NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, August 2011
Ganked by a nOOb
By Vinny La Bash, Regular Contributing Columnist,
Sarasota PCUG, Inc., FL April 2011 issue, Sarasota PC Monitor
http://www.spcug.org
labash (at) spcug.org (click to email author)

If you find the above phrase meaningless, you haven’t experienced the online social networks where you can have the most fun. We’re not talking about Facebook or Twitter. Ditto for other social network sites like MySpace which these days looks like Empty Space.

If you’re not playing one of the more popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), you may be missing out on one of the most interesting and fun-filled experiences you can have with a computer. MMORPG is a genre of web based role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. You’re certainly not alone in this world. It could be inhabited by dozens, hundreds, and in some cases thousands of players. One game, World of WarCraft (WoW) has over a million players.

Most MMORPGs need only a PC to connect to an online server to play. Others require a game console. After storing some basic information about the player, the action starts.

In a MMORPG you the player create and control a character represented by an avatar which you direct to explore, solve problems, and find items necessary to complete tasks which take you closer to achieving the ultimate objective of the game. Other tasks may be part of the game such as building and destroying things, fighting opponents, interacting with other characters, assembling tools, earning or otherwise acquiring the local currency, and so on.

There are games which require you to make moral choices which will affect the outcome of the game. For example, you are leading a team of specialists in an attempt to rescue a large group of people from an imminent natural disaster. Because of the circumstances, which are no one’s fault, you can succeed only by leaving an important member of your party behind to ensure the success of the rescue. However, the team member will almost certainly die in the process, and he or she could be crucial to the success of an even more important operation further along in the game.

Some academics devote time to study games that require players to work with currency of one form or another. There is one game that uses bottle caps for money in the context of its virtual world. Characters designed by players have developed sophisticated economies within games, at times with mechanisms to exchange online currency for real money. These “synthetic economies” bear an eerie resemblance to our own world which is remarkable considering that the most popular games have players who come from all parts of the globe. These “synthetic economies” evolve from players of different cultures which means they may be tapping into something fundamental about human nature.

All this has been made possible through the world wide penetration of broadband internet connections. MMORPGs have gained enormous popularity not only in America but in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Playing a MMORPG might mean you could be a member of a team that is truly international, requiring levels of continuous cooperation from individuals that most governments haven’t been able to pull off.

Many of these games require a monthly subscription fee to play but many of them don’t. Simply search on “Free MMORPG Games” and your search engine will bring up dozens of these games that you can play for free. Use them to get a sense of how to play before committing any cash to the most popular ones. Don’t neglect to go to http://www.mmoglossary.com/mmorpg_terms/1/index.html to get familiar with common game terminology before traveling to an unfamiliar world.

The better you understand the virtual world, the more you can enjoy the experience. Make an effort to understand at least some of the vocabulary. “Ganked” is a combination of two words, gang kill, which refers to a group of experienced players ganging up on a new, greenhorn player and killing off his character for amusement. nOOb is a way of referring to a new, inexperienced player. It’s a variation of “newbie”, but has the additional meaning of clueless. That’s why it’s spelled nOOb to make it resemble boob, a real dummy. Therefore if you’re “Ganked by a nOOb” you’ve experienced the ultimate indignity of MMORPG playing.

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