Online Games - Now More Popular Than Ever Before

Simply saying that online gaming has become popular is a massive understatement. It had been popular for a while, but in the past couple of years its popularity has reached previously unheralded heights. It's not just the number of gamers that has been increasing either, it's the number of games and gaming websites too. Type 'online games' into Google and you'll see that there are more than 200 million results!

So, why is online gaming becoming increasing popular? Well, you can put it down to a few things. One is better technology, another is improved graphics, and a third is increased interactability.

It seems like a lifetime ago now that Pong, Pac-Man and Frogger were the leading lights of the gaming world, but in actual fact it was just a decade or two ago. In the world of technology though, that is more than a lifetime, it's an entirely different era! It's not that games programmers didn't have ideas for the types of games that we enjoy playing now, it was rather that they had no way of implementing their ideas. The coding languages that form the basis of current games simply didn't exist in the past, and the processors in computers just not fast enough to process anything more than simple commands. Now though, technology and programming languages are at a level whereby the imagination is the only limitation, and this has shown itself in the great games that are consistently released.

As for graphics, slow moving, uninspiring blotches that jerked across the screen have been made a thing of the past. Today with the modern technology that is out there, some of the three dimensional games that are being offered online actually more closely resemble a movie than a game. The graphic capability with Flash and Java Scripting and AJAX programming allow a near photo-realism. This is especially true if you are lucky enough to have an extremely high-speed connection like a T1 or a T3 line.

Everyone knows that great graphics don't always equate to a great game though. The criteria for a great game is that it is interactive and rewarding, and this is where online games have really come into their own. Playing online against real people is, for the vast majority of people, far superior to just playing against a computer. Before, Internet connections were just too slow to allow gamers to properly compete against each other online, but now you can compete simultaneously against 20+ people from around the world with no problems at all. This has greatly extended the amount of time that you can play a game before getting bored of it, and literally every time that you play a game you don't know what to expect.

So, what about the future of online gaming? You can be sure that all of the points mentioned above will only continue to improve and, as such, the gaming industry as a whole will continue to grow and bring in more and more gamers, which can only be a good thing for those of us already hooked on the world of online gaming.