The Life and Times of an Online Gamer
Dec 16th, 2004Over at MSNBC, a story about online gaming.
In "RL" (otherwise known as real life), Collier is a graduate student studying electronic visualization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His goal is to, one day, write and design video games.
But in the virtual world, he is Gestalt, a lumbering, mostly peace-loving "wookiee," akin to the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Gestalt has two homes — one of them a beach house on the planet Corellia, the other a smallish mansion that's the equivalent of a space geek's bachelor pad. Gestalt is also a member of the Knights of Ash, a "guild" of about 80 Star Wars Galaxies players from points all over the globe.
The game is one of the increasingly popular and sophisticated "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" — with emphasis on the "multi," since tens of thousands of people can play at once. These games range from the widely known EverQuest to the newly released World of Warcraft, and let players create characters and socialize with people they've often never met in person. Other games, such as Halo 2 and Counter Strike, allow smaller groups of players to meet online to fight computer-generated enemies or each other.
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