Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Online Games (again)

I wrote last week about online games and their negative impact on overall PC game sales. I received quite a bit of e-mail, and 90% of it was along the lines of "I used to buy five games a month, then I started playing City of Everquest Galaxies and I haven't bought a new game in six months." That's been my experience as well, though to a lesser degree. I've actually stopped playing City of Heroes for a while because online games bring out some compulsive aspects of my personality that I really don't like. There's a very fine line between compulsion and discipline, a line that I'm sure most of us have used to our advantage, but with online games I'm clearly over that line. It seems that with single-player games, naked repetition is generally derided, but with online games, it's an art form. Anyone who kept pressing keys to make pie plates in Everquest knows exactly what I'm talking about. If that existed in a single player game, it would have been slammed as a terrible feature, but in an online game it becomes 'crafting' and (coincidentally) a giant time sink, if you're so inclined.

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