lazysupper

This is likely the nerdiest post I’ve written since I tried to (rather unscientifically) figure out how long it would take me to count to one billion. Perhaps it’s nerdier.

I saw a headline today that Blizzard has launched the beta for Starcraft 2, a sequel 12 years after the original (which incidentally consumed the second half of my 1998). After cautiously skimming the article like a former alcoholic fast-walking past a discount liquor store, I thought about the billion dollars that World of Warcraft (the industry’s #1 video game) generates in revenue each year. Most of that money primarily comes from the 11.5 million or so people who pay Blizzard a monthly subscription fee to run around in their virtual world “undertaking grand quests and heroic exploits in a land of fantastic adventure.”

That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of people. And that led to a curiosity about the average time a gamer plays WoW each week. New World Notes posted some Nielsen ratings from May 2009 indicating an average of 653 minutes per week – or about 11 hours. That doesn’t seem so outrageous given that people (North Americans) spend on average anywhere from 22 to 28 hours per week watching television.

But TV aside, to look at these World of Warcraft numbers another way, 11.5 million people playing on average 653 minutes per week tallies up to 7,509,500,000 (or roughly 7.5 billion) minutes. Every week. That’s 125,158,333 hours or about 5,214,930 days. Those 5.2 million days are equal to a total of 14,287.481 years. Therefore, humankind spends well over 14 thousand years playing World of Warcraft each week. All together, that’s about 742,456 years every year.

In a single year, enough man hours of World of Warcraft are played to reach back to the Middle Pleistocene. Before Neanderthals walked the earth. A few weeks before the Stone Age. Back in the homo erectus days and the emergence of the very first hunter-gatherer societies. When “man” was just getting the hang of controlling fire, let alone making it.

Think of all the human advancements (in medicine, technology, etc.) we’ve achieved since we created… fire.

(I guess all those advancements led to people being able to play massively multiplayer video games over fiber optic lines with people scattered all over the world. Or in some cases all crammed into the same living room…)

Tagged as: Fun, games, society, tech

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