Why Play MMORPG? Who Plays MMORPG?

Firstly, please take a look at this graph by holding down the "shift" button on your keyboard and left clicking it with your mouse. It will show you a few of the top subscribing MMORPGs over the past 10 years.

And from the chart, you can see that the leading MMORPG in subscribers since first quarter of 2005 till now, is the

"World of Warcraft" hitting 10 MILLION subscribers worldwide!

being the most popular MMORPG ever! That is like "TWO AND A HALF TIMES" the population of Singapore!!!!!!!!!! ZOMGZ

Are you one of those which contributes to such high number of MMORPG subscribers? And if you are, WHY do you play MMORPG? In this and the following entries, we'll be sharing with you various reasons why people play MMORPG and then the Ethical issues concerning MMORPG.

Firstly, I would like the readers to understand that the key point I will be addressing here is the Ethical Issue between MMORPG and its players. As MMORPG is a video game, and video games are developed by Game Developers. In this world of IT(Intellectual Technology), Game Developers are considered as "IT professionals" and MMORPG players are considered to be the "IT Users". So how are the Game Developers supposed to develop an environment that will encourage ethical behavior of users playing their MMORPG?

Many studies of MMORPG have been done many interested parties, and this article here by a Stanford professor covers on the MMORPG subject which includes a survey he had done with 30,000 users of MMORPG over a span of 3 years to explore user demographics of North America.

It shows that the average gamer age is about 25 with a range between age 11-68.
50% of MMORPG players are working,
22% are full-time students,
12% are working and/or going to school part-time,
10% are unemployed,
3% are home-makers,
while 1% are retired.
Ratio of Male : Female is 9:1.
And also an average of 22 hours usage per week, which shows very high appeal.

From this data, we can conclude that MMORPG does not just represent as a pastime for teenagers but targeting at a even larger community now. So let's move on to why people play MMORPG?