One of the biggest phonemena of recent years has been the rise of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, a fantasy action game that you play in a virtual world with thousands of other players.

Online gaming's been around for a long time, of course, but World of Warcraft (or WoW) is hugely popular, with millions of players and a vast world to explore. So, this article will focus on the gameplay of WoW, especially since most other MMOs emulate it anyway.

With WoW, you must buy a boxed copy of the game (at a physical retail store or an online retailer like Amazon.com). When you install the game and run it, you create a character, choosing from many fantasy races, traits, and classes (e.g., professions).

In the game, you're given quests to complete--kill a troublesome monster, for example. When you complete the quest, you'll get experience points and gold, which will increase your power and let you buy better weapons and armor. With enough experience points, you'll level up, which makes your character more powerful. There are a total of 70 levels for your character.

But once you hit level 70 (and even before that), you can join a guild and participate in raids. A raid is a special monster-killing quest that requires the coordination of many players (sometimes dozens of them). The monsters are very difficult and must be faced with a variety of player types. The members of your guild can quickly become friends as you complete quests.

And once you feel you've done everything you can with that character, you can create a new one and play the game as a different class (a monk instead of a warrior, for example).

The game accomplishes raids through instancing. Once your group enters a particular location to fight a "boss" monster, your fight is split off from the rest of the world and occurs separately. So, even if others wander into the same area, they won't be able to interfere with your fight.

WoW costs between $30 and $40 online, plus $15 per month.

Of course, WoW isn't the only MMO. Other popular online games include:

• EVE Online, a science fiction game
• EverQuest, the first widely popular MMO
• Lineage, very popular overseas
• Second Life, more of a social environment to explore than a game
• Ultima Online, the first fantasy MMO, based on the Ultima computer games