For a lot of the 20th century, life was once rather simple for some people. There was school, college, work, retirement. Alongside that you had hobbies like cars, bowling, or gardening. The former was more or perhaps a less of an undertaking, the latter the fun stuff you did in your leisure time, usually together with local friends from exactly the same neighborhood. This is basically the same as one thousand years ago. For a couple lucky people the 2 areas overlapped and they could do the stuff they liked as their main job.
Now, within the last few 10 years of the 20th century, in addition to in the initial several years of the 21st, it has been changing rather dramatically. This is because 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 all over the world in milliseconds (although, unfortunately, the speed of light still remains a limiting factor). It has led to an explosion in the availability and quality of online games, with the most recent generation like Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft learning to be a phenomenon no more restricted to any particular social class, but instead an all-encompassing cultural element in the industrial countries.
Increasingly, parents discover that their children spend plenty of time playing several of those games, and more and more individuals interact using them DiscordTree.This results in people wanting objective information, which is used challenging to obtain. Most articles about these games are either compiled by rather clueless journalists who've never or hardly played the games under consideration and therefore mainly concentrate on scandalous negative negative effects, or by enthusiastic fans who dive deep into the technicalities and don't mention real life consequences much. This informative article tries to bridge the gap - it describes the currently most critical forms of online games and looks in detail at the social relationships behind them. The authors have already been longterm players for a long time and therefore hope that they may address the matter in considerably greater depth and detail than most journalists (however, you won't find detailed technical facts here since it is not in scope with this article).
You will find basically three main forms of multiplayer online games:
First-person shooters (FPS) where the gamer 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 typically the most popular online multiplayer game). A number of the other examples include Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom3.
Strategy games will be the the next main category. Usually much like FPS games in the round/session-based design of play, in these games the gamer usually does have no single entity, but instead commands numerous troops of some type against other human opponents. There's also various options where you can both play with other humans from the computer etc. Games of this sort include Starcraft, Warcraft III, Age of Empires and many others.
The final group, the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), is the location which popularity has really exploded within the last few few years. Here, the gamer obtains a permanent character (or entity) or several which could evolve and be built with various gear, and undertakes adventures in a sizable world full with other players. This is one of the most promising group as it resembles real life 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.
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