Significance of multiplayer online gaming

Multiplayer online gaming could be called an enhanced version of single player games. Earlier most computer games were played against the computer. This has absolutely no connection with other human players. From the human player perspective this had the drawback of making the computer opponents only as smart as the computer. Computer did well in games such as chess play quite well with human opponents. However in most fast action games like Doom and Quake, the computer opponents did not have nearly the sophistication of a human player. Earlier you feel the excitement however it dies down after sometimes as the computer opponents does not actually satisfy your gaming expectations. Then came computer games in which two players could play together against each other on same machine. However, the very first multiplayer game was actually developed in 1969 by Rick Blomme who wrote a two player game. Then, in 1979, Roy Trubshaw and Rich Bartle developed the first multi user dungeon (MUD) game. MUDs were role playing computer games that run on a bulletin board system or Internet server. The introduction of MUDs saw the rise in the online gaming market in the late 80's to early 90's.

Game makers quickly realized that the only way to make the game play more interactive and appeal to a wider audience was to facilitate human to human connections. Before Internet access was widely available, some game manufacturers began to support play with other human players on a separate computer via direct modem to modem connection. This allowed one player to play against another player in a different location.

The creation of the World Wide Web in December 1990 was the revolutionary step in the history of Multiplayer online gaming. This allowed the people to migrate from Multiplayer online gaming to online Multiplayer online on the Internet. As computer systems became more powerful and allowed for 3D graphics and lightning fast multiplayer capabilities, online gaming became more appealing, even to those without much technical knowledge.

In early 1990’s several online multiplayer games appeared in the market. With the constant rise in the market of the multiplayer online gaming, market of the gaming servers started to come up. For most gamers, the boom in the era of online games started with the release multiplayer version of quake.

The trend of modern online gaming started to appear in late 1990’s when the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) s started appearing in the market. While there were several games prior to (MMORPG) s that allowed network play, none of them had the capacity of creating a huge virtual world for players to interact in. (MMORPG) s started connecting hundreds of players at one time, thus facilitating interaction between thousands of users worldwide. Also, with (MMORPG)s players were able to play online over dial up that was considered impossible.

This trend toward creating an online component for games is only likely to increase. Players are quickly realizing that challenging unpredictable flesh-and-blood adversaries is far more enjoyable than taking on the unrealistic computer-generated opponents of old.