Read Online MMORPG: How a Computer Game Becomes Deadly Serious by Emile van Veen - Free Book Online Page A

cemetery. This spirit turned out to be alive: it appeared as a ghost. This ghost had to run all the way back to the corpse to resurrect. Then the difficulties arose. Back to life again, you were at half health, at approximately the same location where you had died. This meant that the enemy who killed you in the first place was all over you again in a few seconds, while you were only half as strong.
    He was jolted by a knock on his door. He had been playing so intently that he had forgotten the time. It was Rebecca.
    “Well done, level six!” she congratulated him after a glance at the screen. “Now let’s start doing some real work. Could you log off now?”
    When he got back to the opening screen, she gently pushed him out of the desk chair. Robert pulled another chair close and sat next to her at the computer. Rebecca poked his arm, laughingly accusing him of being a WoW addict already. He smiled in return. It was fun, he had to admit. He suddenly noticed his stomach grumbling. An addict indeed; already he was neglecting the needs of his body. He opened a can of Pringles, Bolognese flavor, his favorite.
    “Now let’s take a look at what our friends are doing,” Rebecca said. She pulled a paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. It was a print of the website of the Armory, listing the members of the guild called The Hammer of Grimstone. “I’m going to put them all on your friends list now.”
    “My friends list?”
    “Amazing, isn’t it?” She opened a tab under ‘Social’ and a window appeared. She started with Drimm, typing his name and hitting Enter. Drimm added to friends came the confirmation.
    “Can he see this?” Robert asked.
    She shook her head. “No, that’s the beauty of it. When you add someone to your friends list, he doesn’t get a notification or something like that. Once a person is on your list, you automatically get a notification when he comes online and also when he goes offline. What’s even better, when he’s online, you can see where he is.” She pointed at the friends list, which only showed Drimm. His status was listed as ‘unknown’ Quickly, she added the rest of the names. Done, she logged off and entered the virtual world again using her own account. She opened the same tab to show him how she’d already added the Hammer of Grimstone to Killermage’s contacts.
    “When one of them comes online, this tab will show us in which zone he is.”
    “What’s a zone, exactly?”
    “A zone is much like a province. Or maybe a state of the United States.” She opened the map. “Look. We’re now in a zone called Mulgore.”
    Robert peered at the map, noticing that the map of Killermage showed all of Mulgore, whereas his own map only showed about one third of the area. The rest was grey. He’d already noticed that new areas were revealed on the map when you discovered them, simply by going there. The map of Killermage showed him that Mulgore was a huge piece of territory.
    “You may think that Mulgore is big, but in fact it’s one of the smaller zones.” She clicked on a button that read ‘Zoom Out’ and now the map showed a large continent called Kalimdor surrounded by oceans on all sides. By moving her mouse over the different zones, their names came up. She clicked on one to the north called Winterspring, and he could see in detail all the different areas, roads and villages. She opened a few others at random to give him an impression.
    “Holy shit, it’s huge!” he exclaimed. “Have you been everywhere?”
    She smiled wickedly. “Yes I have, but you haven’t seen anything yet!” She zoomed out again and now he saw a world map showing three large continents. Two were parallel to each other, stretching all the way from the south nearly to the north. They were separated by an ocean. Near the northern polar cap, another large continent lay between the two others. The western continent was called Kalimdor, the opposite one was called Eastern Kingdoms, and the