The World Within Or Online Multiplayer Games In Depth

For the majority of the 20th century, life was previously rather simple for some people. There is school, college, work, retirement. Alongside that you had hobbies like cars, bowling, or gardening. The former was more or even a less of a task, the latter the fun stuff you did in your leisure time, usually along with local friends from the same neighborhood. This is basically the same as a lot of years ago. For a few lucky people the two areas overlapped and they may do the stuff that they liked as their main job.

Now, within the last few 10 years of the 20th century, along with in the first few years of the 21st, it has been changing rather dramatically. The reason is the rapid technical progress, both in the wide area network and computing power areas. Contemporary hardware can animate very detailed and realistic graphics fluently, and transfer data on the movements and actions of hundreds of objects and characters around the world in milliseconds (although, unfortunately, the speed of light still remains a limiting factor). This has resulted in an explosion in the availability and quality of online games, with the modern generation like Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft being a phenomenon no further restricted to any particular social class, but alternatively an all-encompassing cultural element in the industrial countries.

Increasingly, parents discover that their children spend a lot of time playing several of those games, and more and more individuals interact with them. This contributes to people wanting objective information, that will be used not easy to obtain. Most articles about these games are either published by rather clueless journalists who have never or hardly played the games involved and therefore mainly focus on scandalous negative side effects, or by enthusiastic fans who dive deep to the technicalities and don't mention the real world consequences much. This information wow raid boost tries to bridge the gap - it describes the currently most significant kinds of online games and looks in detail at the social relationships behind them. The authors have been longterm players for decades and therefore hope that they can address the issue in considerably greater depth and detail than most journalists (however, you won't find detailed technical facts here since it's not in scope of the article).

There are basically three main kinds of multiplayer online games:

First-person shooters (FPS) where the player sees everything via a (usually temporary, just for the internet session or less) character's eyes and his gun's barrel. This category still remains predominant as a whole worldwide player numbers (according to Valve, Counterstrike is still the most used online multiplayer game). A few of the other examples include Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom3.

Strategy games will be the the second main category. Usually similar to FPS games in the round/session-based style of play, in these games the player usually does not have any single entity, but alternatively commands a number of troops of some sort against other human opponents. There are also various options where it's possible to both play with other humans from the computer etc. Games of this sort include Starcraft, Warcraft III, Age of Empires and many others.

The past group, the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), is the region which popularity has really exploded within the last few few years. Here, the player obtains a lasting character (or entity) or several which can evolve and be designed with various gear, and undertakes adventures in a large world full with other players. This is the most promising group because it resembles the real world most, and it has already been the fastest developing recently. The currently most prominent games in this category are World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, Everquest II and Lineage II.