Tech Tuesday – Google is Pushing Chrome to Be a Game Platform

If you like playing games on the computer, you may find some of this news kind of interesting. I sure did since I am more of a computer gamer then a platform one, even though I own a Wii. Google's strategy is to move computing to the cloud so they are also moving gaming their, with Google Chrome as a gaming platform.

You can already see something like this happening with a game I love playing online, QuakeWorld, which is a first person shooter, from the gaming company Id, which works in a browser. The cool thing too is, that it's multi-player. So I can play against friends, for free. There is paid content and private servers if you want to have those things. I just like the free to play option.

But that is one example. There are many others and if Google has it's way, many more. You can already get a lot of games for Chrome in the Chrome online store. I have the free version of Angry Birds as well as the classic, Missile Command. All played inside my Chrome Browser. And Google has been pushing a game developer's conference called New Game, that focuses on HTML 5 game development. So in the future, all you would do is plug in your controller, and load a game on your computer from the web and away you go.

But more on the behind the scene end of things would be the ability for Chrome to run programs on the web server that were written traditionally using the C and C++ programming languages, which most game developers use, and still have them run on the web. This would give you even more power to run a game like say Halo for example, in your Internet Explorer web browser, if Microsoft were to adopt a similar strategy. This is what Google is shooting for if you pardon the pun.

There is still a ways to go in this. Many games I have seen online, like the classic Zork adventures games from the 80's, are just Flash based version of text adventures. While that's ow it started out on the Commodore 64 and other venerable early computer platforms, I was hoping for more. I think New Game is a good start to help get this new platform rolling.

Do you have any favorite games you like playing in your web browser?

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