As often as five times a week, Thomas Hazzard, 42, a manager at Boeing in Seattle, sits at his home computer a few hours before he heads to his graveyard shift. He pops in his favorite CD-ROM game -- Combat Flight Simulator -- and logs on to Microsoft's Gaming Zone site.
Just moments later he is climbing into a virtual World War II-era fighter plane that is part of a combat squadron with as many as 75 other fliers, each controlling their on-screen aircraft from computers in places as far off as Australia and Sweden. While Hazzard is chummy with all of them, he is especially interested in sharing missions and chatting (using instant text and voice messaging) with joystick jocks he has known all his life.
From a small town in Texas, Hazzard's twin brother, Tim, takes his place in the squadron by logging on to the Internet. Another brother, George, who recently retired from the Air Force, also gets in on the action, signing on from his home near Boise, Idaho. Another brother, Ron, who lives in Wisconsin, joins in whenever he has the time. "It's all really fun," Thomas Hazzard said.
Online gaming has not always been this much fun. For years, a person -- much less four people in one family, scattered across the country -- who wanted to play online faced formidable obstacles. CD-ROM games had to be properly installed on the home computer, and hardware, software and Internet connections had to be configured so the computer could interact with other computers. Potential players stayed away in droves.
For those who managed to go online to play, finding someone to play with was no small task, either. Prospective players were often forced to navigate virtual game rooms to plead their case, in text chat, to be chosen for a game. Those doing the choosing had to be convinced that the player possessed an acceptable level of skill and had all the latest game updates and add-ons.
As a consequence of better game design, as well as more accommodating gaming sites, and faster and more powerful home computers, playing games online is becoming much simpler. The two biggest game-console makers -- Sony and Nintendo -- are promising even more simplicity when their machines begin to be used online, some as early as next year.
People like Thomas Hazzard and his brothers, using little more than basic computer skills, can be playing in minutes at the Gaming Zone or at rival sites like Electronic Arts' EA.com and Sony's Station.com Game site operators say they are working harder on technical details so that players do not have to worry too much about issues like millisecond-long lags in game responses, which put some players at a disadvantage.
"Game developers want to remove any technical barriers," said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst for Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research firm. "They want to make it dead easy for people to get on and get playing."
Most major sites now have "matchmaking" services -- they check your connection, equipment and software and match you up with others who have similar setups. Some sites, like Station.com, also offer translation services for their most popular games so that they can be played not only in English but also in French, German, Japanese and Korean.
Game playing has become so easy that even the Hazzards' 67-year-old father, George, who lives in northern Minnesota, joins in -- though only for less combative games, like online cribbage.
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