Though some may see video games as something disruptive for normal child behavior, sports and other activities, video games have been able to bridge gaps between countries, races, communities which have absolutely no relation with each other due political, ideological and other reasons. Many of the modern divides that we see in the world have been able to bridge through many video games. Many online games, highly popular throughout the planet, have and can be used to mix the communities in competitive spirit and camaraderie.

The paragraphs below will address those popular games and their communities in detail.

Counter-Strike (CS)

The original video game of Counter-Strike was developed as a game mod for another video game called Half-Life. Having started in this fashion, Counter-Strike rocketed to fame and eventually more installments of the game sprung up such as, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source, and so on.

Stemming from the popularity, as of the latest figures, CS community had just over 174,665 active servers, with approximately 276,552 gamers playing online at any given time. According to these statistics, roughly 9.423 billion minutes of play time are taken each month.

World of Warcraft

A brainchild and product of Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft (WoW) is another hugely successful online game. As of January 2007, World of Warcraft surpassed 8 million subscribers and come July 2007 the game hit 9 million subscribers worldwide. Furthermore, it was confirmed that PC gamers played World of Warcraft more than four times as much as any other PC game. If that's not sufficient evidence, you should also know that certain World of Wacraft-based web sites are amongst the highest ranking online publications on the Web. For instance, the WoW oriented web site, WoWHead, has recently been sold for over $1 million.

However, when it comes to Blizzard's games it's not just about Warcraft. The company proudly declared Battle.net as one of the largest online gaming networks with "millions of active users," which, reportedly, outpaces even Xbox Live. It was recorded that by September 2004, Blizzard active user count was up to nearly 12 million, all of which spent more than 2.1 million hours online each day. At the time, the network had 200,000 concurrent users.

The Sims

First and foremost, as one of the highest selling video games on the planet, it is no wonder that this game has a huge online following. Getting back to the sales, reportedly, The Sims (designed by famed video game designer Will Wright) sold over 70 million copies worldwide as of January 2007. Presently, The Sims has a vast and expanding online community with web sites that flock over 1.25 million registered members.

Halo

During the past several years, Halo has been recognized as one of the most popular first-person shooters of all time. For years Microsoft kept pushing Halo, which culminated with the release of Halo 2.

Bungie's official community web site features daily statistics for Halo 2 players who are actively playing the game via Xbox Live. The most recent update showed that almost 12,706 players were online in Halo 2 at the time. Also, around 261,820 unique players were registered, with 688,136 matches logged.

Source and References: www.actiontrip.com