Managing latency and fairness in networked games

Abstract

Networked games can be seen as forerunners of all kinds of participatory entertainment applications delivered through the Internet. Physically dispersed players are immersed in a common virtual environment where they interact in real time. When a user performs an action, other users must be made aware of that action. Otherwise, there is a discrepancy in the perceptions of participants about the overall state of the virtual world. This discrepancy could lead to undesirable and sometimes paradoxical outcomes. In particular, first-person shooter, and to a lesser extent role-playing games impose stringent constraints on responsiveness and consistency. Disciplines Physical Sciences and MathematicsPublication Details

Experiences from Implementing a Mobile Multiplayer Real‐Time Game for Wireless Networks with High Latency

“…Fairness in network games is measurements to avoid some player to have an advantage over others due to latency [33]. Lin et al propose a synchronized messaging service named Sync-MS to balance the tradeoff between response time and fairness [34].…”

“…One of the main challenges when developing multiplayer online games is how to handle network latency. The latency of data packets sent between clients and server causes inconsistencies of the players' views and can give certain players advantages and ruin the fairness in the game [8].…”

Fairness Assessment in Networked Games with Olfactory and Haptic Senses

“…Before the assessment, each pair of subjects was asked to practice on the condition that there was no constant delay. The fairness (as described earlier, the fairness in the game means that the same condition is provided to all the players [12]) at this time was regarded as the standard (i.e., fair) in the assessment. After practice, they were asked to play the networked balloon bursting game with olfactory and haptic senses on the condition that there were constant delays.…”

“…However, the authors do not take account of the influence of the network delay for haptic sense. Therefore, in this paper, we deal with the networked balloon bursting game [6] with olfactory and haptic senses and investigate the influence of network delay on the fairness (the fairness in the game means that the same condition is provided to all the players [12]) between players by QoE assessment. We also compare assessment results with those in the networked games with olfactory and haptic senses, and clarify the differences owing to usage of olfactory and haptic senses among the games.…”

The Playing Session: Enhanced Playability for Mobile Gamers in Massive Metaverses

“…A lot of studies focus on the communication-related problems arising from the distributed nature of the gaming architectures, both from the server and the client point of view [8]. That is, the impact of packet loss and communication latency on the playability and the fairness of Internet games have been widely investigated.…”