I’ve noticed it has been very difficult over the last decade to get credibility whenever we use the word “video game” in a sentence at the office. A trick I have learned is to use the word “simulation” and then all of a sudden they are more willing to listen.

I’m guessing somewhere along the way the world is going to wake up to the fact that World of Warcraft with its 8 million players is currently grossing about $96,000,000 a month. Yes I said “month”. They currently have 390 enterprise level servers stationed around the world, each one supporting about 20,000 users. I’d put a rough guess that any one of those at 7pm in it’s time zone it is typically processing about 4,000 users at about 50ms ping times or about 80,000 TCP/IP transactions per second. All 23/7. All interacting with complex vector matrixes and brilliant artificial intelligence… the kind where its so good it’s transparent to the user… oh sorry I mean “gamer”… you know… those “insignificant slackers” that have “no real economic impact on the world”…

not

How well does the average corporate server farm compare?

PS Ultima Online (first started in 1997) added a real time translation engine which allowed a player in Germany to type and I could read it in broken English on my side and then he could read my immediate response. I always figured that if we had an international meeting it might be quicker to log into the local U.O. “pub” and have a meeting over virtual darts