The mini-games themselves were pretty much unrelated, other than that you were either a slightly drunken dwarf throwing axes, or playing a -like strategy game. But they were really just meant to attract people to a location so we could talk to them about Mines of Moria. We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hours of gameplay logged, so that was really cool.

I think it was like a baby step. Not really related, but a baby step in our overall mentality, which you're going to see a lot of in the next year. The web is really another platform, and it's an extension of the game environment. The mini-games were just that, but it was an attempt to start to understand how the web platform and our in-game immersive platform relate to each other.

Since that time, we've built an entire technical layer between our game databases and the web. So you're going to be seeing some really interesting stuff, social networking kinds of things coming out, surrounding our games, starting with LotRO, where you'll be able to do a lot of the things that people have gotten used to doing. Especially more mainstream people with and places like that. Around the game, around your character, around your actual player account, and tying those things together so it's seamless. That was a first little toe in the water for us with those mini-games, but now we view it as a part of the entire game environment we're building.