I am a self-confessed computer game player. Some may go so far to say that I am a nerd but after watching a documentary called “Gamer Revolution” (cheers to Rat Warne for the heads up) last night I can safely say I am, but an amateur.

Here are a couple of things that are now commonplace in the online gaming community

Purchase, with real money, online items, accessaries or property to use on line in game play. Not only can you buy these thing but you can create them to sell to others; enter real nerd.

An example of this is some American bloke has paid nerd designers US $100,000.00 to build a space station in a game for him. His plan is to on-sell apartments, shops and other items too people who want to visit or live on his space station. To pay for this he put a 2nd mortgage on his home. Hello, hall of fame?

Virtual Sex
Not that I am surprised about this one but things appear to have come a long way since the good old Leisure Suite Larry days. Its mainly the graphics that can now be achieved…. Wild, wild stuff. Its happy days for the next prepubescent generation coming through, ‘things’ have never been easier. I believe it is time Leisure Suite Larry made a comeback however.

Level Jumping
This one was a total unknown to me. You can buy an online game and instead of playing the game yourself to get to the higher ‘ranks’ in the game, you can employ a company to play the game for you to achieve an agreed upon level. Say you are level 20 and you want to be level 40 because you want to have access to the ‘delorian code’ only available to level 40 players. Instead of playing the necessary 160 hours to achieve that level, you can ask ‘Level Jumpers R Us’ to get your character there for you. ‘Level Jumpers R Us’ inturn have a sweat shop in Romania where some ‘worker’ or shifts of ‘workers’ will play your character non stop 24/7 until you can cast the ‘delorian code’ on those lowly dogs stuck at level 20.