World of Warcraft maker Blizzard Entertainment has donated $1.1 million to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The contribution came about as a result of a special WOW-initiative that allowed players to purchase a special in-game pet, the Pandaren Monk (pictured). The donation represents 50.0 percent of the sales of the pet in November and December of last year.

Blizzard made the donation yesterday at its headquarters in Irvine, California and also invited 15 Make-A-Wish kids to attend, who were entertained by the WOW-development team and offered a look behind the scenes of the game.

David Williams, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America president and chief executive officer stated, “Thanks to Blizzard Entertainment and World of Warcraft players around the world, we will be able to grant the heartfelt wishes of even more courageous children with life-threatening medical conditions.”

World of Warcraft maker Activision Blizzard is the latest target of a lawsuit by serial suer (or professional plaintiff) Erik Estavillo.

Filed this morning in the Civil Division of the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara, the civil complaint charges Activision Blizzard with “deceitful” business practices, as it “continues to maintain a harmful virtual environment to many of its customers by forcing them to follow the game’s sneaky and deceitful practices.”

Among Estavillo’s claims is that WOW is designed for a gamer “to walk or run at a calculated slow pace, resulting in the player taking longer to get where he or she needs to go in the game.” This slow pace, says the plaintiff, leads to a longer time needed to finish game play or quests, in turn leading to more subscription revenue for Activision Blizzard.

Estavillo also complains that faster transportation is not available until a player levels up accordingly, or purchases an expansion pack.

The plaintiff then likens his health problems (OCD, Agoraphobia, Panic Disorder, major depression and Crohn’s Disease) to the afflictions that ailed the late EverQuest gamer Shawn Woolley, who took his own life on Thanksgiving morning in 2001.  Estavillo stated that he “doesn’t want to end up like Shawn did as he [Estavillo] relies on videogames heavily for the little ongoing happiness he can achieve in this life.”

Estavillo subpoenaed Depeche Mode founder Martin Lee Gore and actress Winona Ryder to provide testimony on his behalf regarding the subject of alienation.

Gore was subpoenaed because “he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated as can be seen in the songs he writes,” and Ryder because of her and Estavillo’s common interest in the J.D. Salinger book The Catcher in the Rye. Ryder would be able to, “explain the significance of alienation in Catcher in the Rye and will also testify to how alienation in the book can tie to alienation in real live/video games such as World of Warcraft.”

Estavillo is seeking punitive damages of $1.0 million and a court order that WOW implement changes that address the issues of his complaint.

Other lawsuits filed by Estavillo include one against Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), following a banning from the PlayStation Network, and a recent suit that targeted Microsoft and Nintendo—the former over an Xbox 360 red ring of death and the latter over a firmware update that disabled his Homebrew Channel.

Don't invite Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica and Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick to the same party.

Yesterday, Kuchera penned a surprisingly personal criticism of the long-time CEO, including a photo of Kotick with devil's horns added (left). In the column, Kuchera refers to Kotick as "a carpetbagger," "the devil," "brazen," and possessed of a "cash lust."

At issue seems to be Kuchera's feeling that Kotick is all about the Benjamins, not the games:

That's why I find Bobby Kotick so distasteful—the man is a carpetbagger... usually, when you put the devil in charge, you have the good graces to at least keep a smooth-talking demon or two around to deal with the press. With Kotick, he's very brazen about his need to squeeze every last dollar he can out of every franchise under the Activision Blizzard label. He wants to exploit his games. He wants to make sure he has a sequel every year, and don't forget the Wii and DS ports. Why have one StarCraft game if you can have three?...

Kotick doesn't play his games, and it shows. He has a tin ear when it comes to speaking to investors or the press. This is a guy who looks at the balance sheets of World of Warcraft and wants more, more, more... and it's doubtful he even knows the name of Azeroth. Under his control, Activision Blizzard has started to look and feel like the Shire at the end of the Lord of the Rings (and by that, I mean the books' vision)...

World of Warcraft may look like it will go on forever, but the only thing greater than the loyalty of those players is Kotick's cash-lust. The only question is if the two will ever collide...

Whatever one might think of the man, Kotick clearly has business acumen. He was runner-up as Marketwatch's CEO of the Year for 2008 and is currently featured on the cover of Forbes. In fact, the business mag's profile of Kotick comes in for a mention by Kuchera. Some gamers are upset by a line penned by writer Peter Beller and not attributed to the Activision Blizzard CEO:

EA also teamed with MTV to sell Rock Band, a shameless knockoff of Guitar Hero that added drums, bass and a microphone to the world of make-believe rock stars.

Marketwatch has named Activision's Bobby Kotick as one of four runners-up for its 2008 CEO of the Year award.

The respected financial website offers effusive praise for Kotick, along with an amusing tale of how the Activision-Blizzard merger got done:

When [Blizzard CEO] Mike Morhaime first met Kotick, he was looking for a low-key setting to avoid sparking the sort of chatter that often emerges when high-profile business leaders meet in public. Morhaime... chose a steakhouse near his company's Irvine, Calif., headquarters. But he ended up booking a large banquet room by mistake, leaving the two alone and rather conspicuous for the nearly four hours during which they contemplated the potential of a merger creating a new leader in the video-game business...

 

"We wanted to keep it low-key, which was pretty hard to do in this huge room with just the two of us there," Morhaime recalled with a laugh.

Marketwatch notes that Kotick has gamer roots, spending his college days playing text adventure Mystery House as well as arcade classic Defender. Kotick told Marketwatch that he gave up gaming due to an "addictive personality."

The most interesting part of the story, however, is how Kotick came to acquire Activision - and how cheaply:

Kotick and partner Brian Kelly bought a small company that handled licensing for Nintendo's game characters... But Kotick had his eye on making games, so Nintendo  pointed him to Activision, which had made the popular game "Pitfall" for Atari but had since changed its name to Mediagenic in an effort to expand into other areas of software development.

 

Its move ultimately failed, landing Mediagenic in bankruptcy. Kotick and Kelly bought the company in 1990 for less than $500,000...

Swedish News service The Local reports that a 15-year-old gamer from western Sweden went into convulsions on Sunday after a 24-hour WoW binge.

According to the report the boy and some friends were playing the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The 15-year-old's father described the scene:

They played all day and all night. Maybe they got a few hours of sleep. They ate a little food and breakfast at their computers. [When the boy went into convulsions] we were terrified and called rescue services...

Doctors said that sleep deprivation and lack of food likely contributed to the collapse of the boy, who is expected to recover fully.

Not unexpectedly, the mainstream press is linking the episode to game addiction. Britain's The Times quotes child psychiatrist Dr. Richard Graham: 

Some of my clients will discuss playing games for 14 to 16 hours a day at times without breaks and for those the consequences are potentially very severe. The problem with World of Warcraft is the degree it can impact and create a socially withdrawn figure who may be connecting with people in the game and is largely dropping out of education, social opportunities.

 

One young man described vividly to me a sense that having achieved very high success in the game, when he switched off he felt downgraded.

Like millions of other WoW fans, I eagerly awaited last week's release of the Wrath of the Lich King WoW expansion. But this one should perhaps be named Wrath of the Server Queue, instead. Players attempting to log on at the most popular times may find themselves queued for up to two hours.

On the Mal'Ganis server, this has happened to me several times already, and Lich King has been out for less than a week. Judging from posts on the official WoW forum, many other players are frustrated by this turn of events as well. The queues are particularly annoying given that, in addition to the expansion's $39.99 price tag, gamers are paying a $15 per month subscription fee for their accounts.

Most Lich King buyers certainly expected to play, not wait in line, for their money.

The release of the much-anticipated WoW expansion has undoubtedly led to the reactivation of numerous dormant WoW accounts (like mine), but Blizzard needs to adapt to the influx and make adequate server provisions. Yes, they have offered some limited options to transfer one's character to a less populated server for free (normally this service costs $25), but it's not enough to deal with the crush of would-be adventurers.

Blizzard is raking in the greenbacks, as they deserve to for fine products like WoW and Lich King. But consumers deserve to play when they want.

Blizzard needs to fix this.