In browser games. Web games. Browser based games.

The more I consider them, the greater their potential. Clearly, I work for a company that is building a cutting edge browser based game, so I have a vested interest, but it is not just me. id software recently mis-announced a version of Quake 3 in browser, and here’s how a couple of sites reacted to that:

From the Eurogamer comments:

“Now that’s one hell of an interesting side project. The flash/browser games lately got better and better.”

From Wonderland:

“Quake 3, in a web browser? HAPPINESS!”

Quake 3 in a browser window? :-O

So it’s not just my own excitement because of PMOG. As it turned out, id software are only developing a web-based ‘launcher’ for Quake 3, but the general reaction to it was quite telling - people want to play games in their browser. The web browser has become much less of an application and more of a window-to-other-applications. While the web developers spent their time thinking of ways to subvert the web browser to fit their ideas of it becoming a ‘command line to the web’, it seems that most users have spent their time investing in the web browser as a replacement for Windows Explorer, or the Finder. The browser is where they launch applications from - Hotmail, Facebook, Wordpress, and so on.

Again, just recently, there was plenty of excitement around the news of a Site Specific Browser:

“An SSB is an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It’s doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrement’s of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a ‘distraction free browser’ because none of the typical browser chrome is used.”

Pyro - an example of SSB for chattings.

This is an interesting turning point - the thought of web-apps as applications deserving of their own window. It’s the application coming full circle, back to the desktop, only this time with persistent connectivity. However, as much as I used and wrote about the idea a while back, I don’t envisage SSB’s taking off on their own. Rather, it is much more plausible to see Mozilla Firefox encapsulating the idea and allowing any tab to be make site-specific. The idea is so good that it will be built into Firefox, not grown separately.

These jailed instances of web browsers would be ideal for a simple arcade, too. As a developer it would make much more sense to build on-top of the Mozilla framework in return for stable code and near OS-level access to the users’ computer, which is way beyond what any scripting or server-side language can offer. It not a stretch of the imagination to see site-specific browsers giving Mozilla a real foothold in the downloadable, casual games market. Maybe they could even build a better version of Steam?

However, there’s no real reason for users to start demanding everything in-browser, is there?

Well, look at casual games, they’re all about standardisation, making a concept roughly similar to the genres of match-three, word-search or puzzles, and selling the clones.

Look at user behaviour, we don’t want perfect, we want adequate. Look at how the web is growing, thriving on plain text in the face of java applets, flash intro’s and animated gifs. It’s all about survival of the easiest. Games in-browser, then, is the simple web. They’re easy to play, require no context switching and will continue to adapt with the web. They are, however, fundamentally animated, and the push for 3D is driven by game developers, game designers and, to a similar degree, game players. As much as I personally believe that 2D games still have a lot to offer, it’s clear that until a simple and usable in-browser 3D-client is required. As adobe pushes its products online, it’s not a great leap of faith to imagine Flash, the most popular and useful game development environment for in browser games right now, pushing on with 3D apis. One thing is sure, it’s going to be fun to watch this happen.

Duncan Gough posted this up on Thursday, 25 October, 2007 at 11:26 and filed it under Uncategorized. These tags were applied: browser based games, games, web games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.