Casual games have been very popular in the recent years. In this article, you’ll learn why casual games are so hot right now.

1. Casual games are easy to play. Anyone can learn to play in just a few minutes. The gameplay is designed for anyone can play with minimal learning curve.
2. You can play in short bursts, during work breaks or, in the case of portable and cell phone games, on public transportation
3. You can try before you buy. Most games offer 60-minute free trial of gameplay. There’re many sites that offer free computer game downloads on the internet.
4. New games are launched every day. There’s no limit of how many games you can play.
5. 2D, abstract graphics that require low computer specification
6. While hard-core games are geared more toward men, casual games are designed for both men and women.

I recently took a trip down memory lane when I came across a free online games site by chance. I am now in my forties and playing video games is not really my ‘thing’ any more. But whilst I was doing some research for a software developer I happened upon one of the many games sites now available online.

I was amazed at the variety of free games now available to the consumer. Its a far cry from the first games when your only choice was table - tennis or ‘Pong’ as it was called. You did have a choice, you could play single or doubles! Its no wonder that when ‘Space Invaders’ came out in 1980 that it was such a big hit. Saying that, not even I remember the very first games which are documented as being conceived at MIT in 1961. ‘Spacewars’ as it was called was a computing exercise at the time and it would be twenty years before the full extent of the commercialism of games would be realized.

We have, of course, been playing games for centuries. The first recorded games of note were the Olympiads of Ancient Greece. Thought to date back to before the records show, the first games started in 776 B.C. and took place every four years for nearly 1200 years until Theodosius I, a Christian roman emperor abolished them. It would take 1500 years before they would be revived again and the first modern olympics would take place in Athens, Greece in 1896 as homage to the original founders.

The playing of games though may be traced back even further than the Olympics. There is a more primal issue at work involved in the playing of games. It can be related to tribal behaviour in the earliest forms of man where competition for dominance and leadership of the tribe were fought out in competition. Even earlier than this and more primeval is the very nature of evolution and the need to reproduce. The expression ‘Survival of the fittest’ can be as easily attributed to gaming as it can to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The winner takes all mentality is ingrained in all of us from birth as part of our genetic make-up.

So it is not surprising that with the coming of the computer age that mans innate need to satisfy the desire for competition has found a new horizon on the internet. Free online games can now be found to meet all genres of sport. Whilst there may be concern for the hours that our children spend playing such games, it is not surprising as they are just finding the most accessible form of playing out their most basic of instincts.

The gaming business has come along way from the early days of invention at MIT. It matured through the console wars when the big players such as Nintendo and Sony did battle with Microsoft and X-Box. The future, as with most industries today, lies with the development of the internet and the integration of the computer into our televisions and phones and who knows where else. What we can be sure of though, is that wherever the evolution of gaming ends up, our most primal of instinct will be there forcing us to compete. So in the best tradition of the Olympiads, Let the games begin!

About the Author

For the best in free games online. You can find all categories of games to play at net games

Its a simple question to ask, “Whats so funny?” but if you sit down and think about it, it’s not so easy to answer. In some respects it’s an eternal question with no one correct answer. Ask a comedian who is successful about what is it that makes the audience laugh? Why are you so funny? The reply you will probably get, is a litany of stories about the years that they spent ‘doing the circuit’, rooms full of drunks and the nights they died on stage and never got a laugh. They can never quite put their finger on the turning point in their careers and don’t dwell on the reasons. “If it aint broke don’t fix it” and certainly do not try to analyze it for fear that it, like magic, may disappear overnight.

Simply the fact that different things make us laugh and a particular type of humour may leave someone in hysterics and another person bemused, looking for what was so funny, is testament to the innate personal nature of comedy. A study of what make us laugh concluded that their were two types of humour. The type where we laugh with someone or some situation, and another where we are laughing at someone or something. The latter can be seen as a reflection of our own position in society and the confidence we express at the misfortune of another person in an embarrassing situation.

The more confident someones is in them self that the situation would be unlikely to happen to them, then the more likely there are to laugh at the other persons misfortune. If you perceive that the situation that may happen to you, you are less likely to laugh, as the thought of a funny picture of yourself in a possibly compromised position is more unnerving.

Laughing outwardly at others misfortune is also a sign of the character of the person, a study by Dr Boris Sidis concluded in 1913. Dr Sidis concluded that laughter often displays the innate meanness of humanity. “Show me the kind of thing a man will laugh at, and I will show you the kind of man he is”.

Funny in its purest form escapes this classification and the purer the source of the comedy, the higher the state of the evolvement of the amused society Dr Sidis said. We laugh at what we think to be inferior to our own position in society.

Probably the purest form of this is the clown who from his very appearance has released the shackles of what we consider normal in an attempt through visual and mechanical mimicry to make us laugh. It is the clowns diversion from all normal behaviour that allows all of us to laugh with him as well as at him. As the clown does not relate to any normal position that we might find ourselves in we are released from weighing subconsciously whether the situation would adversely affect us.

With the proliferation of the internet throughout our society, we find a situation whereby we can search for our own form of ‘funny’. Be it funny pictures or literature, within the privacy of our homes and only shared between our PC and our self, we are not restrained by our social piers as to what we may laugh at. The proliferation of mediums such as You Tube are testament to this. Here you can find millions of examples of humour, the majority of which will not amuse the individual. However due to statistical variety available everyones taste is catered for and you are able to find something that amuses.

As for what makes us laugh…all I can say is that what makes us laugh only comes second to what puritans would say, is what makes us go blind!

About the Author

Funny Pictures is exactly what it says, a site full of funny pics. If you want to smile, think funny, think Those Funny Pictures.com

Photography as a process goes back many hundreds of years but it was not until a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre continuing the work of his late business partner, Nicephore Niepce combined the use of mercury vapour and fixing salts to produce a process that we today still recognize as the first photographs. His discoveries, announced in 1839 are still part of the process used today in Polaroid photography today.

The process was refined by many of the next few decades until George Eastman made a breakthrough with his patent for a photo emulsion film in 1884 rapidly followed in 1888 with the first patented camera. The same year, the Kodak Company was founded. Its first camera cost $15, a lot of money in 1888. By 1900 Eastman introduced the Brownie at a cost of just $1 and the world of mass photography was born.

Since that day, it has not been the process as much as what the camera captured that has held us captivated across the years. The statement that “The Camera Never Lies” is probably destined to the history books with the invention of the digital era, although there are many examples of the use of trick photography to fool the eye ever since the camera was first put into the public domain.

As early as 1917 and the case of the Cottingley fairies, the photograph has been used to twist the perception of its audience. In the Cottingley hoax, two girls, Fraces Griffiths and Elsie Wright purported to have taken photgraphs with fairies that lived at the stream at the bottom of the garden where Elsie and her parents lived. The photographs created a furore when published alongside an article by Arthur Conan Doyle, who, completely taken in by the fabrication, used it a proof that spirits existed and could be photographed.

It took over sixty years before the two girls, now elderly ladies finally came clean and told the world that the pictures were fakes. But for those sixty or so years, the world believed, well most of them, that the fairies were real.

Photographs have also been used on many occasion in an attempt to disprove a fact. Most notable amongst these attempts are the photographs of the Apollo Moon landings by conspiracy theorists who believe the landings never took place, and that the whole Apollo program took place on a Hollywood style set in the Nevada desert. The most famous of the images ‘proving’ their theory is that of the American flag which seems to be fluttering in a breeze. A breeze, of course, which would not exist on a moon with no atmosphere.

The most famous pictures taken by a private individual and still the cause of many conspiracy theorists today is the footage filmed on an 8mm home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder. The film, probably the best known 90 seconds of moving picture history, depicts, of course , the final moments of the life of then President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Shot from an elevated position above Dealey Plaza, the film was the primary source of evidence used by the Warren Commissions enquiry into the assasination an it is the footage of the third bullet hitting the president that caused many to speculate about the nature of the ‘lone gunman theory’ and the evidence of several gunman firing from the grassy knoll.

Today, with digital media, the camera nearly always lies. The ability to distort the digital image is available to everyone with a computer and the click of a mouse. The results can be as spectacular in their imagery as they are in their deception. They can bring humour and sorrow, change the fortunes of careers or bring news to the world. But for all the complexities of their electronic wizardry one thing is certain.The emotion, whether real or manufactured, portrayed by the still image, still manages to capture a moment in history that forever defies the passage of time.

I spend…well lets just say that I spend way too much time in front of this computer screen. Everything from forums to e-bay passes by me every day. Its my own fault, I am always looking out for the next big thing and monitoring what is in and what is out. i recently got back into the auction rooms at e-bay or should I say my wife recently got me back involved. There is a trick to bidding on the auction sites and even though I’ve told how it works, it is usually left up to me to do her bidding….that’s marriage for you!

Being based in Spain for parts of the year, I thought it would be good to see how the Spanish or the English in Spain were getting on with e-bay and similar sites. I found an online auction site in Spain called sell it on the coast that has recently started up. I joined up and had a browse to see how it performed and was surprisingly impressed. Its working off quick servers and I found no glitches. If your an ex-pat looking to get your e-bay fix a little closer to home then check it out.