The Technologies Behind Online Bingo. Image credit: AdobeStock
Bingo is bigger than it has ever been before right now and the majority of those playing are doing so online. That shift has helped the game attract a younger demographic although, it remains one of the few types of online gaming to be dominated by women rather than men.
The increasingly sophisticated technology powering online bingo sites like poshbingo.co.uk has helped a game of bingo become more accessible and better to play than ever before. This is another key factor contributing to its success.
Bingo is a type of gaming with a long history, as its origins can be traced all the way back to Italy in the 1500s. It was during the 1920s that the modern day version debuted in the United States, but it was not the US that initially took bingo to its heart most strongly.
Instead the game reached the UK during the 1950s/1960s and very rapidly became hugely popular among women. The bingo hall became a fixture of almost every town and city in the country and groups of women would go to them on Friday and Saturday nights to play the game and socialize with each other.
Bingo then started to go into decline during the 1980s, before getting a new lease of life with the launch of the online variant in 1996. US site Bingo Zone was the very first and the timing coincided with the rise of the internet in general during the new century, introducing the excitement of bingo to a fresh and younger generation of players.
The fact that the principles behind the game could be adapted so easily to the digital world has ensured the continuing success of bingo.
Technology is needed to power online bingo sites.
Various types of software are deployed to make the experience of online bingo better than ever in 2022. These are some of the most important ones.
Random Number Generator (RNG) software is widely used in online gaming and is central to the digital bingo game. This software helps to replicate the experience of playing in a bingo hall, where balls are picked out of a bowl that the players can see.
RNG software ensures numbers from within a numerical range are selected with no underlying pattern. This means that people playing can be sure that the games are fair just as they could when playing in a hall.
The most common type of online bingo game involves the player downloading the software used by the website to access the games. Improvements in technology during the past 25 years mean that this can be done much more quickly and speedily now, which makes the game more appealing.
Downloading bingo software also enables people to play it offline, further increasing its accessibility.
This is a more recent development and it has opened bingo up to those who do not want to add software to their computer or mobile device. HTML5 technology is the driver behind instant play bingo software.
For those unfamiliar with the term, HTML5 is the most up to date variant of the Hypertext Markup Language code that is designed to ‘describe’ websites.
The last of the major bingo software developments is graphics cards. These are a type of electronic circuit that allows everything from video to pictures to be created ultra-rapidly.
Essentially graphics cards let people play bingo games online smoothly and quickly without draining the energy of their computer’s central processing unit (CPU).
All of the various software developments in online bingo are helping to improve the overall accessibility of the game. That in turn is bringing bingo to ever-greater numbers of people.
The downloadable software created by major companies like Microgaming, PlayTech and Dragonfish has the benefit of allowing people to play offline once they have it installed on their device. This means that they are not restricted to playing bingo in places where there is a Wi-Fi connection available.
This software has largely been superseded by instant play in 2022 though. The latter has been adopted by most young bingo players because – as the name indicates – it allows them to start playing more or less straight away. With instant play software, all a player has to do is create an account, log in and choose their preferred bingo game.
With this software players can also move seamlessly between multiple bingo sites at the same time, which the younger breed of online player likes to do.
Graphics cards have the advantage of making the video, animations and imagery of online bingo sites run in a smoother, more ‘real’ and interactive way. This has helped to bring the virtual bingo experience closer to that which people enjoyed in the old bingo hall days.
Technology is enhancing every part of the games world, including bingo. It is making it possible for people to play this game on and offline, to gain almost instant access to the games that they wish to play and making the actual experience of playing online bingo much better.