MMORPG: How a Computer Game Becomes Deadly Serious Read Online Free PDF Page B

text you saw? Were there any names?”
    Robert concentrated hard, going back in his mind to that afternoon. After a few seconds it came to him. “I think someone was calling him, waiting for a response. Repeating his name, several times. It was Drimm, or Grimm, or something similar.”
    “You mean ‘Grimm’ like the author of the fairy tales?”
    “Yes, exactly. It was with a double m at the end, I’m sure about that. And I think it was Drimm, not Grimm.”
    “That gives us something to work with. Do you have a computer with Internet here?”
    “Of course!” He jumped off the desk and turned around to open his laptop. It was on standby, so it quickly whirred to life. He logged on and pushed it over to her. She seated herself in his desk chair and opened the Internet browser.
    “We’re going to see if we can find him.” She typed in a web address and whistled as a website came up immediately. “This is impressive. You have a fast Internet connection. At my place, the Armory is always slow.”
    Robert was studying the page. It was rather dark, with a World of Warcraft logo on top. “What is this?” he asked curiously.
    “This is the European section of The Armory. It’s an online database with all the characters that exist in WoW. If you reckon that over twelve million people play the game, this is a gigantic database. Most people have several characters, so it probably contains over fifty million profiles. Look, I’ll show you.”
    She typed in ‘Drimm’ and hit enter. After a second, a list about thirty long came up. Robert surmised that these were all the characters with the name Drimm.
    “It looks like this is a fairly common name in WoW. Myself, I’ve never heard of it. Now let’s have a look at what we’ve got.”
    She studied the list for a few seconds and smiled. “This is easy,” she said.
    Robert didn’t understand a thing of what she was looking for. “Could you please explain what you’re doing? What does it mean?”
    “Right, I’ll try to explain it. First of all, you told me the character you saw was flying. That means that it has to be at least level sixty.”
    “Why?”
    Because only at level sixty can a character obtain the flying skill. You said that the character you saw was riding a dragon. Well, those can only be acquired by characters who are at the maximum level of eighty. Ergo: the Drimm we’re looking for is level eighty.”
    This was easy. Robert nodded his understanding. She continued, as if she was educating him. “Now, you can see that only four characters on the list are level eighty, so our target is one of them. Two are Alliance and two are Horde.”
    Seeing his incomprehension, she explained, “Every character in WoW is a member of either one of two different factions. They’re called the Alliance and the Horde. They’re opposed to each other.
    She suddenly pointed at the screen. “We don’t need to guess anymore. The giveaway is in the guild name. Look at that!”
    Robert bent over to see what she was pointing at. “The Hammer of Grimstone,” he read aloud. “That’s different!”
    “Sure, but it’s a hammer. Don’t forget, out of a possible fifty million characters, we’ve pinpointed it to only four remaining possibilities. I put my money on the one with the hammer in the guild name.”
    “You may be right. Besides, I know nothing about this game!”
    Absentmindedly, she patted his hand. “No worries, I know enough. Now let’s see if we can find out a bit more.”
    She typed a new web address and another website came up. “This is Wowhead,” she explained. “It’s one of the few Internet sites that contains all the information on WoW you might ever need. It’s my personal favorite, I use it all the time. You can look up anything you can think of.”
    “And what are we looking for?”
    “We’re checking the significance of the word Grimstone,” she answered, typing the word in a box at the same time and hitting Enter. After a few