Greg's Corner

Shall we play a game?

Come on. Be honest. You’re not going to get a lot done today. It’s Friday, the boss has left early for the weekend and the phones are pretty quiet. The problem is that the IT Department has stripped anything even remotely fun from your computer. So if you’re looking for something to keep you occupied while the minutes slowly tick away until quitting time, Google has got your back.

As of yesterday, if you go to Google Search and type in either ‘tic tac toe’ or ‘solitaire’ you’ll now be able to play those games within your browser. This works on both desktop and mobile platforms. These are just the latest tricks you can do with Google Search dating back to when they fist introduced the ‘do a barrel roll’ trick. Google has also put games in browser before as it once put a PAC-MAN game within the Google Doodle when it was celebrating PAC-MAN’s 30th anniversary.

The fact that Google chose tic tac toe as one of their games reminds me of the 1980s movie War Games and how Matthew Broderick’s character had to have the military supercomputer play itself in tic tac toe in order to prevent nuclear Armageddon. Back then, even the most rudimentary video games required either a console or computer. Now in a lot of instances we only need a browser or an app. In case you’re not that old and have always lived with more complex games, appreciate what you have now because you will see many more amazing technological advances in your lifetime.