[edit] Brief Description

[edit] Wiki description

History

The earliest computer game, OXO, was developed in 1952 and is a tic-tac-toe game. The first multiplayer computer game was developed in 1961 by a couple of MIT students. Spacewar! involved two spaceships attempting to shoot one another.

The computer games industry tripled over the past 10 years, reaching $7.4 bilion in 2006 only in US. Online games are more and more popular everyday according to the latest statistics: 49% of game players play games online at least one hour per week.

Industry Statistics

According to statistics published on the Entertainment Software Association web site, action games were the top-selling video game genre in 2006 with 27.5% of the units sold. Other popular genres are sport games with 17% units sold, racing and shooters with 10.6% each, role playing with 9.5% and family entertainment with 9.3%.

As far as computer games are concerned, strategy is by far the winning genre with 35.4% units sold in 2006. Role playing games were second in line with 13.9% of the units followed by family entertainment with 12.7% and shooters with 10.9%.

Statistics show that the average game playing time for women is very close to the average playing time for men: 7.4 hours per week vs 7.6 hours per week.

Types of computer games

Based on the gameplay, computer games are categorized in genres

• Action games include action-adventure games, first-person shooters, third-person shooter and tactical shooters
• Adventure games are divided in fighting games, role-playing games, simulation (that realistically simulate experiences like driving a train, flying an aircraft, building a city, running a country or even control lives of people), sport games and strategy games (including tactical, real-time strategy and turn-based strategy games)
  

MMOPs (massively multiplayer online games) and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) combine the multiplayer concept with a wide range of genres. The most important feature is the unlimited number of players that can participate at once.

Most popular game communities

ActionTrip put together an interesting list of the most popular and active game communities. As everyone expected, the list includes gaming "dinosaurs" like Counter Strike and The Sims

Print screen from Valve's Counter Strike Condition Zero 2

As the article shows, Counter Strike is la crème de la crème when comparing first person shooters. It is also the most popular game in the world with at least 250,000 players online any time of the day. Second in line is Runescape, a java based MMORPG with over 10 million players around the globe.

Coming in closely behind is World of Warcraft with 9 million subscribers worldwide in July 2007. WoW seems to be the game surrounded by most scandals due failures in the game servers and criticisms from psychologists that claim that it's addictive.

Last, but not least, another first person shooter developed for Microsoft's Xbox, Halo. Stats show over 260,000 of registered players and about 12,000 online every second. Not so active as the other podium occupants but still a very popular community

Communities

The International Game Developers Association - http://www.igda.org/
Games Blog - Guardian Unlimited - http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/
Video and Computer Games news - http://www.latimes.com/technology/consumer/gamers/
FileFront Gaming Forums - http://forums.filefront.com/
Counter-Strike.net Forums - http://www.forumplanet.com/counterstrike/
The World of Warcraft community forums - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/
Gamer Tales - http://www.gamertales.com/

See also

• Games to download or to play online with user reviews
• "Detox for game addiction?" By Sherry Rauh
• "PC Games" explained on Wikipedia
• Official homepage of the "Entertainment Software Association"
• "Chronology of the History of Video Games"
• Playing the Game: The Economics of the Computer Game Industry

What's there to do here

Participate or just Stare

Take a look at a list with popular games each with a wikipage that can be edited by anyone. You're going to find free, commercial or online games that other have listed because they thought they are cool. Games listed here have gamers ratings and reviews and they compete for the first place in the crowded space of desktop and online games on the internet

Make them compete

You can create list of features and have them compared to see why similar games are better. Why do you have to pay when you can get the same features for free somewhere else?

Bla bla bla

Start chatting on the forum with other ITerating users about what you think of the multitude of games that are rising and why do you think gamers stick to their usual

Add a popular game

Add your favorite game To start competing for the first cup