NO LONGER GOING SOLO NEW ONLINE GAMES CONNECT PLAYERS WHO LEAVE SOLITAIRE-Y WAYS BEHIND.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

Jon Downing started using computers when he was about 11, typing up homework and reports, playing solitaire in his Ventura home. But it wasn't until he joined the Army and trained on massive tank simulators at Fort Knox that he really got into gaming on computer networks with and against his buddies in the barracks.

Now 22, Downing and his brother, Will, spend up to 35 hours a week taking on opponents from just about anywhere there's an Internet connection, in online versions of computer games such as StarCraft and Unreal.

``I can jump on and play people all over the world,'' Downing said. ``There's millions of people out there playing (online), and nobody knows about this. I think it's so great.''

Millions indeed. The Interactive Digital Software Association estimates Americans spent $500 million last year just on online electronic gaming.

And the numbers are only going to increase, says IDSA president Doug Lowenstein, because of two factors: the Internet and next-generation videogame consoles that can connect players to the Internet.

``I see online continuing to grow and companies continuing to gradually figure out how to make the online-games sector a consistently profitable business,'' Lowenstein said. ``The key, in my mind, is broadband. The sooner we get to a broadband world, the more likely the game industry will be at the center of that.''

As more people get connected to superfast cable and DSL phone connections to the Internet, Lowenstein said, the nature of electronic games will change dramatically. Faster connections mean better sound, faster reaction times, more compelling visuals and the possibility of new kinds of immersive entertainment. It's all part of a curious sort of reverse revolution that will send us back to where we started.

``I think games have come full circle,'' said Gary Carlin of Hasbro Interactive's soon-to-launch online gaming site, Games.com. ``There were board games where you played each other, then next was CD-ROM games that mirrored how a human would play. Now that we have online games, we're going back to the human opponent.'' For thousands of years, games were at the center of man's social life. People played each other, and other people watched them play, and talked and partied together as they did.

Then came Pong, and all the videogaming consoles of the past 25 years. Instead of man against man, with others enjoying the competition as spectacle, videogaming machines really only allowed man (or more likely, teen) against box.

The box's hegemony first cracked with the rise of high-end, Windows-based PCs, tweaked to cutting-edge performance. Such uber-machines were favorites of a relatively small band of hard-core gaming fanatics who jumped on titles such as Doom and Quake that let them blast each other over computer networks, typically in offices, college dorms or Downing's barracks.

As the Internet became more broadly available, so, too, did PC games with Internet capabilities. Those Net-savvy titles have proven enduringly attractive, even spawning ``clans'' of players who take on other groups online.

``A hard-core gamer in a club, his three best friends may be in Finland, in Texas and in Brazil, and he's in San Francisco, and they've never met face to face,'' said Frank Rogan, a producer with the online service GameSpy.com.

Two recent best-selling sequels - Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament - explicitly ditched their single-player roots to be played mostly over networks.

Online gamers typically rely on matchmaking and game-hosting services such as GameSpy and Mplayer.com, which make it easy to find and play opponents.

GameSpy's Rogan says 5 million people now use its services regularly. It is branching out in June with GameSpy Arcade, which targets so-called ``casual'' gamers, who tend to prefer the pace of backgammon or bridge online to the mayhem of a first-person shooter.

``What we're looking for is people who don't want to play 'Quake' every day, but want to play a strategy game or a role-playing game or a card game,'' Rogan said. ``As the computer becomes a standard part of the equipment in the house, people are going to seek out these sorts of entertainment.''

Hasbro's soon-to-launch Games.com also offers regular-guy games such as bridge, Stratego and Battleship among 50 or so planned titles, along with chat areas and a one-to-one capability similar to AOL's Instant Message capabilities, said Carlin.

The Groove Alliance, a Toluca Lake company, has a smash hit online with Real Pool, its remarkable 3-D pool game, available at Shockwave.com. More than 2 million people a month play the game, said CEO Chris Kantrowitz.

The company has recently released two other online games, Sky Racer and TankWars, and plans to add multiplayer versions of all three as soon as partners Intel and Macromedia are set up, probably by late June, to run the games.

``Personally, I think multiplayer is the killer (application),'' Kantrowitz said. ``Multiplayer is the thing. What is AOL? It is a big chat company. Most of the traffic going through AOL is just people talking to each other. Now that people are comfortable with virtual conversation, how about virtual competition? That's the next step, I think.''

Online games can create a wide variety of social interactions, such as with Rainbow Six and its sequel, Rogue Spear, which require players to figure out a smart team strategy in a commando operation, then carry it out.

``In Rainbow Six, people really love the cooperative aspect,'' said Carl Schnurr, the games' producer and designer. ``It's an important distinction. In Quake, the social aspect may just be trash-talking to an opponent. In Rainbow Six, there's a very complex social interaction. Every player has a role, they've often worked with each other for a long time, they know what to expect from each other.''

Perhaps the most remarkable online experiences have been among so-called massively multiplayer games, such as Origin's Ultima Online, Sony's Everquest and Microsoft's Asheron's Call.

All three are role-playing games set in huge fantasy worlds, where a player chooses a character with certain abilities and slowly builds up belongings and wealth through a series of adventures. Each has its own distinctive subcultures, such as Ultima's ``player killers'' and Asheron's Call's sophisticated player guilds.

Everquest is so addictive that it's been nicknamed ``Evercrack,'' with 300,000 subscribers paying $10 a month to play, said Clint Worley, a game producer with Verant Interactive, which developed and runs Everquest for Sony.

``We call it the marriage killer,'' said Worley. ``That social aspect is what makes the game work. The community that we build up, it's almost like a chat room.''

As many as 60,000 people will play Everquest at one time, with and against each other in a series of quests. People may spend days or weeks putting together a band of players to take on a daunting enemy or explore a dungeon.

``I think what it comes down to is the community,'' said Worley. ``When you play a single-player game, you play it through and you don't ever want to play it again. With these online games, they change every day. Single-player games just can't compete with that.''

Verant is banking heavily on massively multiplayer games, recently releasing an expansion of Everquest called the Ruins of Kunark and the science-fiction epic Sovereign. The company's real ace, though, is an online game it is creating based on ``Star Wars.''

Worley and others expect online, multiplayer gaming to explode in coming years thanks to another notable change just now arriving: videogame consoles with Net connections.

In the past, consoles such as Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's N64 were stand-alone machines. Their simplicity made them attractive to mass audiences who have little patience for endlessly tweaking a high-end PC.

They were never Net-connected, however, a situation Sega is changing. The modem built into its next-generation Dreamcast machine will have a broad range of Net-savvy games available by this fall, including the sequel to its best-selling football title, NFL2K1, and the Everquest-like Phantasy Star Online.

``It scares me,'' said Schnurr, the Rainbow Six producer. ``The reason it scares me is very personal. I don't have a PC at home, and therefore I have not had to fight off joining any of this multiplayer mayhem. But now I'm going to get sucked in. I think it's going to bring a more mature audience to the console market, and it's going to widen the appeal. If it's that simple and the content is good, people will use it. Things like these massively multiplayer games will go crazy.''

Microsoft's Xbox, scheduled to debut late next year, also will have a built-in modem and a heavy online emphasis, said Microsoft's Doug Hebenthal.

``Online is important to us,'' said Hebenthal. ``We think it's the future of games. Console gamers are coming to the realization that this Internet thing is going to be big some day.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) PLAYING ONLINE

The rise of a new digital community

Photo illustration by Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer

(2) Sega's next-generation Dreamcast machine will have Net-savvy games available by fall, including Phantasy Star Online.

(3) The Dreamcast modem will be built into the new Sega machines.

(4) Sony's multiple-partner Everquest is so addictive it's been nicknamed "Evercrack," with 300,000 subscribers paying $10 a month to play.