…at State of Play, Doug Thomas told the story of the mother who emailed him for advice about her son. It seems that the previous weekend she’d gotten somewhat alarmed when he spent six hours straight playing World of Warcraft. She asked him to quit the game, and when he didn’t, she came over and turned off his computer. “But we were on the *final boss*!” Her question to Thomas: What happened? Thomas replied that what she had done was turn off the computer at the moment when his team had reached the final challenge of the day, leaving the 39 people relying on him stranded. Oh.

My friend Barbara used to talk about the ways that games could be made more family-friendly. For example, she and her son used to argue when mealtime or bedtime came along and he simply wasn’t at a stopping place. She felt that games would be a lot less contentious in a lot of families if designers paid more attention to things like making it possible to save the game at *any* point instead of only at certain, widely dispersed points, or making pause available throughout, and so on. I thought these were all good points, and the fact that so many games were not designed this way probably has or had something to do with the average demographic of the designers.

I don’t know what the solution might have been for WoW. The mother’s response to Thomas’s answer was something like, “Isn’t six hours a long time to play a game?” Well, it is. And especially so if you’re 13 or whatever and, as teenagers often do, fail to communicate to your parent in advance exactly what it is you’re signing up for this Saturday.

There has long been a lot of belief in some parts of the computer industry that virtual worlds are the future (or an important part of it). These kinds of issues will continue to resurface. At State of Play, the design panel talked about how architecture affects human behaviour, comparing real-life examples of public spaces with the virtual ones – in one case, they showed the same world with a big, central fountain around which people congregated and then without it, with people just randomly dispersing. Designers clearly think about this when they build their worlds. But there seems to me much less thought for the way the virtual world intersects with the demands of real life. There is no offline mode for Second Life, for example, so there is no way to sit offline on a plane and read the information you’ve collected in the world even though you can save notecards and other documents. The world itself is too big to download, but I don’t really understand why there is no offline mode for your own inventory and small home space. That, of course, gives the game gods complete control over your experience at all times – there’s always a wait when you log into the world while it downloads all the software updates since your last visit.