MMOs:Like em' or not?

[Mithrandir]

Someone finally added two new thoughts, in combined form, to this very tired, very old debate.  You win, Mith.  So, do you want your prize in crumbs, or in a whole piece of cake?  :D

Occhi
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I thought the thread had gotten pretty stale, so I decided to give it a nudge in the right direction!

Is it? How about chess/checkers/go/shogi/othello. Playing cards. Shooting hoops. Stargazing. Rollerblading/skateboarding. Walking/jogging/biking. Swimming at the town pool. Casual tennis. Reading books from the library. Watching television. Bumping tunes on the boombox, or listening to the ball game. Sketching or writing. Frisbee. Jigsaw puzzles. Singing or dancing. Composing a symphony. Surfing the internet. Programming.

I have yet to meet anyone who plays board games for any other reason than to kill a random hour or two, so I don't know if they can really be qualified as hobbies that one would put the same number of hours into as a video game, sport, etc. The expense of playing cards is also quite dependent on how good you are at playing :)

Nonetheless, I stated that it was "one of the cheapest" not *the* cheapest. If you make a raquet yourself, use tennis balls from the lost-and-found, and play on a public court of course it's going to be cheaper. But if you want to be any good at said sport, you're going to need to sink money into it for lessons, team fees, court fees, etc. Same for many of those you listed above.

For every "stargazing" (with or without a decent telescope?) though, there's playing golf, or playing hockey, or doing drugs, or collecting baseball cards, or collecting comics, and so on and so on and so on.

Playing any non-subscription PC game for longer than 2 months.

Let's take a deeper look at actual time investment verse cost. Assuming $12/month subscription fee, one $30 expansion, a one-time $50 box fee, and a rather low assumption of an average of 2 hours played per night for a year and you're paying about 30 cents an hour.

Most games now-a-days seem to aim for ~30 hours of gameplay, but let's be generous and say that it takes you 60 hours to play through and you play the game twice. With a $50 box price, you're getting about 42 cents an hour - 140% of the price of the MMO... and the MMO lasted longer.