Chan's Personal Blog

Today I was reading CNN and came across an article entitled, "Sony offers pizza feature for hungry gamers." So the story is, Sony is adding the ability to order pizza inside their game Everquest 2. In the game, you type in /pizza and the game will connect you to the nearest Pizza Hut, and you can order a pizza, and they'll deliver it to you. The game will automatically charge the pizza to your monthly gaming subscription bill.

This is somewhat disturbing, especially since Everquest 2 is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). These types of games exist in a persistent online world, which means when you log out of the game, the game world carries on. It's almost like living a second life in the digital world. The actions of your past affects the present and the future. Anyways, it's dangerous because these games are extremely addictive. Everquest is sometimes referred to as Evercrack. I've seen first hand, the damaging effects of these games on people. I've had friends who withdraw from the real world, and game non-stop because of MMORPGs. There's also the famous case in South Korea where a man died by playing a MMORPG for 86 hours straight.

Being able to order pizza within the game is almost the worst case scenario because that will allow geeks to become completely self-sufficient; they'll never have to leave their rooms again. Well.... at least we won't have gamers dying because of starvation?

/pizza ..... crap, nothing happened. /coke? .... gah, I gotta implement these features in my blog.