Imagine, you're piloting your space ship through the galaxy, searching for fame and fortune. You're in the process of working a trade route, transporting ore from a mining colony to a heavily industrialized planet to sell it at a massive fortune. You're gliding through the star system when your sensors select up something.

Pirates close in on you, and you fire off a few shots to keep them at bay. One of them challenges you, "Hand over your cargo or die." You consider bargaining with them, but realize it's no use. You fire off a missile salvo at the nearest pirate, and he disintegrates into dust. The other two pirates open fire, weakening your shields as you make a run for the planet. You duck into its protection just as your shields dissolve, narrowly escaping death and heading towards the biggest sale of your life.

Eve Online is one of various MMORPGs on the internet. An MMORPG is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. A MMORPG like Eve Online is different from most computer games in that in a regular computer game you are the only human player, all of the other characters you interact with are just computerized "bots."

However, in MMORPGs you're interacting with other people who populate the world of the game. There are some characters that are simply part of the game, usually called NPCs (Non Player Characters), but for the most part you're interacting with other people. The pirates in the Eve Online example are other people, sometimes on other parts of the world, connected through the Eve Online server. When you receive messages, there is someone sending them on the other end.

Although MMORPGs have been around for a long time (Everquest was one of the most popular of all time), they're becoming increasingly more popular. Thought he earliest MMORPGs were almost all fantasy based games full of wizards and dragons and warriors, many MMORPGs have branched out. For example, Eve Online is a futuristic, space-based combat and trading game, while The Sims Online is based on the popular Sims living and building game engine. Various people are drawn to MMORPGs since they allow them to play an interesting computer game which allows them to interact with other people, keeping the gamer's interest and avoiding the predictability that some games can lapse into. Eve Online and other games like it function much like small worlds with their own politics, wars, leaders, followers, crooks, and heroes, making the fantasy worlds that much closer to reality.