The Internet offers special methods of communication. Traditionally, people talked with just one person face-to-face or on the phone, or to groups of people at parties or at school. On the other hand, only the Internet makes it possible to communicate with a large variety of different people sitting in different rooms all over the world. One example of this is the growing popularity of massive multiplayer online role-playing games,
commonly called MMORPGs. ln these online games, each player chooses
a character and interacts with other players’ characters. There can be 10
other players, or 50 or 100 or 1,000. Players can join and leave the game
whenever they want to, and the next time they join the game, it will have changed depending on what other players did in that time. With traditional
face-to-face friends, this would never be possible. You couldn’t have players in South Korea, China, Australia, Germany, Canada, and other countriesall playing the same game at the same time and talking to each other.