Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 21
Online Gaming
Online gaming has grown from a tiny fraction of the interactive entertainment
business into a major market in its own right. In this chapter, you'll learn about
some of the features and design challenges that set online gaming apart from the
more traditional single-player or multiplayer local games. Online gaming is a tech-
nology rather than a genre, a mechanism for connecting players together rather
than a particular pattern of gameplay. Therefore, this chapter doesn't look for
design commonalities as the chapters on game genres did. Instead, it addresses
some of the design considerations peculiar to online games no matter what genre
those games belong to. It's a huge topic, however, and there is only room in this
book for the highlights.
Don't confuse online gaming, as this topic uses the term, with online gambling
or online casino gaming. Online gambling is a different industry, and is not
covered here.
The second half of the chapter is devoted to online games that are
persistent worlds
,
also known as massively multiplayer online games, or MMOGs. Raph Koster, lead
designer of both
Ultima Online
and
Star Wars Galaxies
, and Tess Snider, lead program-
mer at Trion World Network, provided a great deal of assistance with this material.
What Are Online Games?
This chapter uses the term
online games
to refer to multiplayer distributed games in
which the players' machines are connected by a network. (This is as opposed to
multiplayer local games in which all the players play on one machine and look at
the same screen.) While online games can, in principle, include solitaire games that
happen to be provided via the Internet, such as
Bejeweled
, the online aspect of soli-
taire games is incidental rather than essential to the experience.
Bejeweled
is simply
a puzzle game. Online games do not need to be distributed over the Internet; games
played over a local area network (LAN) also qualify as online games.
Some features of online games offer advantages to us as game developers, and some
offer advantages to players, attracting people who might not otherwise play com-
puter games.
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