GGZ Gaming Zone is a free online game

Online game

An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology, but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...

 infrastructure project founded in the year 2000. Dozens of games (servers, clients and protocols) have been developed, in addition to gaming tools, a chat bot and other utilities.

Overview

GGZ is the Free Software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 community's answer to advertising-driven community gaming sites like MSN Games

MSN Games

MSN Games is an online games site devoted primarily to casual games, both stand-alone and multi-player online games. Games are available in free on-line versions, trial versions, and full feature pay-to-play versions...

, Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Games is the section of the Yahoo! website in which Yahoo! users can play games either with other users or by themselves. The games on the website are typically Java applets or quick Flash games, but there are others which require a download. Many of the games that require a download...

, and Pogo.com

Pogo.com

Pogo.com is a gaming website that offers a variety of free casual games, from card and board games to puzzle, sports, and word games. It is owned by Electronic Arts....

. Some of the site's features include full internationalization, support for game spectators, and computer players.

Games

As of April 2008, the GGZ website lists support for 38 game engines, including both classic games such as Chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 and computer-specific games such as Bomberman

Bomberman

Bomberman is a strategic, maze-based computer and video game franchise originally developed by Hudson Soft. The original game was published in 1983 and new games in the series are still being published to this day. Today, the commercially successful Bomberman is featured in over 70 different games...

. Most of the games are implemented for multiple toolkits and desktops such as KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

, GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

, SDL

Simple DirectMedia Layer

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices....

 and Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

.

A partial list follows:

• Chess
• Chinese Checkers
• Chinese Chess
• Combat
• ConnectX
• Connect the Dots
• Escape
• Geekgame
• GGZCards (includes LaPocha, Spades, Hearts, Bridge, FortyTwo and others)
• Hastings
• Keepalive
• Krosswater
• LaPocha (deprecated due to GGZCards)
• Muehle
• Reversi
• Spades (aka NetSpades)
• TicTacToe
• GGZBoard (includes Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Go, Hnefatafl and Ludo)

Independent game projects have started to include GGZ support:

• Batalla Naval
• Kamikaze
• Tenes Empanadas Graciela
• Tuxman
• Widelands
• Freeciv
• Freelords

Server

Grubby is the chat bot developed by the GGZ project. It is a versatile internationalized bot.

The main server is named ggzd.
Server tools are ggzduedit to edit user permissions and ggz-cmd to send commands and check the server uptime.

Client

Game tournaments can be organized by anyone. Players can stay informed with the Competition Calendar application.

To enter a game room, the classic way of using a Core Client can be chosen. Alternatively, login is possible with a special application named GGZap, as well as from chat clients such as Pidgin.

Web interface

A rankings page has been developed which has since turned into the GGZ Community portal. It allows players to log in, watch their scores and past results, as well as their collection of awards, define their geographical position on a map, review played games, and talk to each other in the forums.

Similar projects

There are several free projects not related to GGZ, but with (at least partially) similar goals.

• Arianne
• WorldForge
  WorldForge
  The WorldForge project is producing an open source framework for massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The intent lies in creating a widely used development framework and set of libraries by motivating interested developers to improve on the original code.-History:The WorldForge Project...
  
  

Since June 2006, a lot of former MSN Games

MSN Games

MSN Games is an online games site devoted primarily to casual games, both stand-alone and multi-player online games. Games are available in free on-line versions, trial versions, and full feature pay-to-play versions...

users have migrated to the GGZ servers, so that casual games have moved more into the focus of the project.