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:: MAX BLACK ::

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian

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:: Monday, May 31, 2004 ::

Unsolitary Solitaire:

The June issue of Wired magazine reports online gaming is reaching a new demographic: Geezers! Sites like Pogo.com offer lo-tech favorites like bridge, euchre and backgammon and according to the article, the 82.5 million players in the 'casual gaming' community take it very seriously. Wired reports:

The ruling class of online gamers isn't pimply young boys, it's moms--and grandmas. Ruth Lyon is a 66-year-old retired nurse in Honor, Michigan. Instead of watching Jeopardy or reading, she spends three or four hours a night playing euchre and bridge online with her son in California and her daughter in Ohio. And since she lives tucked away in a cottage on a remote lake, she finds it a convenient way to make friends. "It's amazing how many older people are doing this," she says. Online games also help Anne Richards, 56, feel less alone. Confined to a wheel chair, Richards spends a lot of time inside her Florida home. "What I really like is that it's a place to find some human contact," she says. "It gives me a place to go."

Lyon and Richards are among the millions--mostly women 35 to 54--who play casual games online. It's a gray market that earns companies $450 million annually, largely through advertising (less than 2 percent of players actually pay to subscribe). And talk about sticky: Pogo's players spend about 24.8 million hours on the site each month, says Nielsen/NetRatings. "Checkers is a big pickup scene,"

I just checked into Pogo and, as of 9:30 am central time, there were 148,027 people playing online games. Yikes!

:: Max 8:52 AM [+] ::
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