Everyone plays games, whether it’s tug-o-war with your dog and its chew toy or peek-a-boo with a baby, there are many times throughout your life where you indulge in play.
Gaming is organized play, structured and formalized for our entertainment, enjoyment, and personal enrichment. We game for social purposes, for money, to improve our health, and just to make life more interesting.
Although you can expect to find some articles about gaming here this Website is really about other Websites. Our gaming interests are diverse and rich and it would be too much work to document everything on one Website. In fact, even a Web directory like The Open Directory Project does a poor job of organizing all game-related Websites under a single hierarchy.
Here is an example of a list of game-related Websites you will never find under “Games” in any Web directory: The Top 25 Best Math Blogs on the Internet. This article, published on the 100 Best Casino Sites blog, beautifully illustrates exactly how varied the topic of gaming can be. You cannot design a game, or a strategy for winning a game, without involving some sort of math. But how many math blogs will you find in a typical directory of gaming Websites?
Math of course gives us game theory (think of “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe), by which we organize theoretical knowledge into roles that are played out by imaginary gamers. The game theory roles illustrate how components of a system work.
We have organized this Website into several categories. We may add more over time, or take a few away. But here we begin with a simple structure that we think works best for the people who visit this and other sites. We have also included a blog for us to publish random articles. We’ll experiment with the world of gaming there, and maybe point you to some really nice Websites.
Although no one really knows where and when games were invented, the oldest known format for gaming is a sporting competition. I can almost guarantee you that our ancestors 20,000 years ago were competing against each other in running, jumping, and hunting contests for fun and survival. Archaeology, of course, has discovered some very ancient board games whose rules and social relevance may have been lost to the ages.
Gambling games have been around as long as civilization, maybe longer. People have wagered on the outcomes of all sorts of random events. The ancient Roman writer Tacitus even said of the barbaric Germans living north of the empire that they loved gambling so much that, lacking anything else to wager, they might even stake their own freedom (or that of their children) on wagers. Whether this was true of all or any of the ancient Germans has been debated by historians for centuries, but we can accept that gambling was so commonplace in Tacitus’ time that his anecdote does not seem out of place by any measure.
We invented card games and popular casino table games only in the last few centuries. I read somewhere that the first playing cards may have been used in China. China, after all, invented paper. But one can never be sure. Maybe the ancient Mesopotamians had simple clay tablet games we have long since forgotten about.
Of course, the Internet makes gaming truly interesting and fun. Twenty years ago I remember being amazed at finding simple role-playing games (text-based, of course) on the Internet, along with Chess, and a few other simple computer games. Programmers who worked on mini-computer systems in the 1980s will remember the simple “Star Trek” game that was unofficially distributed across many operating systems. And today you can join in massively multi-player online role-playing games with full video graphics, interaction between players, and incredible character capabilities.
It’s just unbelievable what you can find online now. If you want to gamble, there are more than 100 online casino sites which, collectively over thousands of different games. Some of YouTube’s “stars” have dedicated gaming channels where you can watch them play first-person games, strategy games and, yes, even casino games.
Gaming has become so pervasive that marketers often talk about “gamifying” the user experience (creating reward systems to encourage customers to use merchant Websites and keep buying products). We game all day and all night and never think twice about it.
That is why Gaming Websites Today exists. We don’t know where this incredible journey will take us, but we hope you’ll come along and share it with us.