It’s hard to convey why I care about MMOs to people who don’t.

I would say that the mechanics and gameplay of these games are an acquired taste, but they’re not. No one ever starts from a position of disliking combat-by-number or long hours of grinding collection quests only to come to appreciate all of their subtle joys later. It doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes I feel like being an MMO gamer is a bit like being a smoker. As a former smoker from the mid-nineties, I can tell you from experience no one ever starts or continues smoking because they taste delicious. Or because of all that awesome coughing you get to do. Or the repellent smell. Or the cost. No, you smoke because there is something about it that makes you feel comfortable and internally sustained. That eventually gives way, of course, to the fact that you smoke because you smoke and you can’t stop, but that’s not where it starts. It starts with the odd satisfaction of grass-filled paper perched between your fingers and a calm that rushes into your brain when your lungs fill with what can only be described as a toxic miasma of soot, tar and cancer catalysts.

When I fire up World of WarCraft or The Old Republic or EverQuest 2 or RIFT or any of the dozens of MMOs I’ve played, I get that same kind of rush before I ever hit the auto-attack key or click on the first guy with a question mark over his head. Which is part of the reason why I also am part of a mostly quiet segment of gamers that doesn't want MMOs to change.

It may not be good for me, but there it is.

I have had the DOTA2 beta at my disposal and ready to play for some three or four months now, and I’ve played it exactly twice. This is not a badge of misplaced honor, or some kind of self-congratulatory example of restraint. No, the reason I have not played this game is distressingly simple, not to mention more than a little shameful.

Fact is, I’m completely intimidated by it.

And, it’s not alone. There are lots of games that intimidate me, and try as I might to rationalize and logic my way out of this silly trepidation, I can’t get over my hesitation to play certain games. Games like Magic the Gathering Online, Hearts of Iron III, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Demon’s Souls, Team Fortress 2, Dwarf Fortress, League of Legends and a scattering of others. Sometimes they just seem too complex. Other times the community surrounding the game seems too uninviting, most often competing players have been at the game for so long that it all just seems impenetrable from the outside.

And the tragedy, the real shame of it all, is that all of those games above are ones I’d like to learn and get involved in, right up til the moment that I casually look through an online starter guide that talks about how in just five or six months I might begin to understand the fundamentals. Moments like that, I should have a fully functioning and very real ejector seat, because I would pull that rip cord like I was opening a Christmas present from my long-lost billionaire uncle.

It wasn’t that long ago at all that the idea of protest on the web was the sort of thing you laughed at. Casually irritated people taking 13 seconds to sign what might be their actual name to a toothless petition with all the impact of a softly drifting soap bubble was great for shouting at the wind, but the idea that anyone would actually take an online protest or movement seriously was fantasy of the highest order.

And yet, here we are on the far side of the great internet blackout, assuming the internet is entirely made up of Google, Wikipedia and places that aggregate pictures of cats, which I have to admit is a pretty reasonable assumption. The once seemingly invulnerable legislation of SOPA and PIPA that could have changed the web as we knew it is now all but dead, and you can be forgiven for feeling like we can chalk one up for the good guys and pop open the champagne.

Which is exactly the kind of complacent, short-sighted, self-congratulatory lack of direction that will leave us having won a battle and lost the war. While everyone is deciding how we’re going to refocus our illusion of new-found authority in the world of politics and advocacy, the ground will be crumbling under our feet, and when the fall comes I fear it will be a horrible shock, leaving us far worse for a time than we might have been had SOPA just passed quietly in the night as had been intended.

No, the watch-word of today can not be success. It must be vigilance.

Let me get this out of the way, Paul Christoforo acted like a self-important jerk in his correspondence with a customer about delivery of an Avenger controller accessory. His self-congratulatory, imperious, dismissive explosion of barely literate correspondence to a customer asking a completely legitimate question touched as much a raw nerve with me as anyone else who has ever had to endure what passes for customer service these days. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that every single person who read the e-mail chain that began with the customer and ended with Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade took vehement exception with virtually everything Paul said.

Though contrite now and quick to talk about how he was having a bad day —- despite the fact the e-mail conversation stretched over the better part of 2 weeks — he presented the gold-standard example of the worst kind of service. But this article is not about Paul. This article is about the response, and how deeply disquieting the sanctioned retribution of the online hit-mob has become.

The people of the internet know no limits to their charity, but neither do they seem to know limits to their bloodlust for abuse, revenge and humiliation. Even a small corner of the virtual universe can focus into unimaginable pressure — just ask GoDaddy, which has been under siege for more than a week after coming out publicly in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Now, like Paul, GoDaddy isn’t exactly a sympathetic figure, but they are a cautionary tale that when the Sauron Eye of an organized internet mob turns to put your indiscretions under the microscope, the results can be devastating.

In truth, what I have taken away from both these incidents is that there is good reason to fear the tyranny and unrestrained animosity of a virtual lynching, for there is no compassion to be had in its almost random punishment.

I have been a part of many Massively Multiplayer Online game launches. I am, you might say, a connoisseur of new MMOs, the consummate dabbler of online gaming. I love to experience the opening of a new world, to be first to leave virtual footprints on the far side of a new frontier, among that small band standing at the shore of a grand new ocean. Additionally, it may also just be that I draw from a secret well of pleasure in witnessing the failure of others, and there are few places where rich veins of failure run more deeply into the loamy ground of disappointment than in MMO launches.

I was there for the launch of EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Asheron’s Call, Asheron’s Call 2, World of WarCraft, Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I know from personal experience that even in games that may somehow survive their rocky breech birth and establish long legacies of profitable success, the launch can become something best forgotten. Catastrophic lag, broken quests, crashes to desktop, inoperative login or account servers, broken worlds, zones going offline, horrible imbalance, power outages, bizarre bugs, game breaking exploits — these are just a sampling from the smorgasbord buffet of game launch nightmares.

And those are just the ones you can actually do something about. That’s to say nothing of lack of fan interest, empty servers, bad initial reviews, negative buzz coming out of beta and having to launch a half-complete game because your company is just flat out of money. The likelihood of a successful MMO launch, even for the best of companies, are the kind of odds that would make even Vegas blush. So really, what chance did Star Wars: The Old Republic have at a stable, smooth, customer-pleasing launch?

And yet...

The Major League Gaming season of 2011 began not with a bang, but a whimper, reminding those of us who were skeptical about the future of e-sports in general that our concerns were not without merit. The slap in the face to MLG fans that was Dallas, however, ended up being the exception to the season and not the rule. Follow up events in Columbus, Anaheim, Raleigh, Orlando and Providence were not only professionally executed, but each seemed to build on the success and momentum of the one before.

By the end of the season, I had gone from being a serious critic of MLG to an active and excited subscriber. In every conceivable way the broadcast of the fall finale in Providence a few weeks ago was better than the rough attempts of late spring and early summer. It was the sort of broadcast that could make you begin to become a believer in this seemingly fledgling venture of gaming as spectator event. It engaged me on the same competitive and excited level as other sports.

The reality, though, is that E-sports is more than 15 years old now, and though it has experienced what is arguably its best year ever, it’s hard to say that it is much further along, at least in the sense of Western mainstream popularity, than it was five or ten years ago. As much as I may have come to enjoy watching e-sports, I still find it hard to imagine a reality where it can gain a mainstream audience — which is, by the way, very good news.

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It is important you read this document carefully, despite the fact that it is likely longer than most Ernest Hemingway books, has been carefully crafted by a team of high-paid mafia attorneys based out of an impenetrable Manhattan legal fortress, and is specifically designed to be incomprehensible to those lacking both a Juris Doctorate and a positronic brain. However, if you’d just like to roll the dice, skip to the end and click that little “I agree you’ve basically got me bent over a barrel anyway, so let’s end this little charade shall we” button at the bottom, who are we to stop you?

Oh, you want to read the rest? Whatever Perry Mason. Good Luck, chump … I mean valued customer.

Carl woke in a pleasant mood, looking forward to another day of protecting his village, his neighbors and his family. The crisp winter’s sun crackling through the window, spilling a stark beam of weak warmth on his bed, certainly didn’t hurt. He took a deep breath of cool air as he pushed the layers of pelts away. Next to him, his faithful wife stirred sleepily, and he lovingly patted her exposed ivory thigh, which she covered immediately with the furs he had discarded.

She wore a coy smile on her face though, even as her eyes remained firmly closed. Carl resisted a lascivious impulse, and instead slunk from the bed and began building a fire in the fireplace.

Not long after, Carl emerged from his now-warm home and the comfortable kindnesses of his wife, into a bright morning day. Around him Whiterun stirred, the heavy locks of closed shops opening with the sun, the careless chaos of children at play coming from all around. A short, pleasant walk to the town’s main gates was punctuated by a half-dozen greetings with people he had known over now twenty seasons of service as a town guard.

High on the hill at the apex of the town, Dragonsreach, home of Jarl Baalgruf, dominated the skyline, proud and strong. Fears of bandit invasions and conflicts between Battle-born and Grey-mane seemed very far away. As he took his station, Carl could not remember feeling quite so good in a very long time.

And then, the stranger came.

Over the past month or two there have been a lot of rumors and rumblings about the long-delayed “next gen” round of consoles. Lately talk has swirled of a 2012 holiday-season launch for a new Windows-driven Microsoft console. And, to be honest, it kind of makes sense. Now that the Wii has opened up the race, certainly competition cannot be far behind. I assume even gun-shy Sony will eventually get into the act.

As far as I’m concerned, this is all very disappointing news.

I realize now, only too late, that I don’t actually want a new console generation at all. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing that the current console generation should do that it currently can’t. I actually don’t really want any more graphical whizbangery — Battlefield 3 has shown me that the current gen can look too close to real as it is. Online integration is as fully featured as I need it to be. I could probably move to console-only media consumption and be happy enough, particularly once Microsoft's Live update adds even more functionality. My systems already integrate just fine with my computer and other home media. And the games for these systems are getting really, really good. Last thing I want is to go back to 3 years of developers trying to figure out how to make the tech work.

You know what, Microsoft. Keep your Xbox 3 — somehow I keep forgetting that the 360 is actually only the second MS console — I don’t want it.

It seems like every holiday season there is the one game that I never expected to care about, or buy or love. One hidden gem among the big-budget blockbusters and cavalcade of bombast that permeates the Septembers, Octobers and Novembers of our gamer lives. Every year, I look forward to that inevitable game, because it is like a secret surprise. It’s like finding hidden love in a seedy singles’ bar or a forgotten twenty in your coat pocket. It’s the kind of thing that restores your faith in an orderly, functioning universe.

This year, that game for me is Rocksmith. This was a game that I didn’t care at all about even a week and a half ago, and which now seems like something I’ve been looking for ever since I picked up my first Guitar Hero plastic controller some six years ago. Even as everyone pretty much agrees that the music genre is dead or dying, this is a breath of fresh air in a dusty crypt, a refreshing lemonade stand in the middle of Death Valley.

It’s not game of the year. Heck, I’m not even totally sure it’s a game. It is a niche item within a niche genre, and it suffers too often from a lack of fully polished features, but it builds from a solid platform of phenomenal functionality and accessibility. Beyond all else, it feels like the product of people who genuinely care about teaching people to use and get value out of their guitars. It is refreshingly authentic, and that earnestness helps it rise above its shortcomings.