Running Quake II on a grid

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 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.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) is the recently popular game genre that is capable of supporting more than thousands of players in a persistence game world concurrently With the growing of mobile game market size and improvement of wireless technology, a MMOG on mobile device is possible and being concerned. There are many issues that may be encountered when developing a MMOG. Since the mobile game must be created to run on hundreds of device, to deploy and distribute the MMOG on mobile device is harder. Also, the mobile application is easily interrupted by the surrounding environment, such as telecom service or network connectivity. Those make the mobile online game development more challenging. In this paper, we will propose a client framework for MMOG on mobile device that consider both MMOG and mobile games issues. We provide a flexible and easy-to-deploy platform for mobile MMOG.

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.

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.

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.

Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) are characterized by intensive interactions between many simultaneous users and real-time demands on Quality of Service (QoS). Other examples of similar, real-time online interactive applications include various virtual environments, as well as multi-pupil e-learning and simulation-based training courses. A highly desirable enhancement for MMOG is the use of mobile devices for accessing the game application. However, the limited computing power of mobile devices is an obstacle for implementing computation-intensive parts of MMOG, in particular graphics processing, on mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel runtime system for mobile MMOG and other similar applications that moves computation-intensive tasks, including graphics processing, from the mobile devices to Cloud resources. We report experimental results of our runtime system using a realistic multi-player online game.

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.

The widespread dissemination of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games causes new problems not only in the technical field, but also in the field of law. A number of countries have successfully implemented provisions in their legislation governing the legal relationship between players and distributors of online games. However, most states have left this question unresolved. Based on the real cases, this article examines the judicial practice of resolving disputes between players and operators of MMO games in the Russian Federation. The author shows a real picture of the current state of contract law governing relations in the field of the gaming industry and the position of courts in this matter. It substantiated the conclusion on the duality of approaches to solving the question of the nature of contractual relations depending on the subject going to court in Russia. It shows the imperfection of Russian civil law in this area.

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.

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.

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

Here Be (No More) Dragons: Pushing the Frontier of Research on Virtual Organizations and Teams

Distributed Virtual Environments are becoming more popular in today's computing and communications among people. Perhaps the most widely used form of such environments is Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), which are in the form of client/server architecture that requires considerable server resources to manage a large number of distributed players. Peer-to-peer communication can achieve scalability at lower cost but may introduce other difficulties. Synchronous communication is a prime concern for multi-user collaborative applications like MMOGs where players need frequently interaction with each other to share their game states. In this article, we present a hybrid MMOG architecture called MM-VISA (Massively Multiuser VIrtual Simulation Architecture). In this architecture, servers and peers are coupled together to take the inherent advantages of the centralized architecture and the scalability of distributed systems. As the virtual world is decomposed into smaller manageable zones, the players' random movement causes reorganization at the P2P overlay structure. The frequent nature of movements along with unintelligent zone crossing approaches, currently implemented in MMOGs, breaks synchronous communication. To limit such problem, we consider players' gaming characteristics to intelligently define routing paths. A graph-theoretic framework is incorporated for overlay oriented real-time distributed virtual environments. We shall show that interest-driven zone crossing, dynamic shared region between adjacent zones, and clustering of entities based on their attributes significantly decrease unstable overlay situations. The effectiveness of the presented system is justified through simulation.