raph-koster posts

Raph Koster knows a thing or three about gaming. Specifically, online virtual words. He should since he was the lead designer for Ultima Online, the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies, and is the founder and president of Areae, where he's working on a platform for online games called Metaplace.

All that aside, Koster tallied up some very interesting comparative numbers on his personal blog today. With all the hullabaloo about how gaming is taking over Hollywood, how people want interactive entertainment instead of passively sitting in front of a boob tube and soaking up reality TV... one has to ask: what are the real numbers? After Sulake's announcement today that their virtual world Habbo hit the 100 million avatar mark, what does that really mean? Koster gave us some numbers:

• There are 20,000,000 Habbo users worldwide
• 28,800,000 viewers watched the #1 show on US television (sadly, that was American Idol)
• 2.4 million viewers watched the 150th ranked show (Gossip Girl)
• North American World of Warcraft users total 2.5 million
• 1.4 billion movie tickets were sold in the US in one year

That last one is billions... with a "b." And who said video games were taking over Hollywood again? There are several more intriguing numerations on his list so be sure to check it out. Thanks to Raph we now have a better understanding of where gaming ranks within the American entertainment landscape.

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.