By Leslie Walker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 1999

Web Game Guide .com column Advice Tips and Help Treeloot and Hamsters Yahoo! Games Sony's The Station Total Entertainment Uproar.com Microsoft Gaming Zone Mpath Entertainment World Opponent Network Technical Notes

Here is a look at the lighter side of the Net, with a word on what to expect at sites catering to "casual" gamers.

Advice
One technical point first: If you are trying to goof off at work, be forewarned that some Internet games are thwarted by "firewalls" that corporations use to protect their internal computer networks. The Washington Post's firewall, for example, won't let many of these games run on its office machines. Many corporate firewalls, however, are not a problem. For more technical advice, especially if you are using America Online, see these notes.

Help and Tips
For further research, all the portals have gaming guides. There is also an Internet gaming league www.casesladder.com where you can sign up to join "ladders" and tournaments for both parlor and action games online. If you a slow computer but still want to join the fun, you might consider the new $15 "E-mail Games" from Hasbro Interactive, which allows you to play chess, Scrabble and other classics by e-mailing each move to your opponent.

OK, so you're ready for the Internet's faster-paced, free recreational gaming tables. Want an easy laugh first, something that won't crash your computer or tax your brain?

Treeloot (www.treeloot.com) and Hamsters (www.hamsterdance.com)
Two popular time-wasters on the Web are the Treetloot game, where you click on the leaves to try to win prizes (I clicked 55 times and never found any money hiding in those leaves) and the dancing hamsters, where you do nothing more than watch the animals wiggle. Nearly 2 million people chased the tree money in March, while almost 1 million visited www.hamsterdance.com in March. Go figure.

Yahoo! Games
Yahoo was first among the big portals to launch free, Java parlor games in April 1998 using software developed by ClassicGames.com, a company it purchased. Today its 20 games draw tens of thousands of players daily, with the average player session lasting 45 minutes, making Yahoo an easy place to find a checkers partner or foursome for bridge. Yahoo recently debuted a "ladder" system for a dozen competitive games that allows players to be ranked based on their win/loss records.

I had no trouble loading Yahoo's Spades and Gin Rummy games, and the grid listing tables where you can click to "join" the play, "watch" a game or "create a table" was intuitive to use. But my sister and I had trouble figuring out how to lay down our hands in Gin to claim victory. Finally, we trolled Yahoo's other Gin tables, using the chat box to ask other players until we found a helpful veteran who explained that you have to click the "knock" button before you discard. After you discard, the "knock" button is grayed out. It's those persnickety little details that get you.

My favorite Yahoo game, though, involves no cards-it's the Investment Challenge over in Finance, where you build a fictional stock portfolio and compete in the stock market against other "investors" for prizes. (My fake stock portfolio crashed this week, so I guess there's no prize awaiting me.)

Sony's TheStation (http://www.station.sony.com)
Since it launched in 1997, Sony's gaming site has always had a few free games to supplement its main mission of selling subscriptions and promoting the company's action-oriented games. All told, Sony's many Web sites drew 4 million visitors in April, but the company does not disclose how many went to the Station, which offers a mixture of free games and subscription games. Sony recently added a suite of classic board and card games from the Total Entertainment Network to the Station.

Last September, it added multi-player versions of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, so you can choose whether you want to play against the computer or other contestants. I found Wheel of Fortune fairly addictive, while Jeopardy was too slow running on my old Pentium 133 machine on a 28.8K dial-up telephone modem. And Sony's new Dating Game Online, still in its beta testing phase, required a software download that took nearly 20 minutes and caused me to give up in frustration.

At the end of the summer, Sony plans to debut an Internet version of Trivial Pursuit licensed from Hasbro. A Sony subsidiary owns the cable channel, the Game Show Network, which offers continuous games shows on TV. So you can expect plenty more Web games shows from Sony.

Sony does not reveal how many people pay to subscribe to its hard-core gaming area, but says it has registered a total of 3.4 million to the Station. Some 90,000 people have signed up recently to pay $9.89 a month for the privilege of playing the online version of Sony's new EverQuest action game. Nearly 30,000 playing simultaneously every night, the company said.

Total Entertainment Network (www.ten.net)
Based in San Francisco, the TEN Family Games Network is a major supplier of parlor and trivia games to many of the Internet's largest portals, including Excite, GO, AltaVista and Netcenter. TEN offers a fifty percent share of advertising to each partner and has registered more than 2 million players to the network. You enter through the portal-say Excite's Games area-but then can play with anyone playing throughout the network.

TEN launched a Bingo game last month game that is fast-paced and immersive; the company says it will offer more than $50,000 in prizes through bingo this year. You can pick age-based tables (and those 50s tables are hopping) and listen to a caller read out the numbers while you chat with other players in a small box to the left of your scorecard.

"Our Bingo caller sites two cubicles from me, and I competed against him for that gig," said TEN spokesman Garth Chouteau. "He happened to say 'G34' better than I do. How humiliating is that?"

The 10-minute Bingo games occasionally have advertisements that pop up in smaller windows, so players can still see the table, and it has commercial breaks between the games during which large ads fill the gaming area.

For its card tables, TEN's computers detect when a player abandons a live, multiplayer game and will instantly dispatch a "robot" or artificial intelligence to sit in and keep the game going. People can also chose to play one on one against the computer. TEN has a player rating system that takes into account the won/lost record of each player you compete against, designed to allow people to find other players near their skill level.

TEN started its online gaming business as a pay site and still runs a small hard-core subscription service in addition to its network of 15 free games, with more than 15,000 people paying an average of $15 a month to play the more traditional action games.

Uproar.com (www.uproar.com)
Uproar Inc. started life in Budapest as a company called E-Pub (Holdings) Ltd., but changed its name to match its Internet product brand after Internet games took off. The company was founded in 1995 by Michael Simon, an American who was working on his MBA in Budapest, and today it has offices in London, Budapest and the U.S. In April, Uproar's main Web site drew 1.6 million U.S. visitors, according to Media Metrix.

Uproar.com specializes in trivia, quiz and a variety of game shows, offering prizes that range from $5 to several hundred dollars. One of it most popular games is "100%," an adaptation from the TV show that is popular in Europe. Uproar also offers Bingo in 14 languages.

Uproar recently signed an agreement in April to purchase Reward Entertainment, the company that recently launched the Web site, Prizepoint.com, based on the idea of accumulating "prize points" for playing games. The more points accumulated, the greater a player's chances of winning the prize, because the prize awards are weighted based on the point system. The games have many corporate sponsors and the prize system is being closely watched by competitors in the online gaming industry.

Uproar is extending its reach on the Internet by licensing "light" versions of its games to affiliate sites, including some custom versions such as the seven-question daily news quiz (http://www.cnn.com/SEARCH/quiz/) at CNN Interactive. Uproar says it has 25,000 affiliate sites so far; in addition to some advertising revenue splits, Uproar pays its affiliates a small bounty for each player it registers in the Uproar gaming network.

Microsoft Gaming Zone(www.zone.com)
Like Sony's the Station, MSN's Gaming Zone offers a mix of free and paid games-more than 90 all told. It is one of the MSN Network's more popular channels and signs up 10,000 to 20,000 new gaming registrants a day. Spades is one of its more popular free games, with 5,000 or more people simultaneous players at the daily peak.

Mpath Entertainment Network (ww3.Mplayer.com)
Another popular site with hard-core gamers. It had more than half a million visitors in April, according to Media Metrix.

World Opponent Network (www.won.net)
Another popular gaming site offering plenty of games.

Technical notes
Many of the games are written in a scripting language called Java, so make sure you are using at least the 4.0 version of either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. If you are on America Online, you will need to upgrade to AOL's 4.0 software if you haven't already. AOL users also should check their World Wide Web settings to make sure they are not set to enable "graphics compression." That blocks some graphics-intensive games, so uncheck "compressed graphics" before heading for the game tables on the World Wide Web.

If you still find the parlor and trivia games will not run on your computer, it could be because your Web browser is not set to accept Java. It needs to be, and most new computers today come with Java enabled on the Web browser, but it's worth checking if you run into trouble. In Netscape Navigator, you click on "edit" and then "preferences" and "advanced" to control the Java settings. For Internet Explorer. click "view" and then "Internet options" and "Advanced." Look for "enable Java" and check it.