Who Plays World Of Warcraft

World of Warcraft has developed an enormous following since its release in November 2004. It has built upon its initial success to become an enduring and hugely popular title. The demand for the game has been stronger than its creators might have expected, and it is now a fully-fledged social phenomenon, attracting all kinds of people to its world.

World of Warcraft has enjoyed global success and acclaim. It seemed natural that it would do well in America, where there was anticipation for a new Warcraft title. The truth though is that it has taken off everywhere it has been released. It has been a massive hit in Asia, Australia, Canada, and Europe, and has many international fans and subscribers. The game has a simple, universal appeal that transcends language barriers and geography.

One of World of Warcraft's strengths is that it appeals to both casual gamers and more experienced players. The game has made the online multiplayer genre more accessible to people who might not normally play it. A lot of people who try the game may have regarded the genre as too complex or may not have played a role-playing game before. It is the quality of World of Warcraft and the buzz surrounding it that has drawn people's attention towards it.

World of Warcraft has a huge following on the Internet. There is an official site that is busy and informative and contains forums for the game's subscribers. There are many other fan sites as well. It has a keen fan base made up of a broad cross section of society. People enjoy the game for all sorts of reasons, with fans citing the gorgeous graphics, addictive gameplay and unique characters as elements they find appealing.

Although World of Warcraft has the visual style of a cartoon, it is a game that people of any age can enjoy. All age groups play it, from children to seniors. This leads to an interesting online environment, as younger players interact with older gamers. It is a real mix of people, as children and teenagers share the game's world with twenty year olds and more mature, middle-aged players and older. It is a friendly, lively environment and tends to be good-natured and welcoming.

The World of Warcraft universe is a happy, thriving community. There is a strong social aspect to it and players can become friends with each other. The game's world of Azeroth follows the real world's calendar and so they mark holidays and seasonal events in the game. On New Year's Eve in 2005 there were parties and celebrations in Azeroth that all players could attend. It is features like this that make its world much more vivid, colourful and convincing.

There is a fan convention for World of Warcraft. The game's developer Blizzard held an event in October 2005 named BlizzCon, for fans of Warcraft and their other titles. World of Warcraft was a major part of this event, and one of the main attractions was a preview of the game's expansion, The Burning Crusade. Some 8,000 people attended the event, which is expected to become an annual occurrence. Families went together and fans dressed up in costume as their favourite characters from the game.

World of Warcraft has caught people's imagination and this has led to a variety of creative offshoots. One key sign of the game's popularity is the existence of Warcraft fan fiction. Players like to write fictional stories about the characters and events of the game. Fan art is also popular. People draw and paint images inspired by the game and post them in galleries online. Blizzard run their own Fan Art Program that fans can submit their art to for display. There is great creativity and beauty there.

The broad appeal of World of Warcraft is such that it has infiltrated popular culture. The game has been used as an answer on the quiz show Jeopardy. It also has celebrity admirers. The comedian Dave Chappelle is a fan. Chappelle talked about the game during a stand-up performance in San Francisco in 2005. "You know what I've been playing a lot of?" the comedian reportedly asked the audience, "World of Warcraft!" He praised the game and expressed his delight with it.

World of Warcraft then is a game that has broken new ground to appeal to a great number of people in society. With more than five million subscribers, it is now the most popular online role-playing game and has grown far beyond its cult origins. Its wide appeal speaks of the brilliance of the game itself.
By: Hunter Crowell

Java Online Games

After Shockwave, Java is the most popular tool for developing free online games. It is a popular programming language which was developed by James Gosling during the 1990s. It is somewhat related to C++ but is much more simple, and is an object oriented language. Java was developed because C++ was considered to be too complex and when using it there were many errors.

C++ also lacked the ability for distributed programming. Gosling and his colleagues wanted to produce a system that could be used on various platforms, from computer to handheld devices. By 1994 Java begin to be used on the internet. They felt that the internet would become interactive, and this would be the perfect environment to use their programming language. They were right. Java has become one of the most well known platforms in use today on the internet.

Many developers of free online games have quickly realized its potential. While Shockwave has replaced Java as the most popular engine used for online games, Java is still the tool of choice among many developers. Java became very popular when Netscape decided to support the program with their browsers. Most people use Java by the "applets" which are supported by their online browsers.

Yahoo has often been credited with heavily using Java to produce online games. Yahoo games is the portion of their website in which players can play games by themselves or against other players. While most of these games are Java applets, others have to be downloaded onto the computer. Reviews are even featured where users can post their thoughts about the quality of the game. Yahoo is one of the most prominent promoters of free online games. Everything from fantasy sports to card games are available.

Despite this, there are some criticisms of the Java programming language. Shockwave has a 3D engine which is much more powerful, and many developers have chose it rather than Java. Others complain that it is not a very pure object oriented programming language. Those who dislike object oriented languages will not design free online games with Java. Programs written in Java may also run slower than programs written in other languages.

Despite these complaints, Java has become one of the most popular languages used for developing independent games. Advances in this language should allow it to produce games which are much higher in quality and graphical detail. Many popular games can be played at the Java websit

By: Michael Colucci

Xbox

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the "Xbox" brand. For the 2001 console, see Xbox (console). For other uses, see Xbox (disambiguation).
Xbox Xbox Logo.svg
Xbox.svg
Product type     Video gaming
Owner     Microsoft Corporation
Country     Microsoft Redmond Campus, Redmond, Washington, United States
Introduced     2001
Markets     Worldwide
Registered as a trademark in     Worldwide
Website     www.xbox.com

Xbox (stylized as Xbox) is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. It represents a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with three consoles released in the sixth, seventh, and eighth generations respectively. The brand also represents applications (games), streaming services, and an online service by the name of Xbox Live. The brand was first introduced on November 15, 2001 in the United States, with the launch of the original Xbox console.

That original device was the first video game console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. It reached over 24 million units sold as of May 10, 2006.[1] Microsoft's second console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and has sold over 77.2 million consoles worldwide as of April 18, 2013.[2] The successor to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's most recent console, the Xbox One,[3] was revealed on May 21, 2013.[4] The Xbox One has been released in 21 markets in total, with a Chinese release on 29 September 2014. The head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who succeeded former head Marc Whitten in late March 2014.[5][6]

X Window System games

In 1986, MIT and DEC released the X Window System, which provided two important capabilities in terms of game development. Firstly, it provided a widely deployed graphics system for workstation computers on the Internet. A number of workstation graphics systems existed, including Bell Labs' BLIT, SGI's IRIS GL, Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Project, DEC's UWS (Ultrix Workstation Software), VWS (Vax Workstation Software), and Sun's NeWS, but X managed over time to secure cross-platform dominance, becoming available for systems from nearly all workstation manufacturers, and coming from MIT, had particular strength in the academic arena. Since Internet games were being written mostly by college students, this was critical.

Secondly, X had the capability of using computers as thin clients, allowing a personal workstation to use a program which was actually being run on a much more powerful server computer exactly as if the user were sitting at the server computer. While remote control programs such as VNC allow similar capabilities, X incorporates it at the operating system level, allowing for much more tightly integrated functionality than these later solutions provide; multiple applications running on different servers can display individual windows. For example, a word processor running on one server could have two or three windows open while a mail reader running on the workstation itself, and a game running on yet another server could each display their own windows, and all applications would be using native graphics calls. This meant that starting in the summer of 1986, a class of games began to be developed which relied on a fast host computer running the game and "throwing" X display windows, using personal workstation computers to remotely display the game and receive user input. Since X can use multiple networking systems, games based on remote X displays are not Internet-only games; they can be played over DECnet and other non-TCP/IP network stacks.

The first of these remote display games was Xtrek. Based on a PLATO system game, Empire, Xtrek is a 2D multiplayer space battle game loosely set in the Star Trek universe. This game could be played across the Internet, probably the first graphical game that could do so, a few months ahead of the X version of Maze War. Importantly, however, the game itself was not aware that it was using a network. In a sense it was a host-based game, because the program only ran on a single computer, and knew about the X Window System, and the window system took care of the networking: essentially one computer displaying on several screens. The X version of Maze War, on the other hand, was peer-to-peer and used the network directly, with a copy of the program running on each computer in the game, instead of only a single copy running on a server. Netrek (originally called Xtrek II) was a fully network-aware client–server rewrite of Xtrek. Other remote X display based games include xtank and XPilot (1991).[4]

History of online games

Networked host-based systems

A key goal of early network systems such as ARPANET and JANET was to allow users of "dumb" text-based terminals attached to one host computer (or, later, to terminal servers) to interactively use programs on other host computers. This meant that games on those systems were accessible to users in many different locations by use of programs such as telnet.

Most of the early host-based games were single-player, and frequently originated and were primarily played at universities. A sizable proportion were written on DEC-20 mainframes, as those had a strong presence in the university market. Games such as The Oregon Trail (1971), Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), and Star Trek (1972) were very popular, with several or many students each playing their own copy of the game at once, time-sharing the system with each other and users running other programs.

Eventually, though, multiplayer host-based games on networked computers began to be developed. One of the most important of these was MUD (1978), a program which spawned a genre and had significant input into the development of concepts of shared world design, having formative impact on the evolution of MMORPG's. In 1984, MAD debuted on BITNET; this was the first MUD fully accessible from a worldwide computer network.[2] During its two-year existence, 10% of the sites on BITNET connected to it. In 1988, another BITNET MUD named MUDA appeared. It lasted for five years, before going off line due to the retirement of the computers it ran on.[3]

In the summer of 1973, Maze War was first written at NASA's Ames Research Center in California by high school summer interns using Imlac PDS-1 computers. The authors added two-player capability by connecting two IMLAC computers with serial cables. Since two computers were involved, as opposed to "dumb terminals", they could use formatted protocol packets to send information to each other, so this could be considered the first peer-to-peer computer video game. It could also be called the first First person shooter

In 1983, Gary Tarolli wrote a flight simulator demonstration program for Silicon Graphics workstation computers. In 1984, networking capabilities were added by connecting two machines using serial cables just as had been done with the IMLACs for Mazewar at NASA eleven years earlier. Next, XNS support was added, allowing multiple stations to play over an Ethernet, just as with the Xerox version of Mazewar. In 1986, UDP support was added (port 5130), making SGI Dogfight the first game to ever use the Internet protocol suite. The packets used, though, were broadcast packets, which meant that the game was limited to a single network segment; it could not cross a router, and thus could not be played across the Internet. Around 1989, IP Multicast capability was added, and the game became playable between any compatible hosts on the Internet, assuming that they had multicast access (which was quite uncommon). The multicast address is 224.0.1.2, making this only the third multicast application (and the first game) to receive an address assignment, with only the VMTP protocol (224.0.1.0) and the Network Time Protocol (224.0.1.1) having arrived earlier

History of online games

The first video and computer games, such as NIMROD (1951), OXO (1952), and Spacewar! (1961), were for one or two players sitting at a single computer which was being used only to play the game. Later in the 1960s, computers began to support time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to share use of a computer simultaneously. Systems of computer terminals were created allowing users to operate the computer from a different room than where the computer was housed. Soon after, Modem links further expanded this range so that users did not have to be in the same building as the computer; terminals could connect to their host computers via dial-up or leased telephone lines. With the increased remote access, "host based" games were created, in which users on remote systems connected to a central computer to play single-player, and soon after, multiplayer games.

Later, in the 1970s, packet-based computer networking technology began to mature. Between 1973 and 1975, Xerox PARC developed Local Area Networks based on Ethernet. Additionally, the Wide Area Network ARPANET further developed from its 1969 roots, lead to the creation of the Internet on January 1, 1983. These LANs and WANS allowed for network games, where the game created and received network packets; Systems located across LANs or the Internet could run games with each other in peer-to-peer or client–server models.

Browser games

As the World Wide Web developed and browsers became more sophisticated, people started creating browser games that used a web browser as a client. Simple single player games were made that could be played using a web browser via HTML and HTML scripting technologies (most commonly JavaScript, ASP, PHP and MySQL). More complicated games such as Legend of Empires or Travian would contact a web server to allow a multiplayer gaming environment.

The development of web-based graphics technologies such as Flash and Java allowed browser games to become more complex. These games, also known by their related technology as "Flash games" or "Java games", became increasingly popular. Many games originally released in the 1980s, such as Pac-Man and Frogger, were recreated as games played using the Flash plugin on a webpage. Most browser games had limited multiplayer play, often being single player games with a high score list shared amongst all players. This has changed considerably in recent years as examples like Castle of Heroes or Canaan Online show.

Browser-based pet games are popular amongst the younger generation of online gamers. These games range from gigantic games with millions of users, such as Neopets, to smaller and more community-based pet games.

More recent browser-based games use web technologies like Ajax to make more complicated multiplayer interactions possible and WebGL to generate hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without the need for plugins.

Java has become the most widely used programming language for browser games (though 2d).[citation needed] Applets made in Java are embedded in webpages and are run on the user's computer.