Know This: You Are a Bot.

Blizzard attempt to kill WoW bot bad news for copyright law

I link the above article, which reports Blizzard trying to shut down a MMO bot maker by claiming that un-authorized copying of the game from one's hard drive to same computer's RAM is a copyright infringement--Yes, you heard that right!--not because such claim is down right ridiculous and preposterous, but because I want to point out something about popular game genre that is MMORPG.

MMORPG, in case you don't know, stands for "Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game," which entitles thousands of players to live in a world, be a resident of the fantasy world, and interact and form a community among other players.

Sounds cool, eh?

Well, you really shouldn't be impressed. Instead of bringing you living and breathing world where you truly live in, it gives you a static world that only rare patches and updates change certain part of the world. It doesn't let you change the world, not in a meaningful way, anyways.

The game itself is pretty simple: you do quest-grinding for money, experience points, in the name of netting the ultimate items. You may do stuff like chatting, forming clans, creating items based on static formula of other items--this isn't really creating anything--and on and on with mundane and simple grind-work.

Is this fun? I mean, I know there are tens of millions of people playing one or the other MMO games these days, but are they really having fun? I doubt it. I bet most of the MMORPG players are more or less like the potato-chip-eating character who kills off every dang players in the virtual world from a special World of Warcraft episode of South Park; they're being desk-chair-potato, playing games for hours, with frozen and expressionless face.

They are addicted to the game, not loving the game. And I think something's wrong in this picture.

The fact that there are bots that can do what players do is saying something.