Playing games online inside your browser has become one of the most popular forms of entertainment today.  Some may consider browser games to be “casual” games.  But today’s browser games are exceptionally more advanced than the simple flash games of yesteryear.  Today, stunning 3D graphics in browser games is becoming commonplace.  Powerful middleware like Unity are making it even easier to make advanced games with appealing graphics playable inside your browser and also raising the quality bar for online games.  Here is a video of a demo made with Unity:

And that’s just a demo.  But the new wave of the future is really integrating these games well into websites and offering an integrated, social experience.  An example is Atmosphir.  Atmosphir, built using the Unity platform, allows players to make their own levels using the easy-to-use built-in level editor and share them with the world.  While still in its beta stage, it works impressively well so far with over 55,000 players signed up already (including me).

Another example is Free Realms.  It feels almost like an mmo since there’s an immense world to explore in 3D.  But the game world is just a fancy lobby since Free Realms is actually a collection of mini-games.  Granted, a virtual world for players’ avatars to reside in fosters a great deal of community interaction that would less visually pleasing otherwise.

Browser games generally don’t require very large downloads in order to keep their casual pick-up-and-play style.  With the prominence of broadband internet connections, bigger and better games like Atmosphir and Free Realms are possible.  Although it does take several minutes to start playing Atmosphir the first time around, subsequent plays will take much less time to load since a large chunk of game data is cached on your computer.