Online Games - A Primer
Put simply, computer games played via the internet are referred to as online games. With the growth of numbers of people accessing the internet from all over the world, and the growth of the internet itself, there has been a natural calling for internet-based leisure time activities, which of course would include the ability for a person to play games.
Internet gaming covers just about every genre imaginable, from text-based platforms to multi-player RPGs that encorporate virtual worlds and killer graphics that provide an almost realistic experience for the players.
Online games, for the most part, are part of internet communities that add a social element even to single player games - an example of this would be a gaming site that offers chatroom capabilities alongside the game itself.
Simple, text-based multiplayer games, referred to as MUDs, started in the 1980s and were generally played out on a bulletin board system. These games typically resembled games like Dungeons & Dragons, using similar rules and fantasy settings. Other games that could be found in this time period included simple board games, Scrabble clones, chess, and checkers. Games as mentioned above could become expensive to play, however, due to the per-minute connectivity charges that many MUDs had.
The 1990s introduced popular first person shooters, such as Doom. People started using TCP/IP protocols to connect and were able to conduct head-to-head battles with each other on various first person shooter games. Doom paved the way for most modern shooters that also incorporate some type of online components for gamers to interact via the internet.
Technically savvy people began building browser games as internet browsers and the internet itself gained sophistication and popularity. A browser game is just as it sounds - a game played within Internet Explorer, Netscape, or any other browser platform. The early browser games were created using HTML and HTML scripting - MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, and ASP. The utilization of a webserver to allow for multiplayer gaming was used for more complex games.
Java and Flash were the products of web based graphic technology development, which furthered the complexity of online games. "Java games" and "Flash games", as they became known, became more and more popular with internet gamers. Using a flash plugin on a webpage, 1980s classics like Frogger and Pac-Man were revamped and published for users. Flash and Java based games are usually limited to single-player but sometimes incorporate high score lists that publish the scores and the usernames of the people who achieved them, and the list can be viewed by all the players.
The advent and introduction of high-speed internet access gave birth to the ability for hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life around the globe to play games together in a setting called Massively Multiplayer Online games - otherwise known as MMOs. Due to the wide range of gaming interests, several different genres are covered by this umbrella:
MMORTS (Massively multiplayer online real-time strategy)
MMOFPS (Massively multiplayer online first-person shooter)
MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games)
It's easy to see that as time goes by and people broaden their technological horizons, online gaming will continue to evolve with us.
