Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games:a comparative analysis

This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and nonhuman elements.Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue

Resource allocation for massively multiplayer online games using fuzzy linear assignment technique

This paper investigates the possible use of fuzzy system and Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) for resource allocation for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Due to the limitation of design capacity of such complex MMOGs, resources available in the game cannot be unlimited. Resources in this context refer to items used to support the game play and activities in the MMOGs, also known as in-game resources. As for network resources, it is also one of the important research areas for MMOGs due to the increasing number of players. One of the main objectives is to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) in the MMOGs environment for each player. Regardless, which context the resource is defined, the proposed method can still be used. Simulated results based on the network resources to ensure QoS shows that the proposed method could be an alternative

A Reusable Component for Communication and Data Synchronization in Mobile Distributed Interactive Applications

In Distributed Interactive Applications (DIA) such as multiplayer games, where many participants are involved in a same game session and communicate through a network, they may have an inconsistent view of the virtual world because of the communication delays across the network. This issue becomes even more challenging when communicating through a cellular network while executing the DIA client on a mobile terminal. Consistency maintenance algorithms may be used to obtain a uniform view of the virtual world. These algorithms are very complex and hard to program and therefore, the implementation and the future evolution of the application logic code become difficult. To solve this problem, we propose an approach where the consistency concerns are handled separately by a distributed component called a Synchronization Medium, which is responsible for the communication management as well as the consistency maintenance. We present the detailed architecture of the Synchronization Medium and the generic interfaces it offers to DIAs. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively. We first demonstrate that the Synchronization Medium is a reusable component through the development of two game applications, a car racing game and a space war game. A performance evaluation then shows that the overhead introduced by the Synchronization Medium remains acceptable.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Bipartite electronic SLA as a business framework to support cross-organization load management of real-time online applications

Online applications such as games and e-learning applications fall within the broader category of real-time online interactive applications (ROIA), a new class of ‘killer’ application for the Grid that is being investigated in the edutain@grid project. The two case studies in edutain@grid are an online game and an e-learning training application. We present a novel Grid-based business framework that makes use of bipartite service level agreements (SLAs) and dynamic invoice models to model complex business relationships in a massively scalable and flexible way. We support cross-organization load management at the business level, through zone migration. For evaluation we look at existing and extended value chains, the quality of service (QoS) metrics measured and the dynamic invoice models that support this work. We examine the causal links from customer quality of experience (QoE) and service provider quality of business (QoBiz) through to measured quality of service. Finally we discuss a shared reward business ecosystem and suggest how extended service level agreements and invoice models can support this

Dynamic Load Balancing for Massively Multiplayer Online Games Using OPNET

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. In this paper, we have proposed a novel 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. We have designed and evaluated the dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P architecture. We have used OPNET Modeler 18.0 to simulate and evaluate the proposed system. 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 dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P system