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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/a...c9f851b9&ex=1298696400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

NYT article about the DDO launch this week. Funny quotes from some PnP players.

"My youngest son — he's 19 — even he stays up until 4 or 5 in the morning many times at the computer playing games like World of Warcraft," Mr. Gygax said recently, referring to one of the world's most successful online games, which could take in $1 billion in revenue this year. "The analogy I make is that pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games."

"The video games are just so impersonal," said Louis Pirozzi, 38, of Jersey City, as he and five friends gathered around a table and prepared to play a D&D module called "Time's Tide on Bright Sands," an adventure into the desert wasteland controlled by a character named Rary the Traitor. "Role-playing games are about interacting with other players, other real people, not about interacting with a computer."

Mr. Pirozzi added: "Like in one campaign I was running, the players were fighting and I threw the 'South Park' kids into the fight and I had stats for them and everything. You can't have that kind of flexibility in a computer game."

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While players in most online games communicate by typing, Turbine has tried to enhance the in-person feel of D&D Online by building voice-chat software into the game so players can speak with one another using a microphone plugged into their computer. And while most video games try to adopt a cinematic mode of storytelling, D&D Online plainly reminds users that they are playing a computer approximation of a pen-and-paper game. During combat, an icon of a spinning 20-sided die appears in a corner of the screen, just as modern slot machines still show spinning reels even though a microchip has already decided if you've won the jackpot.

Keith Baker, a novelist in Colorado, who created the imaginary world of Eberron, where D&D Online is set, said that online gaming could provide a bonding experience for far-flung friends who might not just pick up the phone to chat.

"What am I going to do, call my friends and just talk for four hours?" Mr. Baker said. "That's not going to happen. But if I have my friend in Austin and my friend in Los Angeles and we can get together online to go defeat the mummy king, it gives us something to do. And we can talk about other stuff while we're doing it, but it gives us a shared activity. Whether it's pen-and-paper or online, playing together with friends is what Dungeons & Dragons is all about."