On Terranova, Matt Mihaly has, in a sentence, summed up my opinion on EQ2’s new /pizza command.

This is such a non-story. “Game lets you bring up external web browser.” Exciting stuff.

Indeed. The most shocking part of the story is that some people think it’s a shocking story, that a /pizza command will somehow disrupt the feel of the game (despite the fact that, if you never type it, you’ll never even notice the functionality exists).

What this feature does is acknowledge what many players already know, and that is that they don’t tend to stay locked inside the ‘magic circle’ of the game. They tend to do other things: talk on ICQ, surf the web, check their mail, buy stuff on Amazon by paging out. The more grindalicious your game is, the more they HAVE to in order to have any semblance of a life.