I’ve been playing my favorite new game for a few weeks now and I’m having a ton of fun!  I’ve met some new friends, I’ve done a bunch of great quests, and I’ve reached the ripe old age of level 21…  Out of 100.  As I’m questing and adventuring to my heart’s content, I see a new player enter the clearing I’m hunting in and use a whole new weapon that shoots blue glowy orbs at the enemies!  They fall down smoldering and he runs over to loot them – it looks so cool!  I message him and ask him how he does it and what weapon he’s using, he tells me it’s a brand new class that just got added to the game…

…And minutes later I find myself in the character create screen, choosing a hair style and deciding how long my sideburns should be before jumping into the new user tutorial with my brand new blue-orb-shooty character, my level 21 sword-brandishing adventurer from only minutes ago forgotten like yesterday’s pop tarts.

Hi, my name is Ditto, and I’m an alt-a-holic.

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There comes a time in every fury orange monsters’ life when the realize they just need a little help.  Maybe that dragon is too strong and keeps eating him.  Maybe that troll is too strong and keeps clubbing him senseless.  Maybe that giant snake is…. oh, not the giant snake again.  Anyway, you get the picture.

MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer Online, and believe it or not, many of them are meant to be played with other people.  A shocking revelation, I know.  From Lord of The Rings Online making Moria more solo-friendly to World of Warcraft, well, being World of Warcraft, there is a trend to make MMO games more accessible to solo players and small groups, which is fine with me!  I like playing with other people, have a lot of fun with it in fact, but I don’t like to be FORCED into it.  I think that a lot of the bigger games out there right now have a nice balance that lets groups of friends have a great time while not penalizing the casual player who likes to dive in and do things on his own.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to make the wild and unlikely assumption that you actually want to make friends in-game to adventure and even socialize with.  It’s a crazy concept I know, but hang with me and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, because making friends in an online game can be a really rewarding experience.

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So I’m playing my favorite MMORPG, really getting into the game, the characters, the magic spells – it’s SO much fun!  I’m just finishing up the introductory areas, where I’ve gained a few levels, learned some skills, and figured out how to play.  My character has a great hat – I do enjoy nice hats.  I probably should have upgraded my sword first, sure, but this hat looks so good – you should see it!

So I finish my final quest in the introductory zone and I’m given my first ‘real’ quest – go find Eric Questgiverson in the town of Toofarfromhere and give him this letter, post haste! It is of the utmost importance, lives may depend on it!  So I lace up my shiny new level five quest reward boots and I head out the West gate into the virtual sunset, a spring in my step and quest in hand!

And I walk.  And I walk.  And I walk.  and I walk some more.

‘Your level five quest reward boots have worn through and need repair.’

I check my game map.  If I’m the little green arrow, and that’s the starting point, and that little dot is the town of Toofarfromhere, that means….

MMO game worlds are REALLY big!

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It usually goes something like this.  I log into one of my social network websites and see the request ‘Elmo M wants to connect’.  I see Elmo M is connected to a few of my friends already, so I click on ‘connect’, then refresh the site, where I see:

Elmo M just grew angry beets in Mafia Farm
Elmo M just built an armored outhouse in Frontier Wars
Elmo M just liked ‘How to get 500 dollars free on Mafia Farm’
Elmo M just completed the mission ‘Buy a Chicken’ on ‘Robot Madness’
And so on…

Social network games are the joy and obsession of millions of social network users and the bane of existence for the rest.  Social games can be fun and even exciting for a player who enjoys steady progress and achievement, but for players who crave a deeper experience these games can be seen as shallow and pointless ‘click-fests’.

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Crafting – some people love it, some people hate it, some people are completely indifferent.  Well I guess you could say that about pretty much anything, couldn’t you?  Except maybe chocolate pudding – I think that’s pretty much universally loved, right?  Where was I again?  Oh right…  If you ask twenty MMO Gamers about crafting you will get about seventy three different responses, based on factors like time of day, time until next game update, and that day’s horoscope for Virgo.  There are gamers that start playing an MMO because of the crafting system, there are gamers that refuse to play a game because of it, and there are many players who probably don’t  have a strong feeling one way or the other.

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This weekend your intrepid Game Monster headed out to PAX East in Boston. This was an amazing and at times completely overwhelming experience and something I was not entirely prepared for. PAX East was huge, much bigger than I imagined for some reason, and the scale was just completely over the top. Fifteen foot tall robots, giant screens projecting all manner of games, incredible hardware and custom mods for everything from xBox 360s to headphones could be seen at every turn, and each booth seemed to be trying to one-up the booth or game before it. It was like an amusement park where each ride was bigger, flashier, and in most cases scarier than the last!

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Today is the big, day, the day I start playing my awesome new online game!  So I’ve found a great game, I’ve created my account, I’ve made a great avatar – now it’s time to play!  Time to log into the game world and be transported into an incredible mystical realm where you -

“You have been defeated by a plague rat.  Return to bind spot?” Continued…

Crafting your avatar is that wonderful and exciting entry into just about any online game.  It’s that near magical art of creating your in-game persona, infusing your character with a bit of whatever parts of you that you want to send forth into the game world to find adventure and victory, with pink pigtails or a lime-green mohawk or a great big scar down your cheek.

Believe it or not, I used to HATE character creation.  It always irked me because I’m a furry orange monster and there just aren’t any games where I could make an avatar that looks even remotely like I do.  The closest I could usually come was orange hair, and even then is was never the right shade of that fiery orange that I’m so proud of.  Game after game, I just crafted some generic looking toon or, even worse, hit ‘random’ a few times in character select and took what was handed to me, since no combination of noses, hairstyles, and body shape could ever come close to making a character that looked like me.

Then one day I decided that this was very silly, and I’ve loved character creation ever since.

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In part one of Playing it Safe I talked about ways of keeping your personal information and accounts safe when you’re signing up for new games and websites, as well as understanding what the bad guys want to get from you.  For this article I want to talk more about staying safe while playing online games and taking part in social websites.

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Staying safe online is something that has always been really important to me, from keeping your personal information safe, to keeping your computer safe, to staying safe in games.  It’s not always easy, either, as the people who want to do bad things are always coming up with new and tricky ways to get you to give them your address or phone number, or install their malicious software, or to hijack your character and take your equipment or gold or whatever.  Fortunately, even though there are always going to be a lot of ways people can try to trick you, there are only a few things they’re trying to get from you, and once you know about them and their tricks it becomes much easier to recognize them and protect yourself against their schemes.

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