MMOs are a strange beast. They are designed to make you play as much as possible, yet addictiveness does not always equal fun. In the field of pyschology, there are several kinds of rewards systems, and the one that seems to be the most successful is the random reward introduced at a random time. Sometimes you click the button, and nothing happens. Sometimes you click and get the food pellet. It's this mechanism that fuels the slots in Vegas, and when you walk away empty, as is statistically inevitable over a long enough stretch of time, you tell yourself that the overall value was the experience itself, since you come away with nothing tangible. MMOs take away your time and they never deliver a discreet conclusion.

I played a ton of Dark Age of Camelot shortly after it launched, and I find myself reminded of it negatively every day that I play World of Warcraft. To discuss the differences in favor of WoW would be an article in itself, but I'll try to keep to the main points.

First, let's talk about The Grind. In a traditional persistent online RPG, you advance your character by killing an endless string of monsters, and by doing "FedEx" quests where you get some money and/or experience points by delivering an arbitrary item from Point A to Point B. As your character advances, his or her progress begins to slow. It takes longer and longer to get to the next level, because you need more and more experience points each time, yet the experience returned from monsters and deliveries does not scale accordingly. Yet you feel compelled to continue because at Level X you get a really cool spell or other ability that's supposed to make the game more "fun."

The second part of the grind is "downtime," the amount of time it takes to recover from each monster (or "mob") encounter. When I played DAOC, it typically took every ounce of my resources to defeat an enemy that would give me respectable experience. Then I would sit down and wait while my energy bars slowly refilled. Then you'd have to wait awhile for the next batch of monsters to spawn again, and you'd typically be competing against other players and "camping" this same spot all day long.

Now, imagine an MMO where your experience is a string of quests where you're rewarded with a cool item, recipe, or a decent amount of pocket money. A game where the grind is virtually eliminated--a game where downtime is relatively nonexistent, where enemies respawn rapidly and dynamically according to how many players are in the local area; where you can use a healing spell, or bandage yourself, or eat some food, or all three, before diving right back in again. Your character's death doesn't result in the loss of many hours of experience points, or one of your items, or any money (although there is item decay, so whatever you have equipped currently takes a 10% durability hit). When you die, you resurrect as a ghost who moves quickly, runs on water, and cannot be harmed on its way back to its body. You can also have a player resurrect you in a matter of moments, even after you have entered ghost form. This is a game that understands Fun.

Welcome to World of Warcraft.

WoW has been described widely as a "newbie-friendly" game, but after playing since the closed beta phase that started back in Spring of this year, I can honestly say that WoW is friendly to everybody. Everything from the colorful art style to the endearing player animations, to the countless quirks of personality makes WoW an inviting experience. Blizzard's passion for gaming joy is infectious, and its sense of humor disarming.