Kostya

On the one hand, I am inclined to dismiss this man's article as the distillation of a lifetime defending the virtues of playing Street Fighter as a noble enterprise, not that I look down on SF Tournaments or anything, but it seems like he's developed quite a sophisticated rhetoric to justify himself.

On the other hand, I think it is quite true enough to say that games have both explicit and implicit lessons for those who play them.

That said, I think that someone could retort with just as good an argument for MMO's teaching valuable lessons. For instance, one might dismiss his whole 'meritocratic' ethos and individual achievement as simply claptrap, WoW is a bit like the real world. There are people who are above you, who are where they are for arbitrary reasons, often things like time spent. I can confidently assert that I will defeat most 4 year olds in an essay writing competition, simply because I have been abroad the earth for a much longer time. In 'real life' maybe it's an important lesson to learn that you're probably going to be shit on by people who aren't as good as you, maybe if you threw away vague Utopian ideals about meritocratic achievement and 'going solo' you might suffer less by falling into line. Perhaps WoW's 40 man raids are nothing more than a recognition of the power of numbers, be they in elections, street fights or on Capitol Hill.

Then again maybe not.

I for one long for the day someone liberates the MMORPG from the long venerated but ultimately ridiculous item/level/profession limitations and tries something a little different from the archetypes essentially set down in the very first RPG's.