Guest editorial for special issue on network and systems support for games

Abstract

Computer games, now a significant economic sector andsubject to both academic and industry research anddevelopment, continue to grow in popularity at a sub-stantial rate. Multiplayer networked games, which enablehundreds of thousands of players to simultaneously interactwith each other, are now widely used not only just forentertainment, but also for socializing, business, com-merce, scientific experimentation, and many other practicalpurposes. Literally millions of people spend their time andmoney in game worlds such as World of Warcraft, whichnow hosts more than 10 million subscribers [2] with a peakof 500,000 players online at a given time, or EntropiaUniverse, which holds the number 1 and number 2 recordfor the most expensive ‘‘virtual’’ real estate player-to-player sale, each over US$300,000 per virtual property.Recently, Entropia Universe’s Planet Calypso, a largevirtual real estate with more than 950,000 registeredaccounts from 200 countries and with US$428 millionplayer-to-player transactions in 2010, has been bought forUS$6 million by SEE Virtual World [3]. A detailed anal-ysis by In-Stat indicates that the revenue generated fromsales of virtual goods has increased 245 %: from US$2.1billion in 2007 to US$7.3 billion in 2010, and that suchrevenues will rise to US$14 billion by 2014 [4]. These arein addition to the player’s gaming purchases and sub-scription fees, which the NPD Group reports to be US$3.3billion just in the fourth quarter of 2011 and only takinginto account the US, UK, France, and Germany’s non-physical retail sales [5]. In China, another large and rapidlygrowing market, online games generated revenue of 11.27billion Yuan (US$1.77 billion) in the first quarter of 2012alone [1]. As these online games become more popular andsignificant contributors to Internet traffic, research needs tobe devoted to manage and support the emerging massive-ness, its traffic on the network, and the users’ quality ofexperience.In this special issue, we focus on online games andcover scientific, engineering, and research topics in termsof systems and networking support to enable such games.We start off the special issue by two review articles. First is‘‘ From 101 to nnn: A Review and a Classification ofComputer Game Architectures’’, which presents the GameWorld Graph (GWG) framework to analyze and classifycomputer game architectures. GWG can cover all gamesranging from single player to massively multiplayer gamesand allows researchers to reflect on current and futurearchitectural strategies as well as techniques that transcendspecific designs, such as anti-cheat strategies. This isfollowed by ‘‘Player Behavior and Traffic Characterizationfor MMORPGs: A Survey’’, which presents current researchefforts in measuring, characterizing, and modeling Mas-sively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG)from two aspects of application level behavior and networktraffic, focusing on the relationship between those twoaspects and providing measurements of network traffic andplayer behavior with key information regarding variousdatasets.