A hybrid P2P communications architecture for zonal MMOGs

In the basis of analysis of education potential of MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game, combining massively multiplayer online game in the present situation of the application of education teaching, discusses the massively multiplayer online games in the education teaching, so as to the theory foundation education in massively multiplayer online game, the reasonable application of teaching theory, and finally, put forward expectations about massively multiplayer online game in future education teaching.

Millions of people play Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and participate in the social networks built around MMOGs daily. These players turn into a collaborative community to exchange game news, advice, and expertise, but in return expect support such as player reports and clan statistics. Thus, the MMOG social networks need to collect and analyze MMOG data, in a process of continuous MMOG analytics. With the appearance of cloud computing, it has become attractive to use on-demand resources to run automated MMOG data analytics tools. In this work we present CAMEO, an architecture for Continuous Analytics for Massively multiplayEr Online games on cloud resources. Our architecture provides various mechanisms for MMOG data collection and continuous analytics of a pre-determined accuracy in real settings. We implement and deploy CAMEO to perform continuous analytics on data from RuneScape, a popular MMOG. Using resources from various real clouds, including the commercial cloud of Amazon, CAMEO can analyze the characteristics of a community of over 3,000,000 active players, and follow the progress of 500,000 of these players for over a week. Thus, we show evidence that CAMEO can support the social networks built around MMOGs.

Millions of people play Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and participate in the social networks built around MMOGs daily. These players turn into a collaborative community to exchange game news, advice, and expertise, but in return expect support such as player reports and clan statistics. Thus, the MMOG social networks need to collect and analyze MMOG data, in a process of continuous MMOG analytics. With the appearance of cloud computing, it has become attractive to use on-demand resources to run automated MMOG data analytics tools. In this work we present CAMEO, an architecture for Continuous Analytics for Massively multiplayEr Online games on cloud resources. Our architecture provides various mechanisms for MMOG data collection and continuous analytics of a pre-determined accuracy in real settings. We implement and deploy CAMEO to perform continuous analytics on data from RuneScape, a popular MMOG. Using resources from various real clouds, including the commercial cloud of Amazon, CAMEO can analyze the characteristics of a community of over 3,000,000 active players, and follow the progress of 500,000 of these players for over a week. Thus, we show evidence that CAMEO can support the social networks built around MMOGs.

How to support massively multiplayer online games (MMGs) on the internet has been a hotspot in the industry and research field. With consideration to the scalability and low cost, the peer-to-peer (P2P) system has been expected to support MMGs. The premise of most of the existing P2P-based Communication Models (PCMs) for MMGs is that the network environment is homogeneous. However, we believe that the network's heterogeneity has a significant impact on the latency in network communication. Here, we present a physical-level simulator for PCM, named Pigeon. It is portable for different P2P protocols, communication models and RPG applications. The Pigeon aims to provide a general platform to test the performance of various PCMs on a heterogeneous network. The preliminary experiments on the Pigeon show some valuable results. Index Terms—MMGs, Peer-to-Peer, Heterogeneity, Latency, Physical-level

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are becoming very popular in recent years, due to the rapid growing of applications, such as massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). As the number of concurrent users increases, scalability becomes one of the major challenges in designing an interactive DVE system. One solution to address this scalability problem is to adopt a multi-server architecture. While some methods focus on the quality of partitioning the load among the servers, others focus on the efficiency of the partitioning process itself. However, all these methods neglect the effect of network delay among the servers on the accuracy of the load balancing solutions. As we show in this paper, the change in the load of the servers due to network delay would affect the performance of the load balancing algorithm. In this work, we conduct a formal analysis of this problem and discuss two efficient delay adjustment schemes to address the problem. Our experimental results show that our proposed schemes can significantly improve the performance of the load balancing algorithm with neglectable computation overhead.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are becoming a very important part of computer entertainment business. With recent development of broadband technologies, the increase of the number of players is putting a strong pressure on this type of applications. Commonly used clients/server systems do not cope well with scalability, limiting the number of players who interact with each other, are not robust enough and might be subject to bottleneck due to their centralized infrastructure. These systems also force the developers to invest enormous amount of money on hardware and time to design complex software systems. To solve these problems we propose a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture for MMOGs. In this paper we discuss the issues surrounding MMOGs, the limitations in term of network infrastructure, and the lack of simulation environment to study and evaluate network architecture and protocol. We use a peer-to-peer (P2P) based architecture and protocol to provide a more scalable, flexible and robust technology solution than currently used infrastructures. We have conducted the design and implementation of a modular MMOG: 'time-prisoners', using a P2P protocol developed in Java and JXTA. The characteristics of P2P overlays enable to organize dynamically, and in transparent way for the users, the group of players according to their locations in the virtual world, and allow to design scalable mechanism to distribute the game state to the players and to maintain the world consistent in case of node failures.

The claim that video games are replacing literacy activities that is bandied about in the American mainstream press is based not only on unspecified definitions of both ‘games' and ‘literacy’ but also on a surprising lack of research on what children actually do when they play video games. In this article, the author examines some of the practices that comprise game play in the context of one genre of video games in particular — massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Based on data culled from a two-year online cognitive ethnography of the MMOG Lineage (both I and II), the author argues that forms of video game play such as those entailed in MMOGs are not replacing literacy activities but rather are literacy activities. In order to make this argument, the author surveys the literacy practices that MMOGamers routinely participate in, both within the game's virtual world (e.g. social interaction, in-game letters) and beyond (e.g. online game forums, the creation of fan sites and fan fiction). Then, with this argument in place, she attempts to historicize this popular contempt toward electronic ‘pop culture’ media such as video games and suggest a potentially more productive (and accurate) framing of the literacy practices of today's generation of adolescents and young adults.

In massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), complex social environments exist in which cooperation is central not only to playing the game but also to experiencing it as an individual player. The growth of multiplayer games that emphasise cooperative activities in computer-based environments has sparked academic interest in collaboration and its role in the field, engaging scholars from domains such as human–computer interaction and digital entertainment. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis of 70 peer-reviewed journal papers published between 2015 and 2024. This data is derived from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. This literature review contributes to the understanding of collaborative factors in MMOGs, which include task interdependence, communication, trust, leadership, and player behaviour. The review is in the field using bibliometrics. To present the findings, we construct an input–process–output (IPO) model that links game features (inputs) and interaction dynamics (processes) to team performance and player experience (outputs) in MMOGs. This review maps the field’s dominant factors (task interdependence, communication, trust, leadership, and player behaviour), pinpoints methodological priorities, and sets a concrete agenda for future research on team collaboration in MMOGs.

Online game's traffic becomes one of the important traffic over the Internet. In last decade, popularity of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) rapidly increased. Most of MMOG are constructed based on client-server architecture. MMOG needs a network with very low-latency point-to-point in upstream direction and low-latency broadcasted from server to client in downstream direction. In the broad-band access networks, passive optical network (PON) is one of the best solutions to meet the higher bandwidth demands with low-latency. Among PON system Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) due to low cost, simplicity, and provide high bandwidth seems one of the best architecture for the MMOG. In this paper, we introduce a new Optical Network Unit (ONU) architecture and new Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) for handling online game's traffic. The proposed ONU is able to classify MMOG game and pass it to new queue instead to send the MMOG traffic to the Best Effort (BE) queue. The DBA can delay MMOG queue for some cycle without effect to the delays. Simulation results depict that our propose architecture can improve the overall QoS in terms of mean packet delay and packet loss.

Understanding the distributions and behaviors of players within Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is essential for research in scalable architectures for these systems. We provide the first look into this problem through a measurement study on one of the most popular MMOGs, World of Warcraft [15]. Our goal is to answer four fundamental questions: how does the population of the virtual world change over time, how are players distributed in the virtual world, how much churn occurs with players, and how do they move in the virtual world. Through probing-based measurements, our preliminary results show that populations fluctuate according to a prime-time schedule, player distribution and churn appears to occur on a power-law distribution, and players move to only a small number of zones during each playing session. The ultimate goal of our research is to design an accurate player model for MMOGs so that future research can predict and simulate player behavior and population fluctuations over time.

Massively Multiplayer Online Cloud Game (MMOCG) is a combination of cloud gaming and Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). Running MMOGs on the cloud can reduce the cost for the players, attract potential players, and meet the nowadays preference of mobile devices. However, the MMOCGs introduce new challenges that need to be addressed. MMOGs usually consume more computational resources because of their sophisticated graphics. Hosting MMOCGs can be more expensive for game operators than hosting other genres of games on the cloud. In order to earn a decent profit, the cost of hosting MMOCGs must be reduced to an acceptable cost. Moreover, MMOCG introduce extra cloud servers to MMOG, which increased the burden of network transmission. So, the MMOCGs must have a good quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) to retain the players. In this thesis, we study the server allocation problem to improve MMOCGs in many aspects, including money cost, QoS, and QoE. We proposed three different server allocation strategies to address the challenges of MMOCGs in different situations. We first consider the MMOCG system with several cloud gaming platforms that lie in different locations in the world, each can provide a type of server that can host MMOG on them. The cloud gaming system only obtains the information necessary for gaming. With only the log-in information, a server allocation problem is defined to reduce the money cost of hosting MMOCGs and provide an acceptable network latency for the players. The problem is formulated into an optimization problem that aims to minimize the weighted combination of server rental cost, data transfer cost, and network latency. A genetic algorithm is developed to solve the minimization problem. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method and compare it with the state-of-the-art as well. The experimental results show that the method gives a lower money cost and a shorter network latency most of the time. We then consider the MMOCG system that can collect the past logging in and out data of the players. We proposed a server allocation problem that aims to reduce the cost of cloud server rental and improve the QoE of the system. A genetic algorithm with gaming time prediction is proposed to solve the problem. The gaming time of the players logging into the system is predicted by the model trained by a neural network. We conduct experiments to evaluate our method and the proposed gaming time prediction model. The results show that our prediction model can achieve almost highly accurate prediction and the server allocation strategy we proposed outperforms the prior art in both server rental and QoE. At last, we consider the influence of QoE on the movement of players during gaming time and propose a server allocation problem aiming to improve the QoE of players during gaming time. We propose a genetic algorithm with trace prediction to address this problem. A trace prediction that predicts the future positions of players for a few time steps when they log into the MMOCG system. Experiments are conducted to evaluate our method by measuring the network latency, mean opinion score, and the time consuming computation. The results show that our method outperforms the genetic algorithm without trace prediction in over 50% of the cases.

The economy crisis swept all over the world in 2008, but theindustry of massive multi-player online game (MMOG) did pretty well through last year. The major reason of that should be the enormous growth of the game players and their payments. The interactive behaviors among those players in MMOG make up of a complex relationship network. Based on our study, the core players of relationship network influence the other players because of the interactive pattern of MMOG. We classify players based on degree distribution of the relationship network, and apply the methods to two types of MMOG with different payment patterns. Then we come to a conclusion that the game companies should pay more attention on the demand of the core players. Our study in this paper should be used to improve the current E-game system design and strategies.

State management is a basic requirement for multiuser virtual environments (VEs) such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Current MMOGs rely on centralized server-clusters that possess inherent scalability bottlenecks and are expensive to adopt and deploy. In this paper, we propose Voronoi state management (VSM) to maintain object states for peer-to-peer-based virtual worlds. By dynamically partitioning the VE with Voronoi diagrams and aggregating game states of overloaded nodes onto superpeers, VSM supports existing consistency control to enable scalable, load balanced, and fault tolerant VE state management. As both client and server-side resources are utilized collaboratively, VSM also integrates both client-server and peer-to-peer VE designs in a unified approach.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Worlds are among the most popular applications on the internet. As player numbers increase, the limits of the currently dominant client/server architecture are becoming obvious. In this paper, we propose a new distributed event dissemination protocol for Virtual Worlds and MMOGs. This protocol is based on the idea of mutual notification: all players send their game event messages directly to all neighbouring players inside their Area of Interest (AOI). The connectedness of the system is ensured by binding neighbours. They are selected using quad-trees. We show by simulation that the proposed system achieves practical performance for Virtual Worlds and MMOGs.

In current Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) the distribution of load is not distributed dynamically. But players tend to concentrate in certain regions of the game world and cause overload conditions. Therefore we propose the use of structured Peer-to-Peer technology for the server infrastructure of the MMOGs to improve the reliability and scalability. Previous work segmented the game work into rectangular areas but often split a group of players to different servers. This work presents a cluster-based P2P approach, which is able to dynamically adapt to the current state of the game and handle uneven distributions of players. We show through simulation, also with traces from real online games, that the cluster-based approach performs better than the previous P2P-based system.