I wonder whatever happened to the actress who played the mom in ET?

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Next Island for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

When I was a kid, I loved Dungeons & Dragons.

Okay, when I was a teenager… late teens, I loved Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games – all the way from grade school through early high school, I had D&D and others (a James Bond game, a Superheroes game, things like that) and I’d get together with friends to play them; it was almost exactly like that ET opening scene with the mom that was kind of hot only we never had pizza delivered and no aliens crash-landed near our house.  But other than that, it was exactly like the movie, right down to that mysterious van that kept driving by.

I wonder whatever happened to that guy?

Anyway, I got away from roleplaying games because they took a lot of time to set up and it was hard to get friends together, and who had the time for that in college? There was drinking to be done. Oh, and studying.

But now, I might be able to get back into roleplaying – no, not that way, weirdo—with “Next Island,” and, as you’d guess with anything that gets my interest these days, I might also make some money at it.

Next Island is this new free-to-play online game , an MMO role-playing adventure game that just opened to the public. I only just heard about it and am really new to it so far but it sounds awesome.

The basic storyline is this: A bunch of scientists found an island dedicated to scientific progress, and have discovered a way to travel in time, including to ancient Greece.  And now YOU join, taking part in what looks to be the kind of roleplaying game that goes beyond hack-em-ups and boring SIMS-suburbia to something that’s really fun and engaging.

On Next Island, you can set yourself up in an occupation, and explore the island and Ancient Greece, and interact with people to solve puzzles and have adventures, and of course have the social aspect of interactive games like this – it’s kind of like Facebook only with avatars and time travel, so it’s about a billion times more fun than Facebook – and all the while, you can earn real money for time spent playing the game.  There’s a feature that turns what you do and time spent in the game into real money, so the longer you play, the more fun the game is AND  you’re getting paid.

So you can tell your boss that you actually ARE being productive, and then go to Ancient Greece.  Works for me.

The really great thing about these MMOs is that it allows the visuals to help out my imagination – so I can flesh out the pictures I create – and also someone else is doing all the work to create the adventure.  I don’t have to get out my graph paper, twenty-sided dice, and books to find out how many ‘hit points’ I have.  I just create a character and get going, working and exploring and adventuring.

I plan on checking it out more; you should go sign up and locate me – but by then I expect to be an expert in Time Travel, which I plan to first use and find out what that guy in the van was up to.