The release of Wrath of the Lich King has been massively successful once again for Blizzard, with around 11 million subscribers around the world regularly getting a dose of elves, orcs, dwarves and wizards fighting in a massively multiplayer universe.

It contrasts with Second Life, which was massively hyped in its time but now only gets a fraction of press coverage.

Although I’m biased as an ex-World of Warcraft player, I think that it is a completely fair reflection on the importance that World of Warcraft has in gaming and a study in how a tech company can build a virtual world which inspires rather than bores.

Here are ten reasons why.

1.    The subscriber base.

The World of Warcraft has around 11 million active subscribers. Second Life does not have anywhere near that number, and that is counting multiple avatars created by the same person, idle accounts on the database, and even traffic bots.

2.    The users

You’re more likely to get your average IT worker playing World of Warcraft rather than playing around with Second Life. That’s certainly true with the younger generation as well, those who are more likely to be part of the next wave of IT workforce.

3.    It’s fun

There’s a reason why they call it Warcrack. WoW is fun, compelling and massively addictive, which you cannot really say about Second Life.

4.    There’s a point to it

Using Second Life, there is often the question of what the whole point of it is. There are no goals and there’s generally little reward, apart from earning money and buying land.

In WoW the reason people continue playing is to get stronger, build characters, increase levels and win new weapons. With 80 possible levels to get through that’s an incredible amount to get through.

5.    The community

To reach decent levels in WoW you need to make friends, form communities and work together just like real life. In Second Life there is little motivation to do that, unless you’re into a bit of online chat.

This places the importance of teamwork, a necessary skill for the future IT generation to learn in the workplace.

6    Reliability

Blizzard works hard to make the system as stable as possible, as they will get a lot of flack if the system suddenly crashes when a raid party is in the middle of battling a level 60 dungeon.

This can’t be said for Second Life. If an object in a user’s inventory which has been paid for disappears, Linden Lab will offer no compensation. This almost never happens in WoW, and if it did there are support groups and helplines which could solve the issue.

7    You can play it with your real friends

It’s unlikely, if ever, that you’ll be in the Second Life world with a fellow user on a computer beside you. One of the strangest things about WoW is that real friends and families have joined up with each other to enter the world, and can often give you an advantage.

8    It continues to grow

Second Life seems to have stood still.  There hasn’t been a drastic change to the original basic world. WoW on the other hand has gone from strength to strength, with the expansion packs Burning Crusade and Lich King offering new characters, new worlds and new ways of playing.

9    WoW makes a lot of money

£35 odd for the new expansion pack, £9 per month to play, 11 million subscribers. Enough said.

10    It inspires genuine devotion

Like Apple, the WoW user base loves Blizzard and the game with a fierce passion, with iPhone style queues stretching all around the world to buy a copy of Lich King. This offers a lesson to any tech company in how to create a product that creates love, devotion and hype which any type of paid advertising cannot buy.

Also in news, could security learn a thing or two from World of Warcraft?

A computer researcher has successfully built a computer system which can give people who are unable to speak or move the chance to communicate using the power of thought.

University of Portsmouth’s Paul Gnanayutham has devised s system which uses patients’ brain waves as well as eye and muscular movements to move a cursor on a computer .

On the prototype device can include targets such as ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it can also switch on electrical appliances as well as link to internet pages. Researchers say the device has the potential to change targets to anything a person needs to say, watch or do.

It’s not the first time that brain waves has been used to navigate cursors, but it is the first time that it has been used on real people with serious brain injuries, rather than confined to the lab and able bodied people.

However to make it a proper reality, it needs funding.

Dr Gnanyutham said: “This technology has been around but very few people have used it for anything worthwhile. I worked with traumatic brain injured participants who were paraplegics, non-verbal and tube fed to give them a voice.

“Hospital staff look after these people - they feed them, wash them, shave them and so on but they do not have a voice.”

The system uses an alice band worn around the head picking up brain waves, muscles  and eye movements. These signals are fed into an amplifier cutting out external noise and listens to the bio-potentials of the person wearing the electrodes, and then to the serial port.

The computer just sees the brain-body interface as the cursor’s control.

At the launch of the new BlackBerry Storm 9500 handset this morning, new Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton of McLaren declared that he preferred the BlackBerry over the iPhone.

At an event set up by Vodafone, who happen to sponsor the McLaren Mercedes Formula One racing team.

As you can see the headline above probably qualifies as one of the most obvious statements of the day. It would have been great if he said Apple’s gadget was better just for amusement’s sake, but that was pretty much unlikely to happen.

What it does do however is mark the start of the Chrismas smartphone wars as the young pretender in the Storm looks to knock Apple off its perch and claim the title as the must-have smartphone.

And it does look like BlackBerry has stolen a march with its new gadget- both businesses and consumers seem equally excited about what it can do -  and IT PRO will be there as always to see how things pan out.

According to security experts, teenage hacking is becoming a real threat when it comes to cyber crime.

Professionals have indicated that forums such as that of Dark Market which was taken down recently, are starting to be populated by teenagers who are looking to swap credit card data as well as the hacking and phishing kits which is used to collect it.

As these teenagers are not as well trained as professionals who may well do this for a living, they are more likely to get caught as well as pick up a criminal record, which will really hurt them if further down the line, they want to have a career in IT.

The first steps are simply to look for cracks and exploits for computer games, for example to run computer games which they haven’t paid for. Although many kids do this, it is nevertheless illegal.

Then it is likely they’ll graduate to more serious crime, such as swapping programs and malicious data, and further on targeting social networking sites with exploits and virus code.

IT PRO talked to Billy Hoffman at RSA Europe, who works in  application security but started out as a hacker working with open source coding. It was the  legal way that hackers could practice with this sort of technology, and for him it later led on to a career on the other side, in working with application software defence.

He said that in the last few years the nature of security has definitely changed, and is there is much more of a financial motivation with many of today’s young would-be hackers.

However unlike working with programming language, young people will often look for the easy money and the easy option, which means they can use ready made kits which allow them to collect credit card data very easily with little technical knowledge.

Teenagers really have to appreciate that stealing this data is the equivalent of stealing somebody’s wallet, taking the pin and using it in a cash machine - and the punishments will suit.

Instead any wannabe hackers should focus their energies in a similar way to Billy Hoffman - legal ways of hacking which may even lead into a lucrative IT career!

New research by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) indicated that three quarters (77 per cent) of adult UK internet users who found pictures of online sex abuse did not know who to report it to.

The survey also said that 71 per cent of those surveyed indicated that online sex abuse images was their biggest concern about the internet.

To change this state of affairs the IWF are trying to publicise its national reporting service and so reduce the amount of illegal images and video which is online.

Chief executive Peter Robbins said that the UK had a very proactive approach to tackling child sexual abuse content online but that the public could do even more.  Organisations were taking part in this campaign to reach millions of people and raise awareness of the ‘Hotline’ service

He said: “Internet consumers should know that if they do stumble across these images then it’s vital to report them to the IWF; we have international partnerships in place to get these websites removed.

“The IWF members and supporters who are united in their efforts to try to eradicate these terrible images on the internet deserve all our thanks.”

It’s possible to report this type of content by going to the website, or going straight to the reporting page.

Around nine out of ten (86 per cent) of broadband users do not understand the limit of their services, according to uSwitch.com.

There are a total of 13.7 million customers who either wrongly believe that they have an unlimited broadband service or do not know what their limit is. In the last year one million consumers nearly reached or exceeded their usgae limits in the last year alone.

The only provider that has launched an unlimited service is Sky which has removed a fair usgae policy, but more than half (56 per cent) or broadband providers are using unlimited in their promotion yet still enforcing limits.

Broadband usage is growing in this country. Applications such as the BBC iPlayer and Channel’s 4oD is gobbling up bandwidth. However users still run the risk of having their services limited, suspended or terminated if they go over usage limits.

Tim Wolfenden said that suppliers shouldn’t class their packages as unlimited if they were not. He said: “With so much reliance on broadband, having the service disconnected could feel to someone as serious as having their electricity cut off.

He added: “As providers aren’t choosing to be fully transparent about this ussue, people need to be savvy when choosing their broadband packages and pay close attention to the small print.”

Strangely the Advertising Standards Authority allows providers to describe services as unlimited even if there is a fair usage cap, as long as it is in the small print. Most consumers aren’t going to do this though.

Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog has beaten Nintendo’s Mario in a poll held at the London Games Festival to win the title of Britain’s favourite video game character.

However it was a really close run thing, with Sonic getting 24 per cent while Mario was very close behind on 21 per cent.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog (24%)

2. Super Mario (21%)

3. Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) (16%)

4. Donkey Kong (11%)

5. Pac Man (10%)

6. Link (The Legend of Zelda) (5%)

7. Max Payne (4%)

8. Pikachu (Pokemon) (3%)

9. Niko Belic (Grand Theft Auto IV) (2%)

10. Blanka (Street Fighter) (1%)

As a kid in the late 80’s, early 90’s it was common for me and some of my school mates to discuss the merits of Sonic and Mario, but really we were talking about Sega VS Nintendo, Master System VS NES, Megadrive VS SNES.

Then it was always Sega that won out because it was always the ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ machine, while Nintendo, while stronger both in the quality of games and hardware, was a little bit geeky. Sega was always a little more ’street’ than Nintendo.

It’s the same with Sonic and Mario - Sonic was just cooler. He was blue, spiky and could turn into a destructive wrecking ball by spinning.

While Mario was a fat, italian plumber with a slightly camp moustache and a crush on a girl named Daisy. He probably could take Sonic in a fight (but only after eating mushrooms).

According to the NSPCC, three out of four children have since images on the ‘internet’ that have disturbed them.

The poll has renewed calls for the computer software manufacturers to make sure they install security which will stop children seeing this explicitly violent or sexual activity.

Policy advisor Zoe Hilton said:  “Children are just a few clicks away from innocently stumbling across upsetting or even dangerous pictures and films such as adult sex scenes, violent dog fights, people self-harming and children being assaulted.”

Guess this isn’t surprising. There have been some occasions where I’ve found images which even I’ve found disturbing, and I’m quite a liberal person.

However my opinion is that the responsibility for this is still very much about the mums and dads. The same with television, where it is the responsibility of parents to make sure they know what they are looking at late at night - computer manufacturers can put all the security controls they want - it needs to be activated by parents and you wouldn’t be surprised if clever kids could bypass the controls anyway.

This means no television or moniors in bedrooms, and for parents to be always conscious to what their kids are looking at - a quick flick through the history of a browser would show you what they’ve been looking at.

My liberal bent always thinks that kids shouldn’t be mollycoddled. My attitude towards videos was that kids should be able to watch scary movies meant for adults - at some point they will find it out anyway.

With the net it’s different as from a few clicks on a Google search it is possible to find material which even I could recognise would screw me up for life if I was younger. However again I say to parents - what are you doing letting little kids surf by themselves anyway?

For teenagers I’m not sure -  Sooner or later they’re going to encounter this sort of stuff or have kids talk about it, and worldly self-aware teens aren’t going to be twisted by stuff which they’ve probably seen before.

Am I too old for gaming? This is a question I’m asking myself now.

First of all - a brief view of my gaming history

I used to be really really into my video games. My first memory was of a Sinclair Spectrum, playing games like Chaos and trying to create text-based games with BASIC programming language. I enjoyed it, but very quickly the Spectrum became out of date and it became the consoles which I loved to use.

I had the original NES - I also had the original FAMICOM, which I had brought back from Thailand to play with. Oh the days of chunky cartridges. Like many others of my age it was all about Mario - One, two and three - you don’t make them like this anymore. When I a kid there was also the arguments between whether Sega or Nintendo was the best console to play with. I was always a Nintendo boy but I remember the schoolyard arguments about whether Mario or Sonic was better.

Then the days of the SNES. Brilliant machine that was. Streetfighter 2 - I remember days and weeks trying to master the game but I could never work out how to do ‘dragon punches’ and ‘fireballs’ properly and so I figured then that the fighting game wasn’t my thing.

The Playstation soon came to dominate my game playing. Resident Evil 2 was great, but the one game I remember was Final Fantasy 7 - I spent my GCSE exam week playing it and although it probably affected my grades I didn’t care - I finished it and still have fond memories of the experience.

Then after the Playstation 2 which was also a time of very hard game playing it kinda stopped. I started to use my PC for games -Baldurs Gate 2 was a particular favourite but then after that university came and I stopped feeling the need to play -maybe because drink, women and football became more interesting.

Now

The most recent games were the online role playing ones like World of Warcraft. Now this is an absolutely brilliant game and I loved being caught up with the world that existed for me inside of it.

However I have no time for them any more. Role playing games and WOW just dominate far too much of your time. To get a really good session you need to have a couple of hours playing, and if you’re not careful a whole night can be gone and I can still be playing.

Can’t do this anymore. Responsibilities and stuff I have to do and now its just not in my mind anymore to play these games.

It’s sad … but it looks like I’m growing up!

Shame, my level 50 warrior is probably still out there frozen in time and waiting for me to play him again earning experience and using his double headed axe.

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