Through the perseverence of Russ Burnham, memebers and geuest of the Southern California Local network were treated to an excelelnt tour of Blizzard Entertainment. Having been founded in the early 1990's Blizzard Entertainment is best known for it's fantasy genre of games, with Warcraft: orcs vs Humans becoming it's first breakthorugh hit, followed by the massively multi-player online role-playing game World of Warcraft, currently in its fifth expansion.



At the center of their campus they have an Orc Statue surrounded on the eight sides by their eight core values, starting with Gameplay First, and including Play Nice Play Fair and Think Globally.



From the talk we learned that Blizzard takes it's values, and care for their employees seriously, with a number of Blizzard themed gifts such as sword, sheilds, crowns and so forth for numbers of years of service. The Play Nice Play Fair is backed up with various tools to help detect cheating and to determine if changes that have been made to the game give a character too much power, allowing appropriate corrective action to be taken immediately. We were also treated to an insight as to how the global nature of their games requires a 24/7 network operations center to watch for weather and other events that might impact gameplay and the need to ensure that in some countries online games cannot be played after midnight to help make sure children get enough sleep before the next schoolday.



All in all a fascinating visit, and thank you to everybody who made it happen.