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Breakfast Topic: Primetime WoW

First the Toyota ad, then Judge Judy and How I Met Your Mother. Lately, WoW has been appearing all over the place. It's been popular before, of course (we've seen the Office Space commercial, and of course the South Park episode), but World of Warcraft has been popping up all over pop culture lately, and I've been wondering: it's been showing up in primetime, but has World of Warcraft hit its prime?

It's been the top online roleplaying game for quite a while now, and The Burning Crusade was actually released as the biggest PC game sequel ever. But as popular as videogames are, they're still a niche market in the terms of popular culture. Every gamer may know what Warcraft is, but that doesn't mean your parents or grandparents do (unless they play, but that's another Breakfast Topic).

Until now. Is World of Warcraft finally breaking out of the gamer barrier and moving into the mainstream? There are more WoW players in America than farmers, and while I was kind of joking about seeing realm outage news on the local TV station, maybe it really will happen-- the game's already appeared on the sitcoms before the news. Are all these mentions just a coincidence, or has WoW finally hit its mainstream tipping point?