“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." - Morpheus

Red has always been the color of danger. In UO when you became a PK you went Red. When you choose a server that is based on PvP it is called a red server. If you choose a PvE server it is a blue server. Which do you choose when given the choice? To some it’s an easy choice. To some it’s a labor or epic proportions to decide if it’s worth it. Is it worth the time investment? Is it all that it promises to be? Will the time put in equal fun?

Chaos

n 1: a state of extreme confusion and disorder [syn: pandemonium, bedlam, topsy-turvydom, topsy-turvyness] 2: the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos 3: (Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universe [syn: Chaos] 4: (physics) a dynamical system that is extremely sensitive to its initial conditions

Into all things in life there is a sense of chaos that permeates the edges of all that we do. Most sane human beings strive to create order from chaos. It is our natural state to make sense of things, to organize, to catalogue and to set things right. This sense of putting things in order has manifested itself in the form of “Instancing” when we discuss MMOs. Where once we were at risk of an individual or even a group of individuals mucking up a perfectly good dragon pull, we now have the safety net that the only screw-ups bound to happen will come from one of our own. Rejoice all ye who once lamented the lag and chaos that used to make your heart race and your blood pressure skyrocket!

A recent topic of heated debate all over the MMORPG community is the technological advance (or philosophical leap backwards, to some people) of “instancing.” For anyone not yet acquainted with the concept, instancing is the practice of allocating a piece of the game world that generates a copy of itself for each individual or group that enters. The best examples are in games like Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, where everyone exists in a shared environment until they pass through a designated gate (as in WoW), after which they are transferred to a carbon copy of a specific dungeon that they are free to explore and conquer without any interference or interruption. Regardless of how long they spend in the dungeon, anyone else that enters that same gate is sent off to a different, private copy of the same area.