Academic literature on the topic 'Massively multiplayer online games'

With the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) really came into their own as millions of people started playing worldwide. Providing scalability to such a large audience while maintaining a consistent gameplay experience is a diffcult task which many companies face in an industry where only few succeed. This thesis focuses on the issues of how a MMOG can be scaled to support more concurrent players and how consistency can be maintained in a Distributed Multi-Server Environment (DMSE). As a basis for investigation the notion of "Subgames" (i.e. games within games) was introduced. As smaller, more flexible game units, subgames reduce scalability problems but raise consistency concerns by requiring modular game actions in a distributed environment to function. This is addressed through a new transactional protocol and action framework which abstracts and solves consistency issues while creating an infrastructure which allows for scalability. A complete solution is illustrated using these techniques through the design of general game mechanics and subgames. The approach here further enables scalability of MMOGs in a DMSE and provides a general framework for the further investigation of MMOG consistency and scalability through subgame instances.<br>La popularité des jeux massivement multi-joueurs en ligne ( MMOGs ) a grandement augmenté avec l'arrivée du jeu World of Warcraft, qui est joué par des millions de personnes à travers le monde. Cependant, ce type d'application nécessite des infrastructures extensibles pour accommoder des milliers de joueurs, tout en offrant une expérience de jeu consistante. Ceci représente un grand obstacle que plusieurs compagnies doivent affronter, mais qui est surmonté par peu. Cette thèse aborde les problèmes reliés à la croissance du nombre de joueurs simultanés, tout en discutant comment maintenir un environnement distribué multi- serveurs ( DMSE ) consistant. La notion de sous-jeux ( un jeu qui se déroule l'intérieur d'un autre jeu ) a été utilisée pour mieux étudier le problème. En tant qu'unités de jeu plus petits et flexibles, les sous-jeux facilitent la croissance, mais augmentent les problèmes de concurrence puisque leur bon fonctionnement nécessite des actions modulaires dans un environnement distribué. Ces défis sont adressés par un nouveau protocole transactionnel et un cadre d'applications d'actions qui font abstraction et règlent les problèmes de consistance, tout en offrant une infrastructure qui permet une certaine croissance. Une solution, où les mécanismes de jeux et de sous-jeux sont adaptés en conséquence, illustre les techniques proposées dans cette thèse. Ces techniques permettent une plus grande croissance pour les jeux MMOGs dans un DMSE, tout en fournissant des outils de sous-jeux qui permettent l'étude des défis de consistance et de croissance.

Thesis (M.S.)--Wake Forest University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2009.<br>Title from electronic thesis title page. Thesis advisor: William H. Turkett Jr. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-62).

Les jeux massivement multi-joueurs en ligne (jeux MMOGs) visent à rassembler un nombre infini de joueurs dans le même univers virtuel. Pourtant, tous les MMOG existants reposent sur des architectures client / serveur centralisé qui imposent une limite sur le nombre maximum de joueurs (avatars) et sur les ressources qui peuvent coexister dans un univers virtuel donné. Cette thèse vise à proposer des solutions pour améliorer l'évolutivité de MMOG. Cette thèse explore deux services qui sont essentiels à toutes les variantes de MMOG: jumelage et détection de triche. Ces deux services sont les goulots d'étranglement connus, et pourtant les implémentations actuelles restent centralisées. Cette thèse montre également qu'il est possible de concevoir un service d'arbitrage au-dessus d'un système de réputation. Le service résultant reste très efficace sur une grande échelle, à la fois en termes de performance et en termes de prévention de la fraude. Comme l'arbitrage est un problème similaire à la détection de fautes, cette thèse étend l'approche proposée pour surveiller les défaillances<br>Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) aim at gathering an infinite number of players within the same virtual universe. Yet all existing MMOGs rely on centralized client/server architectures which impose a limit on the maximum number of players (avatars) and resources that can coexist in any given virtual universe. This thesis aims at proposing solutions to improve the scalability of MMOGs. To address the wide variety of their concerns, MMOGs rely on independent services such as virtual world hosting, avatar storage, matchmaking, cheat detection, and game design. This thesis explores two services that are crucial to all MMOG variants: matchmaking and cheat detection. Both services are known bottlenecks, and yet current implementations remain centralized. This thesis also shows that it is possible to design a peer to peer refereeing service on top of a reputation system. The resulting service remains highly efficient on a large scale, both in terms of performance and in terms of cheat prevention. Since refereeing is somewhat similar to failure detection, this thesis extends the proposed approach to monitor failures. The resulting failure detection service scales with the number of monitored nodes and tolerates jitter

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are a prominent genre in today's video game industry with the most popular MMORPGs generating billions of dollars in revenue and attracting millions of players. As they have grown, they have become a major target for both technological research and sociological research. In such research, it is nearly impossible to reach the same player scale from any self-made technology or sociological experiments. This greatly limits the amount of control and topics that can be explored. In an effort to make up a lacking or non-existent player-base for custom-made MMORPG research scenarios A.I. agents, impersonating human players, can be used to "bootstrap" the research scenario to reach the necessary massive number of players that define the game genre. This thesis presents a system that makes its human players and A.I. players indistinguishable while preserving the basic characteristics of a typical MMORPG. To better achieve identical perception of human and A.I. players, our system centers around the collection, sharing, and exchange of information while limiting the means of expression and actions of players. A gameplay scenario built on the Panoptyk engine was constructed to imitate gameplay experienced in major MMORPGs. We conducted a user-study where subjects play through the scenario with a varying number of A.I. players unknown to them. Three versions of the scenario were created to assess how indistinguishable human and A.I. players were and vice versa. We found, across 24 participants, there were 32% correct identifications, 30% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of "I don't know". This was broken down into 20% correct identifications, 42% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of "I don't know" for bot characters and 46% correct identifications, 16% incorrect identifications, and 38% answers of ``I don't know'' for human characters.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can be treated as a database application. Players request actions concurrently to alter the state of objects in the game. Since the world state is the most valuable asset of MMOGs, it is extremely important to ensure its consistency. On the other hand, the defining feature of such games is their capacity to support thousands of clients playing simultaneously, thus requiring scalability. This thesis proposes a solution which leverages typical game semantics and architectures to design scalable transaction models for action handling while maintaining the required levels of consistency. These models vary in their levels of isolation and atomicity and offer different consistency guarantees that are suitable for actions of varying importance and complexity. Action handling protocols are then designed according to those models and optimized for scalability and efficiency. We also present a persistence architecture which is integrated with the transaction models mentioned above. We show how the different consistency guarantees of each transaction model can be maintained by the persistence structure. Concrete actions are then implemented and designed using various transaction models with persistence support. We then evaluate and compare the performance of the various implementations and discuss the trade-off between performance and consistency.<br>Les jeux en ligne massivement multijoueur (MMOGs) peuvent être considérés comme des applications base de données. Les joueurs initient des actions de façon concurrentielle pour modifier l'état du jeu. Puisque l'état du monde est le plus grand atout des MMOGs, il est extrêmement important d'assurer sa consistance. D'un autre côté, la caractéristique essentielle de ces jeux est leur capacité de supporter plusieurs milliers de clients simultanément, et donc l'habileté de gérer une charge grandissante. Cette thèse propose une solution qui est fondée sur des sémantiques et architectures typiques aux jeux pour concevoir des modèles de transaction extensibles à la charge pour la gestion des actions tout en maintenant les niveaux requis de consistance. Ces modèles varient dans leurs niveaux d'isolation et d'atomicité et offrent donc des garanties de consistance variées qui sont adaptées à des actions d'importance et de complexité différente. Des protocoles de gestion des actions optimisés sont alors conçus selon ces modèles. Nous présentons aussi une architecture pour la gestion de persistance des données qui est intégrée aux modèles de transaction mentionnés ci-dessus. Nous montrons comment les garanties de consistance de chaque modèle sont maintenues par la structure persistante. Des actions concrètes sont alors mises en oeuvre et conçues selon les divers modèles de transaction avec persistance. Nous évaluons et comparons la performance de chacune des implémentations et discutons du compromis entre la performance et la consistance.

In recent years, there has been an important growth of online gaming. Today’s Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can contain millions of synchronous players scattered across the world and participating with each other within a single shared game. Traditional Client/Server architectures of MMOGs exhibit different problems in scalability, reliability, and latency, as well as the cost of adding new servers when demand is too high. P2P architecture provides considerable support for scalability of MMOGs. It also achieves good response times by supporting direct connections between players. This thesis proposes a novel hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture for MMOGs and a new dynamic load balancing for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) based this hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture. We have divided the game world space into several regions. Each region in the game world space is controlled and managed by using both a super-peer and a clone-super-peer. The region's super-peer is responsible for distributing the game update among the players inside the region, as well as managing the game communications between the players. However, the clone-super-peer is responsible for controlling the players' migration from one region to another, in addition to be the super-peer of the region when the super-peer leaves the game. In this thesis, we have designed and simulated a static and dynamic Area of Interest Management (AoIM) for MMOGs based on both architectures hybrid P2P and client-server with the possibility of players to move from one region to another. In this thesis also, we have designed and evaluated the static and dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P architecture. We have used OPNET Modeler 18.0 to simulate and evaluate the proposed system, especially standard applications, custom applications, TDMA and RX Group. Our dynamic load balancer is responsible for distributing the load among the regions in the game world space. The position of the load balancer is located between the game server and the regions. The results, following extensive experiments, show that low delay and higher traffic communication can be achieved using both of hybrid P2P architecture, static and dynamic AoIM, dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P system.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are a popular type of online video game. While these games and their players have been studied previously, there is gap in the literature that examines the relationship between one’s motivation to play MMOGs and loneliness, depression, and problematic use. For this study, 440 players of World of Warcraft (WoW), a popular MMOG, completed a demographics questionnaire and four measures, including Williams, Yee, & Caplan’s (2008) motivation measure, Peter’s & Malesky’s (2008) World of Warcraft-specific Problematic Usage-Engagement Questionnaire, UCLA’s Loneliness scale, and The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales. Results from quantitative analyses suggest that MMO players who are motivated to play for reasons of achievement and immersion are more likely to experience problematic use than those persons who play for social motivations. Loneliness and depression were only positively related with immersion motivated players, and there exists a significant negative relationship between social motivation and depression. These results suggest that gamers who play WoW for immersive reasons are the most at-risk in comparison to their peers. Implications for counseling, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

There has been a tremendous growth in the popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (or MMOGs) with millions of players interacting in their virtual game space at the same time. However, the centralized server architecture of most modern day MMOGs is unable to cope with this increase in the number of participating players. Hence, there is a need for a scalable network architecture which can support these large number of players without affecting the overall gaming experience for each player. In this thesis we propose a scalable distributed server architecture which divides the virtual game space in smaller sub spaces and assigns them across a cluster of server nodes thereby reducing the overall load per server. It is based on a distributed publish/subscribe architecture which takes care of client-server as well as server-server communication. We discuss the implementation of this architecture in a real MMOG and experimentally prove that it shows better scalability than the centralized server architecture.

This thesis examined the presentation of self in Massively Multiplayer Online games, to investigate how players create and maintain versions of self in these environments. Key research questions concerned the motivation for engaging in these behaviours, the impact of such activities on their offline lives and for those that did not engage in the active presentation of self, why they did not do this. There were three studies in the thesis, employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The first study consisted of interviews (n=29), analysed using Grounded theory, and the second an online focus group (n=13 participants) explored using thematic analysis. These results were combined to create a theoretical model for the presentation of self in MMOs. Based on these concept statements a third study (n=408) was created, using an online questionnaire design. Results indicated that a five factor model was the most satisfactory means of explaining the presentation of self in MMOs – with Presentation of the Existing Self, Social Interaction, Gaming Aesthetics, Presenting Different Sides of the Self, and Emotional Impact as the salient factors. Virtual environments are rapidly emerging as a core element of human socialising, as evidenced by the growth of the games industry and the expansion of social networking sites in the last ten years. MMOs represent just one type of virtual environment but also some of the most exciting, since they allow the presentation of multiple versions of self in a fantastical social environment. The thesis adds to the literature through its examination of the presentation of self, in illustrating how and why playe3rs experience and represent their offline self in MMOs. This has not been achieved in any other previously published work and is an original contribution to the literature.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) present fantastic, persistent worlds and narratives for a community of players to experience through pre-defined rules, roles, and environments. To be able to offer the opportunity for every player to try the same experiences, many game developers have opted to create elaborate virtual theme parks: scripted experiences within static worlds that cannot be affected or changed through player actions. Within these games, some players have turned to role-playing to establish meaningful connections to these worlds by expanding upon and subverting the game's expectations to assume a limited sense of agency within the world. The interaction between role-players and the locations they occupy within these worlds is a notable marker of this narrative layering; specific locations inform social codes of conduct, designed by developers, and then repurposed by players for their characters and stories. Through a qualitative case study in World of Warcraft on public role-playing events, this thesis considers how the design of in-game locations inform their use for role-playing, and how locations are altered through storytelling as a result.