The Online Game Industry is an Excellent Way to Study the Economics of Fun by Richard Kingston
While scientists developed sensory-input devices to mimic the sensations of a virtual world, the games industry eschewed this hardware-based approach in favour of creating alternative realities through emotionally engaging software. "It turns out that the way humans are made, the software-based... Millions of people now spend several hours a week immersed in "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (MMORPGs). ... But how can all the players end up in the top 10%? ... Simple: the upwardly mobile human players need only be a subset of the world's population.

Enigma: Rising Tide Review by Neal Stevens
SINGLE PLAYER REVIEW Enigma lives! Tesseraction has released a single player offline version of their upcoming massively multiplayer naval game and it lives up to its potential and then some. Playing Enigma offline gives you a chance to see what this game is all about and train for the... If Tesseraction is able to forge ahead and bring new versions and enhancements to Enigma as promised, including the massive multiplayer component, Enigma will have a lock on the naval game community. ... With the development emphasis on the eventual multiplayer action, there is no random mission...

Second Life is What You Make of It by Madison Lockwood
Second Life (SL) is a privately owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, introduced in 2003 by West Coast company Linden Lab. Users can visit this virtual world almost as if it were a real place via their home computer and an internet connection. ... Technically, Second Life has the most in common in the gamming industry with Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs. ... Residents spend a quarter of the time they're logged in, tens of thousands of hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, part of the landscape for everyone else.