Games such as World of Warcraft and worlds like Habbo Hotel are fast becoming "significant platforms" in the converged media world, the report said.

"There's a whole ream of different genres and spaces emerging," said the report author Piers Harding-Rolls.

Revenues from subscriptions to MMOGs will hit $1.5bn by 2011, he said.

But the growth in MMOGs remains limited compared to developing markets such as video on demand, which is expected to be worth $11.4bn from revenues in four years' time.

The range of MMOGs has started to diversify in recent years with new genres and types of games. There has also been an expansion in the different ways the games generate revenue.

The South Korean bill has received strong support from some in the game industry, particularly companies that run multiplayer Internet games in which the commercial exchange of virtual currency can potentially disrupt balance and competition. On the other side of the issue are gold-farming companies that serve the growing market for virtual currency. An article in The Korea Times cites statistics from the country's Game Development and Promotion institute, which states that the size of the virtual item exchange market is roughly $1 billion and estimates that approximately 60 percent of item trading company profits come from gold farming.

As gold farmers are quick to point out, prohibition will not decrease the market for virtual currency, and somebody will always emerge to take advantage of it. Prohibition, anyone? By imposing penalties on virtual currency exchange, the Korean government will deprive native companies of access to a rapidly growing, $1 billion dollar market that will still be serviced by foreign companies. Many MMORPG developers already have policies forbidding the commercial exchange of virtual currency, and some might question if it is fair to the tax-paying public to shift the costs and burdens of enforcing those policies to the Korean government.

The bill is also relatively vague about what actually constitutes virtual currency. One wonders if this proposed prohibition would criminalize games like Second Life in which commercial transactions are a fundamental aspect of the experience.

The "Browncoats," as Firefly's most devoted fans are known, have been campaigning to bring the show back almost since the moment it was canceled in late 2002. Now they'll get their wish, albeit in a new form.

"We see virtual worlds as an extraordinarily promising new entertainment medium," said Adam Kline, Fox Licensing's vice president of media enterprises in an e-mail. "We believe Multiverse can deliver an experience that will remain true to the original series, while enabling a whole new level of personal involvement for fans."

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The online version will move away from those central characters -- after all, there's only one Mal Reynolds. In an MMORPG, "everybody has to have their own story," says Multiverse co-founder and executive producer Corey Bridges.

"Television series can be really good properties to turn into MMOs, because when you make a TV series, not only do you need great characters, but you need to create a full, rich, compelling place," Bridges says. "If you're doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That's what Joss Whedon did with Firefly."

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

And while games stamped "Made in the U.S.A." have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980's.

The game has more players in China, where it has engaged in co-promotions with major brands like Coca-Cola, than in the United States. (There are more than three million players in China, and slightly fewer than two million in the United States. And as with most video games, a clear majority of players worldwide are male.)

There is a rabid legion of fans here in South Korea, which has the world's most fervent gaming culture, and more than a million people play in Europe. Most World of Warcraft players pay around $14 a month for access.

The gaming community calls them "griefers": people who like nothing better than to kill team-mates or obstruct the game's objectives. Griefers scam, cheat and abuse, often victimising the weakest and newest players. In games that attempt to encourage complex and enduring interactions among thousands of players, "griefing" has evolved from being an isolated nuisance to a social disease.

The players of World of Warcraft were left with a similar conundrum in March, when a group of gamers performed an act whose only purpose was to cause emotional pain. The death of a member of the community inspired her fellow gamers to hold a virtual funeral, which was raided by a malicious mob that made short work of the mourners, all of whom had relinquished their weapons as a sign of respect. Since the funeral was naively held in a zone designed for combat, few could question the legitimacy of the attack within the game's rules. None the less, the mourners were outraged, not at the penalties their characters would have to suffer, but at the brazen attack on their feelings.

"I expect we'll see more and more self-government," says Scott Jennings, game developer and author of Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies. "The reason is fairly obvious if not particularly noble: it's less expensive for game companies to have their customers police themselves than hire people to do it. The trick, and why you don't see it generally, is to construct self-policing schemes in such a way that they don't enable unscrupulous players to use them as tools of grief."

The map utilizes the Google Maps API and therefore behaves just a like a Google Map. Clicking on the controls on the left side of the map will let you zoom in and out. Dragging the map around lets you scroll the map and view different areas. It's that easy.

Use the menu to the right of the map to select resources and labels that you wish to display. Currently you can display herbs, ore, treasure, zone names, and city names. There are over 15,000 data points covering 69 resources with their exact map location in our database. The bottom of the menu provides quick links to popular locations in the game. Found a great area that you want to share with your friends? Go to the location on the map, click on the "Link to this Location" and then copy the URL.

Sometimes we all need a break from our day-to-day lives. What better time to log out of the real world and log in to a massively multiplayer online role playing game? And the more unrealistic the roles are to play, the better—like Robusto29, a left-handed, sword-wielding warrior, who also bakes banana pancakes for weary travelers. That's how we roll on RuneScape, a top-100 player in the Buzz.

Boasting over 2 million users worldwide, RuneScape offers a free version and can be run in a web browser, allowing for some real nice lunchtime escapes from cubicleland. While it may not be as easy on the eyes as some other popular online RPG games, like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, or EverQuest, RuneScape is still a lot better way to kill time than pushing around cells in a spreadsheet.

The criminals are trying to rob players of virtual assets obtained in the games, such as 'money' that players can use to buy weapons and goods, according to security firm Panda Software.

Given the effort required to obtain these items, there are many people prepared to pay for them as an easy way to reach higher levels and increase their reputations.

As a result, the virtual economy of the game translates into real profits for the cyber-crook, even more so with new games that allow real-world funds to be transferred into the game for use in the virtual world.

According to Panda, the malware that most frequently affects games are Trojans. In one example the Lineage virus steals player log-in details, allowing another player to steal virtual money to buy weapons, privileges or abilities within the game.

Rain and other inclement weather had been promised to the millions who play "World of Warcraft" since the massively multiplayer online PC game's launch in November 2004. A rotating team of developers at Blizzard Entertainment actually worked on creating a weather system for five years. Only last week, however, did the game's developers find a way to patch it into the game in a way the meets their expectations — and that they hope will meet fans' as well.

In the course of preparing that weather, developers have to make decisions about what video game weather should actually be. Should it just be something to look at or should it have an impact? When should it rain and where? And if game designers could decide the time and date of a rainstorm, should they?

"Coming up with the weather system for a world is fun," said Jeff Kaplan, 33, lead designer at Blizzard Entertainment's Irvine, California, headquarters, where the real-life lack of precipitation resembles the old weather-free version of his game. The falling-from-the-sky possibilities are broad when you're designing weather for a video game. "We've talked about how cool would it be when you killed the blood god, that it rains blood."

Blood storms aside, Kaplan said that Blizzard is approaching the change in climate modestly. Last week, three types of weather were introduced to "WoW": rainstorms, sandstorms and snowstorms. They have a chance of occurring in just 11 of the game's 40-plus realms and will crop up with a frequency that has been designed to err on the side of too little.

The contest involves entrants producing movies using the Blizzard Entertainment MMORPG World of Warcraft game engine to create imaginative movies in the three main categories of Dance, Comedy and Drama. Five prizes will be awarded for each category. An additional ten prizes will be awarded for special categories including Best Music, Best Dialog, Best Action Scene, Best Pun or Line, and Best Editing and Special Effects. A special prize will also be awarded to a selected movie among all valid contest entrants. Entries must be submitted by Monday February, 6th 2006 12:00pm PST.

Ellen Ripley, a longtime resident of the world, showed up for the grand finale and recorded screenshots and the dialogue as the end times approached. My favorite parts? The totally surreal warnings from that flashed onscreen -- "This world will be shutting down in 1 minute. Please log out" -- and the banter of the remaining residents, which mixes deeply heartfelt good-byes with howls of anguish and nerdcore quotings of The Lord of the Rings and Douglas Adams' ouevre

As of December 30, 2005 the AC2 service is no longer available. Turbine and the AC2 development team would like to express our thanks to the many players who've been part of Asheron's Call 2 over the years. We hope you've had as much fun playing the game as we did creating it for you.

It's never easy to say goodbye to a place you've called home, but we hope to see all of you in Turbine's other worlds.

I still remember the end of the Ultima Online beta. There was plenty of warning so people had time to do a lot of goofy stuff. I ended up leading a rebel army against Lord British's castle, which was a lot of fun. To make things interesting I got everyone to dye their clothes yellow and then we marched across the countryside. By the time we got to town we were so large the guards couldn't handle us. Although I managed to get inside the castle, but I found it empty. It wasn't until months later, in the real game, that someone managed to off the tyrannical Lord British.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, me and my colleagues are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works in the makeshift factory and goes by the online code-name "Wandering."

"I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good, compared to the other jobs I've had," he said. "And I can play games all day."

He and his comrades belong to the latest global industry to use cheap Chinese labor - the fast-growing world of online gaming, which generates $3.6 billion a year, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the online gaming market.

They are workers with quotas and bosses who equip them to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres. In the hours these workers play, they accumulate gold coins that they can sell for real money to game players around the world, who then use the coins to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accouterments to climb levels or create more powerful characters. The Internet is filled with classified advertisements from small companies, many of them in China, auctioning off their powerful figures, called avatars, and individual gamers marketing virtual weapons and wares.

Turbine's game developers say D&D Online is designed to stay as true as possible to the paper-based version and offers a reasonable online alternative to the more than 4.6 million people still playing D&D just in the United States. The game -- in which players create imaginary characters and adventure through fantasy forests, castles and other environs -- has been around for more than three decades.

The company has built the online version specifically around the teams of fantasy adventurers that made the original D&D so popular. John Foster, Turbine's director of public relations, said D&D Online requires players to quickly find others with whom to join forces and set out to complete quests.

Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films, plans to call the space resort, in the science-fiction themed game Project Entropia, "Club Neverdie." Like other land areas in the game that has been visited by 300,000 players, the resort grounds will spawn dinosaur-like monsters, which visitors can kill.

Jacobs will take a cut of the virtual resources that the carcasses yield, like hides.

Jacobs, 39, plans to hire famous disc jockeys to entertain visitors once a week or so at the resort but still reckons on netting $20,000 a month from the hunting tax and other income.

"I want to operate this thing at the level of a major nightclub in a major city," Jacobs said.

Developed by Avalanche, 25 To Life is a third-person shooter set in modern urban streets. You'll choose to play either cops or criminals to either infiltrate a drug lord's inner sanctum, or bust out of jail and fight your way up the ranks of the underground.

Gangster shooter Roll Call has been renamed and re-dated this week, publisher Eidos Interactive has announced. Roll Call will from henceforth be known as Zero Tolerance -- City Under Fire, and will now be released in the second-quarter of 2006 (sometime between spring and early summer, broadly speaking). This new date serves Europe, and possibly other PAL regions, whilst the publisher has yet to announce plans for North America. The game is still being created for the Xbox and the PS2, with Rocksteady Studios of London developing this latest gang-land action title.

A recent posting on RootKit.com suggests that Blizzard installs software that watches the personal information of people playing their game. The software is designed to hunt for cheat-ware, but reads the title headings of any window open, regardless of its relation to WoW. The poster reports that he, "watched the (program) sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, (and) the URL of several websites that I had open at the time."

In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a "corrupted blood" infection that can instantly kill weaker characters.

The infection was only supposed to affect those in the immediate vicinity of Hakkar's corpse but some players found a way to transfer it to other areas of the game by infecting an in-game virtual pet with it.

This pet was then unleashed in the orc capital city of Ogrimmar and proved hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to player.

Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as "carriers" and infected player-controlled characters they encountered.

What Blizzard's finalized response to the plague remains to be seen, but if their message boards are any indication, it's thankfully tongue-in-cheek. "It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results," says one moderator on the official forums. "At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future."

"The title in its current form, initially scheduled for an October 2005 release, does satisfy neither our quality requirements nor the fans expectations. We will not release anything that does not do justice to this well known license." says Albert Seidl, CEO JoWooD Productions Software AG. "In recent months we have invested a lot of time and resources in helping Perception finish the development, but we now simply have lost confidence in their ability to finish this project in time and sufficient quality."

World of Warcraft recently surpassed the two million mark for paying subscribers. Already the largest MMO in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, Blizzard expects to see even greater growth with the recent commercial launch in China on June 7, 2005. Anticipation for World of Warcraft was already at an all-time high in China, with peak concurrency during the open beta test topping 500,000 players, nearly equal to World of Warcraft's peak concurrency in all three current markets combined. Blizzard expects to see the new mark of two million subscribers shattered quickly with the arrival of players from China in the coming weeks.

Our rental service allows you to rent accounts for "multi massive online role playing games". Renting accounts means you have the option of trying different classes/races/genders/servers etc. without worrying about owning an account. If you want to use the character for a raid, show off to your friends or just to have fun on your spare time, then maybe renting an account instead of buying an account is the best decision for you.

Not only do we level up your characters, but we level up your character skills, complete quests, kill high level mobs, and we also give you free loot (currency/items). All the loot remains on your account that we loot off random mobs. We also make sure nobody knows that your account is being power-leveled during the process.

"As we try to create more immersive experiences, these artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward and this is one of the areas that could really explode," Bing Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game company, said after his talk Wednesday night. "We hope that the folks here start thinking about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics is a feature or sound is a feature."

Facade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a four year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Facade will be publicly released as a freeware cd-rom / download in early summer 2005.

"I have always been a huge fan of Conan and his Hyborian universe, and to direct this game is a dream come true. We are truly trying to make this the ultimate representation of Conan's world, and we are filling it with features never before seen in an online game. Have you not felt the urge when a great single-player RPG ends to have your character live on and interact with other fellow travelers? To enter an even greater world? This is that opportunity, to have a detailed RPG all about you, your choices and your character, and if you win -- to share that victory at an even greater stage."

Shot-Online is not just an online sports game either, but it is a highly accurate simulation and a deep role-playing experience. It is the RPG quality that makes Shot-Online the unique game it is, especially with the community interaction and the enhancement and leveling of your character. A proprietary physics engine was used in Shot-Online to accurately recreate the ball and course dynamics. In other words, the ball will behave as it should over the geography of the course. Characters also benefit from accuracy through technology ? motion captured golf swings from a PGA golfer were used to match the most spot-on feel of a real golf swing, putting, chip shot, and other golfing actions.