How Video Games Can Be Incorporated Into Your Next Company Party

Historically, video games have been seen as an alternative to social activity; a place where those who lack basic conversational skills could thrive without the need to communicate with anyone. Beginning with the Wii, and subsequently with the Playstation Move, and the Xbox 360 Kinect, a new genre was created: the casual game.

Casual video games are defined within this article as any game that is intuitive and user-friendly, typically focusing more on the movement of the player to control the game play. Nintendo's Wii Sports is the prototypical casual game, with options such as tennis that don't require a single button to be pushed once the match begins. Since these new-generation games are able to be picked up and played by just about anyone, they make a perfect addition to any company party.

There are several different ways that you can go about incorporating video games into your event. If you are planning to have families invited but wanted to have more mature entertainment, such as casino games, you can have a separate "kid-friendly" area with lots of age-appropriate video games for all of the kids. You may find that many of the adults end up spending their time in the kids' area though. Another option is to choose from many different video game party themes. This can be as simple as having Wii Sports set up in different stations for a sports themed party, or as extravagant as having full racing simulators brought in to complement your Nascar theme. Best of all, you can just allow the games be the focus of the party.

The next trick is convincing people that have never played video games in their life, that not only will they be able to play, but that they will undoubtedly have a lot of fun. Contests can be a great way to accomplish this. Break your group into teams and have them compete in a few of the games for the chance to win a prize. Not only will this encourage team-building amongst your fellow employees, but it will get everyone involved in the games and having a great time. Another strategy would be to grease the wheels a little bit by waiting until the guests have had a drink or two before moving on to the games. If that is still not enough, having dedicated event staff on hand to encourage and coach everyone on how to play the games can get even the most reluctant employee to give it a go.

As new and entertaining casual games continue to come out for the all three of the main consoles, video games will only continue to grow in popularity as the second highest priority at your next company event, just behind the open bar.

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.