www.livemint.com SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 2009 L7

PlayLOUNGE

Mod happy: Drift City needs external plug­ins installed on your browser.

Empires R Us:Browser­based empiremanagement games such asIkariam (above) and NileOnline feature complexeconomics and tradingmodels, and a competitiveladder of rankings amongtheir virtual rulers.

DESKTOP ADVENTURES

Click for kingdoms

B Y K R I S H R A G H A V

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There’s trouble brewing inthe capital city of Qeteshthe Pharaoh.

L e a t h e r p r o d u c t i o n h a sdropped precipitously in the cityof the Tempest, fuelled by a sup-p l y s h o r t a g e a n d a s u d d e ndemand for sandals, which usecopious quantities of the material.

“Leather!” cries the harriedPharaoh in a message to his trad-ing partner, the Pharaoh Merid-ian*. “I want my leather! I’m downto 50 units and I lose 32 an hour!”

“Dude,” says Meridian, ratherout of character. “The ships areen route. Twenty-two hours,they’ll be there.”

“Damn it to hell,” grunts Pha-raoh Qetesh in reply.

Qetesh and Meridian aren’tcharacters in some post-modernalternate history drama, butp l a y e r s — g a m e r s — i n a n e wonline multiplayer game calledNile Online. Sometimes playingfor minutes a day, or hours at astretch, the two, along with 2,500others, pretend to be ancientEgyptian rulers. They juggletrade deals, economic policy andurban planning in their virtualempires along the Nile.

The catch? They do all thiswithin the comforts of theirWeb browser.

The browser has recentlybecome the platform du jour forlarge, community-based onlinegames. They are usually calledMMOs, or Massively MultiplayerOnline, games—the most popu-larofwhich is World Of Warcraft,with at least 11 million players.But browser-based communitygames are a slightly differentbreed—they’re mostly free, easyto pick up, and a boon for thetime-starved office-goer—andcan be played in convenient, bro-ken-up sessions.

All you need to do is browse tothe game site and register for anaccount. Almost all of them havestrong communities and helpful

Don’t bother—thereare worlds aplentywithin the comfortsof your browser

ety is also staggering.For the traditional swords-

and-sorcery fans, there’s thei r r e v e r e n t a n d h i l a r i o u sK i n g d o m o f L o a t h i n g(www.kingdomofloathing.com)which, while poking fun at every-thing under the sun, is also a sur-prisingly deep and long-lastingrole-playing game. Its hand-drawn stick-figure visuals arecrude but cute, and there’s ahuge world to explore, tonnes ofitems to collect, monsters todefeat and quests to complete.Also look out for the 28-poundaccordion-playing mariachis and

the cymbal-clanging monkeys.Empire builders and mega-

lomaniacs should look no fur-ther than the aforementionedEgyptian-themed Nile Online(www.playnileonline.com) orthe exotic island setting ofIkariam (www.ikariam.org).For more modern realpoli-t i k , t h e r e ’ s C y b e r N a t i o n s( w w w . c y b e r n a t i o n s . n e t )a n d N a t i o n S t a t e s(www.nationstates.net)—bewarned t hough , bot h havesteep learning curves.

No Internet gaming story iscomplete without mentioningz o m b i e s — a n d t h a n k f u l l y ,there’s one based around thel o v a b l e , b r a i n n i b b l i n g ,undead beasts as well— the32,000-user strong Urban Dead(www.urbandead.com)

For the more esoteric, there’sZon (www.enterzon.com)—aMMO that promises to teach youMandarin Chinese, and Drift City(http://drift.ijji.com), a Korean-based MMO that allows you torace in customized cars around alarge city.

Most of the MMOs are run bysmall, independent developers or

looser groups of dedicated pro-grammers, and support them-selves either through advertising(such as Nile Online), subscrip-tions or through paying custom-ers who get access to “premium”content not given away free.

Browser crashes are rare, butstill possible—so make sure youlose nothing work-related whenchasing fez-wearing rabbitsthrough a cursed forest, or negoti-ating trade agreements with anearby libertarian state.

* P h a r a o h n a m e s h a v e b e e nchanged to protect identity.

Browser banter

Read what Jeremiah Freyholtz, designerof ‘Nile Online’, has to say atwww.livemint.com/freyholtz.htm

forums, where wizened playerswill answer all doubts and queries.While they’ve been around insome form or the other since 2002,browser games are starting tobecome more complex, moresocial and better-looking.

“Browser games have kind offilled in a significant gap,” saysA l o k K e j r i w a l , t h e C E O o fGames2win.com, a flash gameportal. “The big game titles havealienated a lot of gamers, needingvery high system requirements.People are willing to spend a lot oftime playing browser-based gamesinstead, and you’re bound to seethem becomingmore and moresophisticated.”

The most popu-lar browser-basedMMOs have userbases exceeding100,000 players,a n d a p a r t f r o mh a n d l i n g t h ecomplexit ies ofsuch a huge num-b e r o f d y n a m i cplayers in a virtualworld, they’re alsob r e a k i n g n e wground—makinggames look moreattractive, accessi-ble and creatingopportunities forplayers to worktogether in com-p l e t i n g g a m eobjectives.

“Browser gamesare moving awayfrom boring textand becoming bet-ter-looking,” saysJ e r e m i a h F r e y -h o l t z , g a m edesigner at TiltedMill, which runsNile Online. Thetitle is currently in“ o p e n b e t a ” , as t a g e i n g a m ed e v e l o p m e n twhere the design-ers invite players totry out the gameand point out bugsand inconsisten-cies. “We (the NileOnline team) arealso exploring thei d e a o f s e r v e re v e n t s ( e . g . ,droughts, invasionsby raiders or evenquests) and larger-scale projects thatplayers can coop-eratively work ontogether, thingsy o u ’ d n o r m a l l yexpect to see onlyi n f u l l - s c a l eMMOs.”

The sheer vari-