The thing is, there's people that doesn't seem to do anything else besides playing games. Just over 2 weeks ago I picked up MGS3 Subsistence, and there's this guy in the online community (snake something... don't remember), who's already got 300+ hours of online play! I mean, WTF!!. That game was released in mid march, it has been on the marked for just over a month, and there's people who has already played it online for more than 300 hours? That's roughly 10 hours a day!! Get a life people!!... I must admit the damn game is extremely addictive, like nothing I've seen before, but there are limits to everything. I have 12 (maybe a little more) hours of online play, and seems like in spite of this insane people I hadn't been left too far behind, 'cause I've gotten pretty good, specially with the SVD. But what Yuko said in her post on the same matter is true. Online gaming is more of a who's-got-the-largest-penis thing, so casual online players just looking for some clean family fun will most likely get "ownd" all the time.

What I think is that online gaming (in competitive games like racing, fighting, fps's and so on) is just replacing what arcades used to be some time ago. Nobody goes to the arcades to prove who's the best Street Fighter player anymore, at least no significant amount of people. Today people compete online. I remember when I was 13, struggling to try to learn how to play King of Fighters '95. It was almost impossible because everytime I found the goddamn machine alone and put a token in it, some gaming bully would come and kick my ass without mercy just to prove he was good and I sucked. It wasn't until I got my hands on the imported Playstation version of the game that I could learn how to play profficiently. Then I returned to the arcades and kicked some butts back :twisted:

In that sense, online gaming has expanded the posibilities of the arcades to never imagined dimensions, since now you can take on people all over the world, not only the same locals you see everyday -just that you cannot see for real if they're really that good or just found a way to cheat-. But I agree that developers should use the advantages given by new technology to create an online gaming environment free of any kind of elitism, since the majority of gamers that go online, or at least try to until they're obliterated, are not there to inflate their ego. Let's see what Sony does with their Playstation Online Platform.