No discussion of UO ever happens without people arguing about PvP, but that's not what this post is about or what one should take from UO when comparing it to WoW and other contemporary games.

The thing that made UO way ahead of its time was personalization. You could wear whatever you wanted, color it however you wanted, and surround yourself with personalized items. People made gold from selling their creations. There's a lot of talk about casuals and how you can't have a UO-like game succeed because casual players won't like it. That's absurd. You don't think all those gamer girls (and most gamers in general) want to dress up their internet dolls? WoW is a very fun game but it's depressing how it not only does not support personalization, it seems to actively resist it. Everyone looks the same in WoW - and maybe that's largely due to technology limitations, but it's still something that they should attempt to address.

Second Life is an awful cesspool of porn and spam, but the only activity that is creative, flourishing, and profitable is the selling of player-designed clothes and other customization for avatars. Personalization is something people want in MMOs, and UO had a ton of it 15 years ago. Not that Blizzard really needs any help digger deeper into the player's psyche, but if they wanted to hook even more casuals, that could certainly learn from UO.

Many of us that read Slashdot are used to the idea that the internet provides anonymity and that we can keep our "real lives" separate and private from what we do online. Perhaps this comes from the fact that the internet, for us, began as minor and very much separate part of our everyday lives. But things have changed. The internet is now pervasive. Today many people, young people especially, do not recognize a separation between the internet and real life because there is no separation.

My point is that people are willing to give up their privacy online because they are used to doing so in "real life." Talking to strangers, telling people your name, letting people see what you look like are all part of being social. Not everyone understands why this should be different online, especially since the opportunities to be social online are often more abundant. Are there dangers from this? Of course there are. Are they different and new (and OMG SCARY!) compared to the dangers of being social offline? Yes, but that doesn't mean they are worse. It just means that people need a different skillset to deal with the dangers.

Privacy is important, but so is being social. Just because something done voluntarily erodes privacy, it isn't necessarily bad.