All information will be kept strictly confidential and will only be used for internal purposes for GameAmp staff. It may become necessary for one of our site managers or administrator to modify your account from time to time and they will be able to see your personal information. Other internal usages may also arise and GameAmp staff will need to access your personal information. For example; prize giveaways. But once again, we vow to NEVER divulge any of your personal information to anyone without your direct written and/or verbal consent.
Here are a few things you should note:
GameAmp uses the IP address that you access the site from to compile usage statistics available for view by a select group of people.
Logs are kept on all access to our servers for security purposes.
Rules and Conditions
By signing up for a GameAmp account you are agreeing to abide by our rules and regulations. If any of these rules or regulations change, you will be notified via private message or email letting you know what has changed and the new rules will take effect immediately.
The Rules:
Do not post any material which may be deemed offensive to others. This includes, but is not limited to: pornography, slander or libel against any other person, foul language (use your best judgment), and any material which any other person besides yourself holds a copyright on (unless you have express written permission).
That's it; simple enough to follow. Just remember to always use your own best judgment when submitting material to be added to any site on the GameAmp Network. If your submission is not approved immediately, then please be patient. Our administrators are working as hard as they can. If for some reason your submission is still not approved within 72 hours, then please send the site manager or an administrator a private message detailing what you submitted and they will get back to you as soon as possible.
Everyone will look like a Greek god or goddess.
If you don't understand the gravitational pull of an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), I'm going to enlighten you with just a dozen words: you get to pick what you look like and what your talents are.
That's the real beauty of it. The first thing you do in the MMORPG World of Warcraft is design your own body and decide what your strengths will be. You pick your race. What could be more seductive than that, the ability to turn in all of the cards you were dealt at birth and draw new ones from a face-up deck? If you have friends who've gotten sucked into the WoW black hole and you don't understand why they never talk to you any more, this is it. I remember being a chubby teenager with bad skin and astigmatism and pants that didn't fit quite right. What would I have given to be reborn as a strapping warrior with rippling pecs and armor of hammered silver?
On that kid's screen now is a dozen noble warriors of exotic races, brandishing elaborate weapons and charging a gigantic demon across a fire-scarred mountaintop. The dwarf next to him is controlled by an accountant planted at his own computer in Cleveland, two babies sleeping in the next room and his pregnant wife on the sofa. The robed priest in the back casting healing spells is actually a 250-lb. ex-gangster, playing from the computer lab of a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania. The elf on his left, sprinting and drawing his mighty magical bow, is the digital body of a wheelchair-bound 12 year-old girl in Miami.
It's not just for fantasy geeks, of course. Even The Sims lets you pick a version of yourself with low body fat and cool hair. And this idea is what's going to push the expansion of MMORPG technology in the way that porn pushed the expansion of the internet, the desperate-but-untapped desire to interact with others without the bothersome interference of genetic flaws and poor diet and exercise habits.
But it's not just the physical image that changes. In that world, I am a dragon slayer. There, my reptutation and history are just as awe-inspiring as my look. Even now, much of the satisfaction for WoW gamers is in the very real sense of accomplishment they get, a person glowing with a burst of golden light when they gain a level in experience and strength. How can the real world compete with that? Wouldn't those long Calculus lectures have been easier to sit through if, every time you learned something important, gold light shot out from your body?
In the future, long after World of Warcraft has gone the way of ARPANET, everyone will have a virtual-world twin. An upgraded, digital representative of yourself which I'll henceforth refer to as Awesome You . And you'll see a time in your life when more people know Awesome You than know the real you.
Some people live like that already.
All will play in the same virtual world.
Gamers rejoiced back in April when it was announced that Blizzard, Square/Enix and Sony were merging their virtual worlds so that online characters from one game could stride seamlessly into another. It made perfect business sense and I was the first to say I wasn't at all surprised by the news. I had been predicting it for months. The fact that it turned out to be an April Fool's joke and entirely false only proves my point. Ahem.
As this kind of community gaming becomes the nation's pasttime, convenience will demand that some day each person's online identity be able to move from one realm to the next, from the suburbs of the next Sims Online game to WoW's Spiderskull Mountain. And with that convergence of virtual worlds we'll have the first real, primitive incarnation of something not unlike the matrix, or what old science fiction authors called the metaverse. A simulated, virtual world.
You won't have to be into fantasy to participate. You can spend your gaming time in a virtual suburb and build a virtual family and enjoy growing a virtual garden, while your best friend goes off to fight the Orcs of Thunderclaw Valley. Your cousin can go re-fight World War 2 every day. It will still be mainly a game at this stage of its evolution, but as the experience is tailored to every single taste (all under one virtual roof) more and more people will participate. And once everybody's there, why not do all of your chatting and text messaging there? Half of the WoW experience seems to be just a beautifully-rendered and animated chat interface anyway.
The first steps will likely come with the next game consoles, expanding the pool of gamers beyond those with pimped-out gaming PC's. The Playstation 3 will have at least one huge MMORPG on it ( Final Fantasy VII ). The XBox 360 should have World of Warcraft . And then if you get the console users hooked, and if the the console makers succeed in their plan to get a box in every single house in the civilized world, and then if they expand the interface so you can use your cell phone to check in on your game... You get the idea.
You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.
You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.
Let's take this a little bit further. You earn gold in World of Warcraft, gold with which you can buy these in-game objects. If this game gold is truly valuable to my life, if it lets me get more value out of the pasttime I already pay real-world money for, what's to stop me from paying real money for game money? Nothing. Go to Ebay and do a search for World of Warcraft Gold and let your jaw drop open.
Here we have game currency being traded for real currency, and at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar.
If we go further still, we can imagine a person winning rare weapons and selling them on auction sites or directly to other players they meet. We can imagine somebody working full-time to gather in-game gold by slaying gold-shitting squirrels (or whatever you do to get gold in the game) and then exchanging it for real dollars to pay the real rent with. Sure, it may be decades before you see this kind of-
Oh, wait. There are people doing that right now.
And if you're chuckling and shaking your head at the glazed-eyed geeks who can't tell the difference between game money and real money, let me ask you something: when Square bought Enix for $727 million two years ago, do you think they they actually stacked crate after crate of cash on a flatbed truck and then drove the $727 million over to their offices?
No. That money only existed as numbers in a computer. In fact, not even 10% of the money in the American economy exists as physical, printed currency. All of the rest exists on servers and hard drives and in the imaginations of the people. It has value for the exact same reason WoW gold has value: because people think it has value.
I'm guessing that if you started this article thinking it was a joke, this is the point when you sobered up and realized that, as author H.G. Wells predicted, "the future will accost us with boob-slapping ferocity."
The Basics of Consumer Behavior
The study of consumer behavior examines all aspects of consumers' feelings, thoughts, and reasons for making particular decisions in purchasing products or services or subscribing to ideas, and also how consumers use and dispose of products. Influences on a consumer's beliefs or practices may be influenced by family and friends, religious beliefs, cultural attitudes, by social expectations, by professional standards, by advertising appeals, or by any combination of these factors. While some of these influences are felt in the conscious mind of a consumer (all my friends are wearing a certain kind of boots this fall, so I've decided to buy a pair just like them), an even greater factor may be unconscious beliefs or associations (the smell of this fabric softener reminds me of my mother's laundry day when I was a child, so I'll pick it over the other that doesn't carry personal associations).
The most obvious application for knowledge of consumer behavior is obviously marketing strategy—understanding that a growing number of consumers are on low-carbohydrate diets, for instance, has led to an ever-increasing number of products that are labeled as “Low Carb.” But the study of consumer behavior also has repercussions for public policy (allowing government agencies to make regulations to protect consumers), social marketing (promoting ideas that encourage people to act in their own best interest, such as wearing seatbelts or adopting safe-sex practices), and consumer education (teaching practices that make us smarter shoppers, such as buying in bulk to save money or avoiding produce that has been treated with dangerous pesticides).
Marketers may examine consumer behavior using either primary or secondary research. Primary research is that which is done specifically for a particular product or service, examining attitudes among consumers who make use of it. Secondary research was done by another party or for another purpose, such as census data. While secondary research has many fruitful applications, its uses may be far more limited than primary research, which can be designed address any issue of interest to the marketer.
Primary research is usually conducted by asking consumers to answer survey questions, either by mail, internet, telephone, or in person. Mail surveys are useful because they are inexpensive and may ask as many questions as desired, but the return rate is usually quite low, and, as the respondents are self-selected, the results may be unreliable (people who fill out a survey that comes in the mail with a detergent sample, for instance, may already be loyal to that brand, which isn't helpful in understanding how to recruit new consumers). Telephone surveys may reach a somewhat broader audience, but they are more expensive to conduct and are limited by the participants' patience—most people are unwilling to devote more than five minutes to answering a surveyor's questions over the phone. Internet surveys can be cheap to set up, but exposure to aggressive internet advertising has made many consumers resistant to surveying by this method, and, as with telephone surveys, those who will participate may grow frustrated if the survey isn't brief. Questioning consumers in person, by setting up a booth or desk in a shopping area, can be an effective way of reaching a target group, but face-to-face interviews are particularly prone to unintentional bias. The unconscious behavior or facial expressions of an interlocutor may cause the consumer to answer questions in the way he or she believes is desired.
Any attempt to survey consumers, though, must deal with the issue of bias. The simple wording of a question can predispose consumers to respond in a certain way. For instance, asking “Do you like Coke better than Pepsi?” is likely to produce a higher number of Coke loyalists than simply asking “What's your favorite soft drink?” Any human involvement in the survey, whether by phone or in person, just adds an additional potential for biased results.
Another way of examining consumer attitudes is through assembling six to 12 consumers in a focus group. Focus groups may work in a less structured way, getting participants to begin a conversation about a class or group of products or services rather than asking pointed questions. This can help avoid bias from those conducting the research and allow consumers to express attitudes that might never have been discovered in a more structured survey, but, as in any group interaction, dominant personalities may influence how others express their ideas. Focus groups are also expensive to conduct and unreliable in making generalizations about wider populations unless many groups are assembled.
Direct observation of consumer behavior in a shopping environment can be a useful tool, allowing us to gauge, for instance, if consumers approaching a display of food products really do go to look at the “Low Carb” packaging first. In some occasions, researchers will examine subjects' physiological responses to advertising. Does a commercial for a cake frosting make the subject salivate? Does a man's heart rate increase when he sees beautiful women in a beer commercial? Again, these methods may be quite expensive and time-consuming, and a great many consumers must be examined for the results to be statistically significant.
No one method of conducting primary research is perfect or necessarily more advantageous generally than others. In selecting methodology, marketers must consider what kind of information is most important to gather and select the most appropriate method.