Four years ago Blizzard launched World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online RPG that abruptly snatched the spotlight from former genre heavyweight, Sony Online's EverQuest, and went on to enjoy a degree of success few could have predicted. With 11 million subscribers worldwide, the cultural impact of Blizzard's creation is difficult to accurately measure.It's a much different experience from other media, such as movies or books, particularly when trying to assess some kind of worth. You don't fault a movie for crashing, for instance, you fault the projector. A paragraph in a novel will never glitch out, requiring you to close and reopen the pages to reset it.

A massively multiplayer online game has so many more moving pieces and potential complications that having a company like Blizzard working behind the scenes should inspire confidence. It's got the quality assurance staff and support to ensure its products are remarkably polished, perform well, and actually work across a range of desktops and laptops with wildly varying hardware configurations. Also, the fact that there's such a large player base means this virtual world isn't getting shut down anytime soon, a danger with this type of game as most recently demonstrated with NCsoft and Tabula Rasa.

Games like this like this aren't one-shot, linear run-throughs or exercises in melding gameplay with abstract artistic themes; they're services. You pay a subscription fee and in return you get stable servers to play on, constant bug fixes, updates to game systems, added content, and customer support lines. It's spawned its own lexicon, countless Internet memes, appeared as the focus of an episode of South Park, and has dominated industry discussion about online games since its release.