less sense to me on the PC. Games like FEAR and Oblivion(maybe Oblivion can be excused because it was built for the Xbox 360). Do the people who make these games realize that even among PC gamers, most will not be able to run them without upgrading their computer? And if most people do try to run them, they'll look like crap and might even crash, which isn't going to make the game look very good for whoever bought it and doesn't know why it won't work right. Its like selling console games that require $200 peripherals to run correctly(a few of these have been made, I'm sure). I guess they could be assuming that in another 2-3 years, the average PC owner will be able to run the games, but by then unless it was really successful(taking us back to the original problem) the game will be off the shelves and in the bargain bins. Maybe someone who knows more about the game industry can explain.
That works on roads without a lot of traffic, but if you look at a busy 2-lane section of the interstate you might see a mile long line cars, trucks, semi's, houses being moved etc. all clogged up in the same place. So then you get the people who want to pass them: the ones who want to fly through at 90+mph combined with drivers want to go the speed limit and end up taking 10 minutes before they pass the whole mess and get back in the right lane. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but on a busy section of the road if you tried to actually use the passing lane *only* for passing you'd end up swerving in and out of the traffic all day. Conclusion: All highways/interstate sections need at least 3 lanes!
I had this same problem in my car. Now whenever an SUV/truck comes up behind me with the headlights I just flip the rear-view mirror up towards the ceiling, I can still see the headlights of all the cars behind me from the secondary reflection(or reflection coming off the surface behind the mirror, whatever) and it isn't nearly as bright. It's not like its possible to see anything past the headlights anyway on a dark road.
Is there some sort of program to read wikipedia and then choose to filter out certain editor's additions from the articles? It would be kind of weird to see what it would look like without some of the obsessive revert war type of people.
It's its a very long game(like many modern RPGs) I'll quit playing before I even get to the end.
Either way is fine with me. I play a game until I get bored and then I quit. The only games I generally reach the end of are adventure game types because they're usually relatively short.
I remember hearing an engineering professor talking about how a lot of newer products are often lighter and less strong because of the newer tools and computing power available when designing them. Like parts for cars; it used to be that it wasn't worth it to figure out exactly how strong a part needed to be built so you would just do a rough estimation and end up with something that could probably take twice the amount of abuse it was built for. But now all the numbers are just plugged into a computer and it's easy to design things exactly to specification.
I wonder if a similar thing has occurred with technology related devices? With better manufacturing systems and more experience in designing things like MP3 players and laptops, perhaps companies are now building these things to only take a specific amount of abuse that fits into their pricing scheme where before they were overbuilt to take into account unknown factors and manufacturing issues?
What I really hate about MMORPGs. If a quest isn't fun(collect 100 rat eyes) it shouldn't be in the game. I guess they're trying to avoid it in Warhammer by adding more PVP oriented quests. It's seemingly impossible to fill a game with PVE quests that prevent the player from leveling too quickly while not sucking completely.
Maybe PVP objectives are a good way around this. Killing 20 other players(who would also have missions to kill you) would be a lot more fun than killing computer rats, but I'll wait until I see the finished product. It seems like MMORPGs always find some way to turn any meaningful progression into a grind. At this point I feel like the genre itself is broken, it will be interesting to see how it changes in the next 10 years. I realize WoW has a couple million players in the US but I wonder how many total subscribers it's actually gone through?
World of Warcraft does have a pretty complex gameplay system, the problem is that most of the fun parts are pretty much destroyed by the standard MMORPG developer vision of, "Spend time, progress"...I don't mean that grinding in itself is bad. I played the game for 6 months, and became increasingly aware of this MMORPG mentality, "If Player A spends more time than Player B, Player A should be *guaranteed* x rewards...". There's absolutely no way around it. If you want to get anywhere in the game, you have to follow the exact same path everyone else did. If Player B is "level 30" and finds a way to defeat Player A who is "Level 60", or finds a way to solo sections of a 40 person dungeon, that's absolutely terrible and will certainly be prevented in the next update(which most of the playerbase is happy to see happen). It's obvious from the way the combat is structured. In PVP, players have giant red tags over their heads to prevent any sort of hiding(that would avoid the numbers game that is PVP) etc...in PVE any target more than 4 levels above the player is essentially invincible. All of the giant 40 person bosses are immune to all the cool status effects classes can do to foster a sort of "ant colony" mentality in guilds, you'll never your guild member's individual contributions without some sort of data tracking UI mod.. The only MMORPG I've played that attempts to avoid this was EVE Online(a sort of space MMORPG). You could play for a few days and have a ship capable of going just about anywhere, and have a reasonable chance of survival against players with ships worth ten times as much(HOW TERRIBLY UNFAIR!). If you put less time into the game, you don't have as many options as you could otherwise, but you can still easily focus one thing and be pretty capable at doing that. This isn't a plug for EVE. The atmosphere absolutely sucks. Spaceships are supposed to be sexy. Instead, you are introduced to your character as some foul looking being(its impossible to make one that looks good) who is apparently suspended in a glob of green goop with tubes going up his ass. Not to mention that spaceflight itself is terribly boring. But they had some good ideas as far as giving players real freedom instead of a sort of single-minded time=progress focus like WoW. I suppose I just hate MMORPGs in general. The whole EARN things with your time just ruins it for me. Games(not just electronic) are about strategy and pushing the game mechanics to the limit, and playing mind-games with your opponents, perfecting your skills. These things are pretty much non-existant in warcraft.
To me, an "addictive" game is a game that is interesting enough that I will choose to play it over other leisure activities and maybe occasionally when I should be doing work. But eventually addicting games lose their novelty and I quit playing except maybe to go back to them every couple of months or whatever.
Looking at World of Warcraft from this perspective, I imagine that someone "addicted" to World of Warcraft to the point that they neglect work/school and wreck their lives is someone with an "addictive personality" or mental problems.
I started playing WoW initially just trying it on a friend's computer. To me it was just an RPG with a lot of players on at once. Initially I did find that same addictive quality that other well-designed games have. It was just a fun game, like Super Mario Brothers or Morrowind or Halo. After playing it for about 200 hours World of Warcraft isn't really the same kind of fun, but you'll see many people continue to play anyway.
From my personal experience, around one hundred something hours into the game some other player asked me if I wanted to join their guild(if you are not familiar with online games this is like a team or organization sort of thing). I figured that was cool, I could use it to find some good people to team up with to do 5 person dungeons. So basically I got to know some of the people in the guild and have fun doing instances with them.
Eventually some of the people in the guild started hitting the maximum level and wanting to do the "end-game" dungeons. Now I felt like I should get to the highest level too, not neccesarily because it was a fun anymore but because I wanted to keep up with the people I had got to know in the guild and do cool end-game dungeons. At this point I was basically trying to find time to set aside so I could level at least a certain amount every week.
At this point my guild started getting more "hardcore". Doing end-game dungeons neccesitated kicking players who weren't at least a certain level, asking people to do at least one guild dungeon run a week, etc. While I didn't completely dislike doing these things, I found myself trying to set aside time and schedule other activities around what my guild was doing; I wanted to help them make progress in the game. Eventually all my college classes and other things were becoming so time consuming I had to stop playing for a few weeks, when I had some free time again I couldn't imagine why I would start playing again.
My point in writing this is that World of Warcraft(and probably any MMORPG) initially comes off like any other game but many people(like me) start out playing an RPG and end up slowly getting sucked into a completely different game based around competitiveness, teamwork, bureaucracy, social interaction that is completely unexpected. It isn't like a rat pushing a lever over and over to get food pellets. I started getting more invested in my progress in the game, and wanted to put more time into it. Not because of the game itself, but because of the other people playing the game. An analogy: You start a club with some friends to watch baseball games every week, and five months later find yourself a member of a competitive baseball team(and of course, there are also people who just love baseball and are fine with setting aside the time to play on a team).
Of course, the huge amount of time needed to make any progress in the game is another completely different, but important issue. Neither a single player version of World of Warcraft, nor a World of Warcraft which didn't require hours of time to progress, would result in so many "addicted" players. This is probably all stating the obvious for anyone who has played an MMORPG but it seems to be ignored in articles about MMORPG addiction.
Computers that look like transformers are going out of style, and scare away girls. Be ironic and show that you don't care by using something like the kitty computer case. =^.^=