Last week, my wife asked me if I would be interested in playing the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft again. I spent a few days thinking about it before going out to spend $60 on the games, and signing up for two recurring monthly plans for a total of $30.

Not very frugal, you might say. However, I would have to disagree. We started playing this game back in 2005. This was during an especially frugal time for us, as I was in graduate school and my wife was only working part-time. Yet we paid $30 a month to play a game. Why? Because it proved to be one of the most entertaining, cheapest forms of entertainment I have ever used.

In fact, after having started playing again last week, I have come close to deciding to return the Xbox 360 I bought (at a $300 discount, thanks to gift cards) which would return $500 to me, albeit $300 of that in Best Buy gift cards.

Here’s something for you: A video game costs about $50 and entertains me for two weeks straight, and then a bit on and off after that. World of Warcraft entertains me, well, forever. Or I could go and spend $10 on a movie for two hours of entertainment, or instead get an equivalent of three weeks entertainment from Warcraft.

Over time, the monthly costs due tend to add up. As we’ve been playing since January 2005, we have spent about $800 on the game, including the initial costs. Of course, it’s only fair to balance that against the $1000 I received from auctioning one of our characters on eBay.

In total, I played the game for close to 2000 hours over the past few years. My portion of the game cost $400. That works out to $0.20/hr cost for the game. Pretty reasonable if you ask me!

Of course, then there’s the whole issue of the inherent addictive nature of the game, and the fact that maybe I should see a movie every once in awhile. But those aren’t so much finance issues as personal issues, and I figure I’ll leave that for another post.