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A recent market forecast has predicted that the global market for video games will rise to $82 billion in 2017 (http://www. forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/18/new-reportsforecasts-global-video-game-industry-will-reach-82-bil lion-by-2017/). The growth is driven by factors including advances in graphics hardware and proliferation of mobile devices. The ubiquity of network connections has also driven up the demand for online gaming, with the market forecasted to reach $35 billion by 2017 (http://www.for bes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/18/new-reports-fore casts-global-video-game-industry-will-reach-82-billionby-2017/). This increasing number of game players desire better playing experiences, straining the underlying network and system architecture, and introduces new research questions that require synthesis of a variety of research areas. This special issue focuses on network and systems aspects of games, and covers research and engineering topics that help understand networked games of today and enable the next generation of future networked games. We invited 19 selected papers published in the NetGames 2012 Workshop to expand their work and to submit to the special issue. We also received seven papers that are submitted as a result of the open call for papers. In total, 18 papers have been submitted. After a rigorous reviewing process, we accepted 11 of the submissions to appear in this special issue. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics in network and systems support for games, including cloud gaming, mobile gaming, and security. Cloud gaming has recently emerged as a new service that offers the possibility to play online games using any terminal, such as a tablet, a smartphone, or a TV screen. The concept is based on cloud computing principles, where most of the processing is achieved in the cloud and the audio/video rendering is streamed to thin terminals. Pushing the complexity toward data centers and network infrastructures offers many advantages to the customers and to the gaming industry, but it also raises many technical and scientific challenges that have recently attracted a growing attention from the researchers and the developers. Addressing these issues requires, as a preliminary step, a better understanding of this emerging service. The first five papers of this special issue address a wide range of important issues related to cloud gaming. The Paper ‘‘Dissecting the Protocol and network Traffic of the OnLive Cloud Gaming platform’’ provides a detailed analysis of the traffic associated to a popular cloud gaming platform. The different phases of the game sessions are identified and the associated data traffic is characterized in terms of bandwidth, packets size and arrival time distributions. Using these observations, the authors propose a very useful mathematical model of cloud gaming traffic. The paper ‘‘On the Performance of OnLive Thin Client Games’’ aims to provide a deep understanding of the traffic associated with cloud gaming, where traffic features are studied and compared to other multimedia services like M. Abdallah (&) Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6), Pierre and Marie Curie University, 4, Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France e-mail: Maha.Abdallah@lip6.fr

The Arab world witnessed an influx of satellite channels during the 1990s and in the early years of the first decade of the new century. Many analysts in the Arab world applauded this influx as a potential tool for political change in the Arab countries. Two stations were at the heart of the new optimism: Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya, the two most prominent 24-hour news channels in the region. Al-Jazeera proved to be more controversial because in its early years of broadcasting it managed to break taboos in the Arab media by tackling issues of human rights and hosting Arab dissidents. Also, its coverage of international conflicts (primarily Afghanistan and Iraq) has marked it as a counter-hegemonic news outlet. For the first time, the flow of news went from South to North. Some scholars who study Arab satellite media, and Al-Jazeera specifically, have gone so far as to suggest that it has created a new Arab public sphere (Lynch, Miladi). However, the political developments in the Arab world, mainly the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and what is now happening in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen, have raised questions as to how credible these suggestions are. And are we going to claim the same powers for social media in the Arab world? This article takes the form of a personal reflection on how successful (or not) Arab satellite channels are proving to be as a tool for political change and reform in the Arab world. Are these channels editorially free from Arab governments’ political and economic interests? And could new media (notably social networking sites) achieve what satellite channels have been unable to over the last two decades? 1996 saw the launch of Al-Jazeera, the first 24-hour news channel in the Arab world. However, it didn’t have much of an impact on the media scene in the region until 1998 and gained its controversial reputation through its coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (see Zayani; Miles; Allan and Zelizer; El-Nawawy and Iskandar). In the Arab world, it gained popularity with its compelling talk shows and open discussions of human rights and democracy (Alterman). But its dominance didn’t last long. In 2003, Al Walid Al Ibrahim, son-in-law of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (1921-2005) established Al Arabiya, the second 24-hour news channel in the Arab world, just before the start of the Iraq war. Many scholars and analysts saw in this a direct response to the popularity that Al-Jazeera was achieving with the Arab audiences. Al Arabiya, however, didn’t achieve the level of popularity that Al-Jazeera enjoyed throughout its years of broadcasting (Shapiro). Al Arabiya and Al-Jazeera Arabic subsequently became rivals representing political and national interests and not just news competitors. Indeed, one of Wikileaks’ latest revelations states that Al-Jazeera changed its coverage to suit Qatari foreign policy. The US ambassador to Qatar, Joseph LeBaron, was reported as saying: The Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, had joked in an interview that Al-Jazeera had caused the Gulf State such headaches that it might be better to sell it. But the ambassador remarked: “Such statements must not be taken at face value.” He went on: “Al-Jazeera’s ability to influence public opinion throughout the region is a substantial source of leverage for Qatar, one which it is unlikely to relinquish. Moreover, the network can also be used as a chip to improve relations. For example, Al-Jazeera’s more favourable coverage of Saudi Arabia's royal family has facilitated Qatari–Saudi reconciliation over the past year.” (Booth). The unspoken political rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Qatar on Lebanese domestic disputes, over Iran, and over the Palestinian internal conflict was played out in the two channels. This brings us to my central question: can Arab satellite channels, and specifically Al-Jazeera Arabic and Al Arabiya, be regarded as tools for democratic political change? In the recent revolution in Tunisia (spring 2011), satellite channels had to catch up with what social media were reporting: and Al-Jazeera more so than Al Arabiya because of previous encounters between Al-Jazeera and Zein Al Abidine bin Ali’s regime (Greenslade, The Guardian). Bin Ali controlled the country’s media and access to satellite media to suit his interests. Al-Jazeera was banned from Tunisia on several occasions and had their offices closed down. Bin Ali allowed private TV stations to operate but under indirect state control when it came to politics and what Ben Ali’s regime viewed as national and security interests. Should we therefore give social networking credit for facilitating the revolution in Tunisia? Yes, we should. We should give it credit for operating as a mobilising tool. The people were ready, the political moment came, and the people used it. Four out of ten Tunisians are connected to the Internet; almost 20 per cent of the Tunisian population are on Facebook (Mourtada and Salem). We are talking about a newly media-literate population who have access to the new technology and know how to use it. On this point, it is important to note that eight out of ten Facebook users in Tunisia are under the age of 30 (Mourtada and Salem). Public defiance and displays of popular anger were sustained by new media outlets (Miladi). Facebook pages have become sites of networking and spaces for exchanging and disseminating news about the protests (Miladi). Pages such as “The people of Tunisia are burning themselves, Mr President” had around 15,000 members. “Wall-posts” specifying the date and place of upcoming protest became very familiar on social media websites. They even managed to survive government attempts to disable and block these sites. Tunisian and non-Tunisians alike became involved in spreading the message through these sites and Arab transnationalism and support for the revolution came to a head. Many adjacent countries had Facebook pages showing support for the Tunisian revolution. And one of the most prominent of these pages was “Egyptians supporting the Tunisian revolution.” There can be little doubt, therefore, that the success of the Tunisian revolution encouraged the youth of Egypt (estimated at 80 per cent of its Facebook users) to rise up and persist in their call for change and political reform. Little did Wael Ghonim and his friends on the “Kolinah Khaled Said” (“We are all Khaled Said”) Facebook page know where their call for demonstrations on the 25 January 2011 would lead. In the wake of the Tunisian victory, the “We are all Khaled Said” page (Said was a young man who died under torture by Egyptian police) garnered 100,000 hits and most of these virtual supporters then took to the streets on 25 January which was where the Egyptian revolution started. Egyptians were the first Arab youth to have used the Internet as a political platform and tool to mobilise people for change. Egypt has the largest and most active blogosphere in the Arab world. The Egyptian bloggers were the first to reveal corruption and initiated calls for change as early as 2007 (Saleh). A few victories were achieved, such as the firing and sentencing of two police officers condemned for torturing Imad Al Kabeer in 2007 (BBC Arabic). However, these early Egyptian bloggers faced significant jail sentences and prosecution (BBC News). Several movements were orchestrated via Facebook, including the 6 April uprising of 2007, but at this time such resistance invariably ended in persecution and even more oppression. The 25 January revolution therefore took the regime by surprise. In response, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his entourage (who controlled the state media and privately owned TV stations such as Dream TV) started making declarations that “Egypt is not Tunisia,” but the youth of Egypt were determined to prove them wrong. Significantly, Mubarak’s first reaction was to block Twitter, then Facebook, as well as disrupting mobile phone text-messaging and Blackberry-messaging services. Then, on Thursday 27 January, the regime attempted to shut down the Internet as a whole. Al-Jazeera Arabic quickly picked up on the events in Egypt and began live coverage from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which resulted in Mubarak’s block of Al-Jazeera’s transmission in Egypt and the withdrawal of its operational licences. One joke exchanged with Tunisian activists on Facebook was that Egyptians, too, had “Ammar 404” (the nickname of the government censor in Tunisia). It was not long, however, before Arab activists from across the regions started exchanging codes and software that allowed Egyptians to access the Internet, despite the government blockades. Egyptian computer science students also worked on ways to access the Worldwide Web and overcome the government’s blockade (Shouier) and Google launched a special service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by dialling a phone number and leaving a voice message (Oreskovic, Reuters). Facebook group pages like Akher Khabar’s “Latest News” and Rased’s “RNN” were then used by the Egyptian diaspora to share all the information they could get from friends and family back home, bypassing more traditional modes of communication. This transnational support group was crucial in communicating their fellow citizens’ messages to the rest of the world; through them, news made its way onto Facebook and then through to the other Arab nations and beyond. My own personal observation of these pages during the period 25 January to 12 February revealed that the usage of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter changed markedly, shifting from being merely social in nature to becoming rapidly and primarily political, not only among Arab users in the Arab world, as Mourtada and Salem argue, but also throughout the Arabian diaspora. In the case of Libya’s revolution, also, social media may be seen to be a mobilising tool in the hands of both Libyans at home and across the

The cultural industry in China has made great progress these years. The seventh session of the Sixth Plenary Session and eighteenth meeting provides a perfect opportunity for the development of China's cultural industry. In the process of developing cultural industry, it is crucial to pay attention to the protection of cultural content and passing on, for the reason that it is the "raw material" and "foundation" of development. The cultural industry is a "blank check" without content, which is good-looking but not working. As an important part of cultural development, intangible cultural heritage protection and exploitation is urgent, because it is not only an important source of developing cultural industry, but also a essential way to protect national culture, inherit Chinese civilization and improve the image of a country. So how to keep pace with the rapid development of new media, make protection and exploitation of intangible cultural heritage is a significant task.

The astonishing increase in the spread of the Internet has given rise to a globally connected community proficient at deploying online games for a large number of participants geographically located very far from each other. However, online games are characterized by more stringent requirements than traditional distributed applications deployed over the Internet can fulfill. Indeed, one of the key factors in determining the success of an online game is its ability to rapidly deliver events to the various game servers that maintain the state of the game over the network. We have already demonstrated [Palazzi et al. 2004] that in this context adapting RED (random early detection) techniques, borrowed from queuing management, can improve the global responsiveness of a game. However, this solution may not be sufficient for a specific class of online games. We deem that fast-paced multiplayer online games (such as shoot 'em ups, for example) in which participants have to behave frenetically, must guarantee a very high degree of interactivity, even at the cost of partially sacrificing the consistency of the game state. In this case having only a partially consistent view of the game state will not affect a player's amusement as much as delaying action-processing activity will. Hence we explore the possibility of applying a RIO-based (RED with in and out) algorithm to manage game delivery to the various game servers, in order to improve the degree of interactivity for fast-paced online games. Preliminary experimental results confirm the viability of our approach.

With a shift in the on-line gaming landscape from individually hosted game servers, to gaming services centrally hosted by game publishers, game console manufacturers, and third-party infrastructure providers, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the geographic distribution of current game servers and players. Much like content-distribution networks are key in improving user web experience, game server placement is key in improving game player experience. This paper explores the current geographic distribution of a global set of servers for several popular on-line games as well as the geographic distribution of a set of players for a particular on-line game server. Our results quantify the breakup of current game servers across continents and show, quite suprisingly, that players do not necessarily migrate to servers that are geographically close.

Still Not on the Radar: Adolescent Risk and Gambling, Revisited

The Virtual Hosting Environment (VHE) is an advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) environment where business services can be integrated with one another across organisational boundaries and domains. The VHE also provides the means to virtualize the environment where the business servicesoperate. There are two keys areas to be considered as background for this experiment. The proof of concept aimed to provide a novel business service provision solution for online gaming. Online gaming relates to any form of game played over a network with one or more players. It involves in its simplest form a minimum of two computers (that of the player and the game server). In its more advanced form, it uses entire sets of servers, dedicated storage, and playing platforms for massive multiplayer online games (MMOG). The increasing reach of the Internet, the soaring number of connected homes, and the wider choice in technology have contributed to online gaming’s rapid growth. The Internet now offers an ever richer palette of games. The gaming industry is thriving: this was true in 2006 at the start of this Business Experiment. According to report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (2009), it is even more true today. Their report estimates that between late 2008 and 2013, the entire gaming market will grow by an average of 7.4 %, jumping from $51.4 billion in 2008 to $73.5 billion in 2013 (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2009). A recent Eurotechnology Japan report states that the Japan Gaming sector alone is booming with the combined net annual income of Japan’s top nine game companies overtaking the combined net income of Japan’s top 19 electrical giants (Eurotechnology Japan 2009). Online gaming in particular is powering the growth. In the USA, online gaming grew 22% year on year, while console game sales are expected to drop by as much as 20% year on year (comScore 2009). One of the key reasons is the cheapness of online games by comparison to console alternatives. This fuels a greater consumer demand for more readily-available, cheaper, and richer games. In Total Telecom Magazine (2009), Strategy Analytics states “Global revenues from PC and video game software reached more than US$46.5 billion in 2008, of which $6.4 billion or 22% of total revenues was derived from online channels”. In addition, “the online share of gaming is expected to continue to rise to an estimated one third of revenues in 2011/12” (Total Telecom Magazine 2009).

This poster describes the results of a 500 million packet trace of a popular on-line, multiplayer, game server. The results show that the traffic behavior of this heavily loaded game server is highly predictable and can be attributed to the fact that current game designs target the saturation of the narrowest, last-mile link (i.e. 56k modems). Specifically, in order to maximize the interactivity of the game itself and to provide relatively uniform experiences between players playing over different network speeds, on-line games typically fix their usage requirements in such a way as to saturate the network link of their lowest speed players. While the traffic observed is highly predictable, the trace also indicates that these on-line games provide significant challenges to current network infrastructure. As a result of synchronous game logic requiring an extreme amount of interactivity, a close look at the trace reveals the presence of large, highly periodic, bursts of small packets. With such stringent demands on interactivity, routers must be designed with enough capacity to quickly route such bursts without delay. As current routers are designed for bulk data transfers with larger packets, a significant, concentrated deployment of on-line game servers will have the potential for overwhelming current networking equipment.

This research analyzed the case of Ncsoft to study the organizational learning, exploitation and exploration that create dynamic capability in hypercompetitive environment. First of all, we demonstrated the activities of exploitation and exploration in Ncsoft according to the life cycle of online game industry. An exploitation related to routine, learning and fit with existing environment brings about incremental innovation. In contrast, an exploration associated with non-learning, flexibility with changing environment results in radical innovation. We examined them based on the life cycle of its various game services. NCsoft that built the leading position in online game industry focused the exploitation activities at the stage of beginning period and growth, whereas NCsoft has increased the activities of exploration at period of mature. In addition, the firm conducts an exploration for its brand new game services and R&D. Conversely, An exploitation is conducted for sustainable updating of patch service and marketing and system building. The result implies that online game companies create sustainable competitive advantage using the balance between exploitation and exploration.Keywords : Online game(온라인 게임), Exploitation(활용), Exploration(탐색), Dynamic capability(동태적 역량), Innovation(혁신)

This paper reveals the significance of localizing online games by exploring the classification, current status and future development of the “League of Legends” (LOL), which is one of the most heated and commercially successful online games all over the world. LOL, which is a typical representative of the current online games, is a hybrid of website and system. Today, with its global popularity, commercial benefits and booming status in electronic sports, it has already witnessed and experienced localization and globalization. Currently, to serve the players from different countries, there are more than 30 game servers in 9 different regions. Each server has already been localized to adapt to the local language and culture. In this paper, the Chinese server is selected as an example to be compared with the American server (the original server), thus analyzing LOL’s localization from the perspective of characters’ names and representative lines. Moreover, this paper also highlights the possible trends for further localization and globalization of the LOL and other online games, which include improvements of game servers and the chat window. In all, the industry of online games is witnessing the process of localization and globalization. Both linguistically and technically, this industry should be and can be further revised and improved for better user experiences and business purpose.

On-line games are a rapidly growing Internet application. Because of the cost in supporting on-line games and the unpredictable load on servers, companies are moving toward sharing infrastructure for game hosting. To efficiently provision on-line games, it is important to understand game workloads and the behavior of game players. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of a collection of on-line game players and game workloads using data from several sources including: a 13-month trace of an extremely busy game server containing over 2.8 million connections, a two-year trace of the aggregate game populations of over 550 on-line games, and a 4-month trace of a content-distribution network used to deliver games. The key findings from our measurement study are: (1) these gamers are an extremely difficult set of users to satisfy and unless game servers are properly set up and provisioned, gamers quickly choose to go elsewhere, (2) the popularity of these games follows a power law making games difficult to provision at launch time, (3) game workloads are predictable only over short-term intervals, (4) there are significant challenges in hosting games on shared infrastructure due to temporal and geographic synchronization across different games and other interactive applications, and (5) game software updates are a significent burden on game hosting that must be planned for. Our results have implications for both game publishers as well as infrastructure providers.

On-line games are a rapidly growing Internet application. Because of the cost in supporting on-line games and the unpredictable load on servers, companies are moving toward sharing infrastructure for game hosting. To efficiently provision on-line games, it is important to understand game workloads and the behavior of game players. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of a collection of on-line game players and game workloads using data from several sources including: a 13-month trace of an extremely busy game server containing over 2.8 million connections, a two-year trace of the aggregate game populations of over 550 on-line games, and a 4-month trace of a content-distribution network used to deliver games. The key findings from our measurement study are: (1) these gamers are an extremely difficult set of users to satisfy and unless game servers are properly set up and provisioned, gamers quickly choose to go elsewhere, (2) the popularity of these games follows a power law making games difficult to provision at launch time, (3) game workloads are predictable only over short-term intervals, (4) there are significant challenges in hosting games on shared infrastructure due to temporal and geographic synchronization across different games and other interactive applications, and (5) game software updates are a significent burden on game hosting that must be planned for. Our results have implications for both game publishers as well as infrastructure providers.

This data-driven study focuses on characterizing and predicting mobility of players between gaming servers in two popular online games, Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Understanding these patterns of mobility between gaming servers is important for addressing challenges related to scaling popular online platforms, such as server provisioning, traffic redirection in case of server failure, and game promotion. In this study, we build predictive models for the growth and the pace of player mobility between gaming servers. We show that the most influential factors in predicting the pace and growth of migration are related to the number of in-game interactions. Declared friendship relationships in the online social network, on the other hand, have no effect on predicting mobility patterns.

Many of today's real-time multi-player online games are highly dependent on the communication network that connects players with the game and each other. Factors such as network latency and network throughput can significantly affect a user's gaming experience. For example, many online games use a (logically) centralized game server that acts as a rendezvous point for players to exchange real-time gaming events. The number and location of these servers in the network plays a critical role in the interactive response time of the game. Currently, gaming companies go to great lengths to find the best locations for the placement of their game servers. However, finding the best locations is challenging because the number of players and their locations is not known ahead of time. Consequently, game companies typically build a generic (static) game network that hopefully will provide acceptable performance to most users. With the growing popularity of cloud computing and software defined networking (SDN), it is now possible to build a custom game network on-the-fly; a game network tailored for a particular game and its current participants (players). In this paper, we introduce the concept of a HyperNet Game that is capable of dynamically creating and deploying a software defined network tailored to the needs of the game and the current set of participants in the game. We present an example multi-player hypernet game that we have developed that is able to dynamically deploy optimally placed game servers based on the current set of players. We present performance results that show greatly improved user response times compared to the currently deployed (static) game server network used today.

Online gaming generated $178 billion globally in 2020, with the popular shooter, action-adventure, role-playing, and sporting titles commanding hundreds of millions of players worldwide. Most online games require only a few hundred kbps of bandwidth, but are very sensitive to latency. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keen to reduce “lag” by tuning their peering relationships and routing paths to game servers are hamstrung by lack of visibility on: (a) gaming patterns, which can change day-to-day as games rise and fall in popularity; and (b) locations of gaming servers, which can change from hour-to-hour across countries and cloud providers depending on player locations and matchmaking. In this paper, we develop methods that give ISPs visibility into online gaming activity and associated server latency. As our first contribution, we analyze packet traces of ten popular games and develop a method to automatically generate signatures and accurately detect game sessions by extracting key attributes from network traffic. Field deployment in a university campus identifies 31 k game sessions representing 9,000 gaming hours over a month. As our second contribution, we perform BGP route and Geolocation lookups, coupled with active ICMP and TCP latency measurements, to map the AS-path and latency to the 4,500+ game servers identified. We show that the game servers span 31 Autonomous Systems, distributed across 14 countries and 165 routing prefixes, and routing decisions can significantly impact latencies for gamers in the same city. Our study gives ISPs much-needed visibility so they can optimize their peering relationships and routing paths to better serve their gaming customers.