A blog about web design, technology and cool stuff

So this week I’m talking about something a little different. It’s my other passion, besides web design/development; videogames.

Gaming and the web

A few years ago gaming was seen as a solitary pastime. More often than not videogames were a single user experience. With only one person being able to play at any given time it wasn’t a very social platform.

More recently, the release of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles has seen gaming become a much more social activity thanks to the increase in broadband usage and the speed at which data can be transferred over the web.

Play together

The development by Microsoft of their Xbox Live service has pioneered the way for online gaming on consoles. Xbox Live is an online infrastructure that allows anyone with an Xbox 360 console to connect to the service via their home broadband connection and enjoy playing games online with other people all over the world.

Similarly, Sony Computer Entertainment developed their own online platform called Playstation Network (PSN) which, although not as robust or feature rich as Xbox Live, does provide a similar online experience.

Of course, PC gamers have been playing online games much longer than their console owning cousins, but the main difference is that the consoles are now located in the living room of many households, not confined to a bedroom or office like most desktop PCs.

The consoles and their online abilities have bought the web into gamers living rooms.

Biggest game of the year

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released on 10th Nov and we’ve been playing it a lot. The game uses the web (specifically Xbox Live, Playstation Network and IW.net servers) to allow gamers to play competitively against each other in many different types of game.

Staying connected

Modern Warfare 2 uses some pretty fancy technology to ensure that the online experience is the best it can possibly be. For example, if the host disconnects then instead of  everyone being kicked from the game the game pauses and automatically searches for a new host from the group of players in the game. This means that after a few seconds delay the game can carry on and the user experience is all the better for it.

Talking, talking talking happy talk

Other features such as online chat between players enable real-time communcation. Whilst this has existed for some time it’s important to not forget that technology like this is only possible thanks to the web. 10 years ago it wasn’t commonplace to be able to talk to the people you were playing with unless they were sitting in your house with you, nowadays thanks to VOIP technology we can communicate with people all over the world in our games for free, once again enhancing the user experience.

Final thought

The internet brings us all much closer together and makes the world a much smaller place. Videogames show that this can be used for entertainment purposes as well as business use. Who knows what type of games we’ll be playing in 10 years time, but one thing I am confident of is that we won’t be playing them alone.

Written by Ian Hazeldine, Managing Director of Yellow Circle Web Solutions Limited (and an avid gamer)

Tags: Online play, Playstation 3, PSN, videogames, Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Communication, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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