In-game browsers and media players: why not?

One thing that I absolutely hate is having to alt+tab in games, or having to play in windowed mode. I’d imagine that many other people probably feel the same way. This happens most often in MMOs, mainly because there’s often need to get to browser windows and media players during extended periods of unbroken play. Just because of the nature of the online game, I find myself sacrificing optimal brightness/contrast and graphical quality for the ability to quickly alt+tab. It’s more important to have information at the tips of my fingers than to have 5 trillion more shaders on my in-game fingertips.

This is why I can’t understand why more MMOs don’t have these same capabilities in-game. Even EQLive had a media player capable of playing mp3s, if rudimentary. EVE is capable of playing the same, and I know that there are several other games with similar capabilities, but what about the big players? There’s not the slightest semblance of a media player in EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft, and the former is one of the biggest resource hogs known to man. Alt+tabbing EQ2 is like playing russian roulette.

To the game’s credit, though, after logging back in recently I was pleasantly surprised with the addition of a browser window. Given the open source nature of the Gecko browser engine and the prevalence of the firefox browser, I’m completely at a loss for why in-game browsers don’t come standard in games. I don’t want to imply that it would be a walk in the park to add that kind of capability, but clearly the tools are there. Standards-compliant browser rendering engines are available, for free, to whomever wants to use them. My cell phone has a browser, why not my game?

Being a student of economics, I realize that specialization of programs independently of each other will result in better software (that is, if a game company writes their own browsers and mp3 players in game, they’re taking time away from developing features in the game, etc), but in a world where music and the web are two of the most important components of daily life (ipod, iphone anyone?), I hardly see the harm in providing these to gamers. Maybe the innovators behind xfire will expand their aim to the media/browsing world in the near future. At least that’s my hope.