Note: This article is based on a white paper written about
online gaming for broadband as well as completed
research about online gaming.
Both of these are available for purchase from Birds-Eye.Net.
Internet gaming is one of the hottest growing markets in the world. Among today’s
hundreds/thousands of game titles for personal computers lies the even older (perhaps
larger) isolated market for game consoles played on consumer televisions. The advent of
increasingly available broadband Internet connectivity along with a recent game console
from Microsoft that now includes a Ethernet port present the potential for an interesting
merger of two previously separate industries. This impending merger multiplies the number
of Internet capable gamers, radically changing and exposing the landscape of demand for
Internet games!
So what is the big deal with having a multitude of games to play out on the Internet?
Why is this significant? Furthermore, what drives people to play games, especially
Internet games? All questions one should understand before gaming will make any sense to
the average person – non-gamer!
The evolution of gaming popularity
Have you ever played pong? You know, the “really” old video game where you
would manipulate some device (keyboard/dial/joy stick) to move a bar up and down a
television/computer screen in an effort to deflect a ball-like object against some kind of
wall. I recall people, including myself, spending hours playing that game – a match
of skill against a computer who could actually make each deflection increasingly
difficult. After a while you either get frustrated and give up or beat the game and thus
the fun ran out. While pong was a pathetically simplistic example of a single player game,
this concept of either giving up or the fun running out applies to any game you play
against the computer. The computer is simply a boring opponent.
After pong, new games began to enter the gaming market with a trend consistently moving
towards involving more of your senses (e.g. sight, sound, touch). With each game came
increasing intelligence, more complex graphics and colors, and high quality sounds (even
voices, and theater surround) that certainly grab your attention and can hold it for hours
(if not days/weeks/…). Newer games even have weights built into the joysticks or hand
controllers to stimulate your sense of touch. However, even with all these improvements
the same thing happens – either you get frustrated and give up or you beat the game
and the fun runs out.
The next major advancement of games came with multiplayer games that allowed two or
more people to interact with a single game or would allow two game consoles or computers
to connect to one another. In these games, instead of simply playing against the computer,
you played against other people in the same room (your parents, neighbors, friends,
cozens, etc.). This type of play represented a significant advancement in that a single
game could engage more than one individual. It also represented a much more diverse play
environment where players could team up against each other and do things much more
spontaneous and deceiving than a computer opponent would during a single player version of
the same game. Multiplayer games therefore became much more interesting, unpredictable,
and challenging to gamers. Unfortunately, these games required that the extra players be
physically present in the same room – a difficult limitation to overcome considering
its hard to find players willing to travel to someone’s house before they can play
some game. This inconvenience limited game consoles and PC games from exploiting the
allure of multiplayer games.
Radical changes brought about by the Internet
The Internet has changed EVERYTHING when it comes to games. Take a small software
gaming company called ID Software, it has 17 employees, two blockbuster games, and 20
million a year in revenue - gaming is big business! ID (Software) figured out that gamers
eventually find playing against the computer boring and that multiplayer games were the
way to go. However, before the concept of multiplayer games could take off ID needed to
find a way to address the limitation of players needing to be physically present in the
same room. ID’s solution to this limitation was to develop a way for gamers to play
against each other across a computer network and then eventually over the Internet. The
Internet permitted multiple computers to communicate with one another and thus allowed
multiple PC gamers to join the same game. So instead of playing against some computer
opponent, you can now play with your friends, your co-workers, fellow apartment residents,
pretty much anyone worldwide through exploiting the power of the Internet. However
Internet-based multiplayer games were limited to those using a PC – standalone game
consoles seemed to be excluded from this group because they lacked the capability to
connect to the outside world. Only recently have game consoles like X-Box come with
built-in network connectivity potential.
The capability of gaming consoles to access the Internet and the increasing number of
online games is significant. Projections of the numbers of gaming consoles show that by
the end of 2002 around 65 million game consoles worldwide will be in consumer homes and by
2003 there will over 69 million (source USB Warburg). Since gaming consoles cost less than
PCs (~$300) that also makes them more attractive to a wider audience – or simply a
whole new breed of on-line gamers. It is also important to note that dollar for dollar the
gaming console is much better platform for games than the PC. While Microsoft’s X-Box
clearly has built-in broadband capability, Sony and Nintendo (the other two major game
console makers) are said to have plans in the works to also add an Ethernet port to their
next generation consoles and possibly even an expansion card that adds this capability to
more recent game consoles (Sony’s PS2 for example has a target date for this
capability scheduled for November 2002).
Changes in games as a result of the Internet
As these Internet games have evolved so have the variations of play. Take one game
produced by ID and one of its blockbuster hits – Quake. Quake leverages three pieces
of software to offer it on-line: game servers, game clients, and master servers. These
three entities play in important roll in the wide spread popularity of the game. The game
server actually hosts the game. The master server allows the game servers to
post/advertise their games on it – whereby allowing gamers to find these games. The
game client allows Internet gamers to connect over the Internet to these game servers and
play the hosted game. The differences between the standalone game distributed to
consumers on CD and the games hosted out on the Internet are quite extensive! First of
all, it’s not just a single out-of-the-box game that gamers play out on the Internet
– virtually anything is possible. While all games being played out on the Internet
still require you to first purchase the game CD from a retail source and install it on
your PC or insert it into your game console, the games played on the Internet are quite a
bit different from the one that came with your CD. The Internet game, rules, players, and
environment can actually vary greatly depending on the creativity of the person hosting
the game as well as the players who play that game. Quake supports user modifications (or
mods as gamers call them). A mod is piece of programming code that can be developed
externally to the game server application and then loaded during run time. Quake mods rang
from very simple changes to game play to very extensive overhauls of all aspects of game
play – the possibilities here are limited only by ones imagination! Game server
owners can create/run different mods, select different maps and rotations that the players
will encounter, and manage a multitude of other performance settings and game play
environment parameters. You can even build your own maps – there are hundreds of
custom maps created by die-hard gamers who have built entire cities, scenic majesties
(Figure 1.0), spaceships (Figure 2.0), etc. Building these maps takes weeks, even months
to build and may contain a host of custom built sounds, weapons, etc.
Figure 1.0 |
Figure 2.0 |
Beyond that you can even totally change the game from one person against everyone to
team play, or even change the game play. Quake for example supports a number of different
games (mods) including Deathmatch, Team Fortress, Capture the flag, Paint Ball, etc.
– all of which have been created outside the software that ID distributes via CD.
These mods are available on the Internet as free downloads and most can be installed
relatively easy on existing Quake servers. While all these games fit within the confines
supported by the game’s graphics and basic capability (shoot-em-up), they all
represent drastically different play and attract different types and numbers of
players. For example, Deathmatch (everyone against everyone) generally runs with
about 2-10 players in each game where as Team Fortress (army against army) generally runs
with 6-20 players in each game.
While any Quake game can hold up to about 32 players, this number is only the maximum
set by the game itself. In actual play, games with more than 8 or 10 players can be
overwhelming – if not impossible to play. The reason for this is if too many players
are in a room and they are all shooting its hard to stay alive long enough to do anything
before you get taken out – it can also slow down the game play as the performance of
the server is decreased when it must manage multiple players all shooting one another in
tight quarters. Thus the size of the map being used can impact a number of things. Maps
can consist of a single room or 10s of rooms. The larger the map, generally, the more
players that can realistically all play in a single game. But who wants to play in a large
map with only a handful of players – takes too long to find the enemy! Quality Quake
servers keep the size of maps rotated by the server held in close check with the number of
players each server expects to attract. With thousands of Quake servers out on the
Internet, active players generally have hundreds of attractive game servers to choose from
– thus it is seldom that any one game server gets overrun with players. Very few game
servers are just that popular. The game play of Internet gaming servers goes beyond
that which your typical computer opponent is capable – even the most complex/smart
computer games are not as ingenious as real people. The reason for this is because players
find a way to push the game to the limits – even cheat at it! Some players are so
good they take the game to another level literally (e.g. rocket jumping, create bots that
automate things, shooting while flying, hiding up in the rafters, etc.). These players
seek out other players of their skill or greater – which they can only find on the
Internet! Thus as players increase their skill, they consistently seek out more advanced
players to compete against – Internet games host an endless supply of talented
gamers! Most gaming server sites encourage player ranking by tracking player statistics
that influence players to come back to their site and improve their statistics. Since
there are so many Quake players out there it is very difficult to reach the best player in
the world status but several have done it (Dennis “Thresh” Fong did it in 1999
and won a Ferrari). Each player can also express him/her self in games. For example
they can create and wear different skins – a skin reflects the way a player appears
graphically to others they play with/against within a game. There are a number of
different skin editors available to the public that allow players to create their own
skins or even download one of hundreds of skins other people have already created. These
skins cover the full gambit from superheroes (like Batman pictured in Figure 3.0) and
women (e.g. Firestar pictured in Figure 4.0) to even movie characters (e.g. Star Wars
action figure Bobafett pictured in Figure 5.0).
Figure 3.0: Batman Skin |
Figure 4.0: Firestar Skin |
Figure 5.0: Bobafett Skin |
Expression can take on a kind of cult where players form clans or communities and play
together challenging other clans or communities of players. Players within groups all wear
the same types of skins or insignias; all reside within the same city/state/or apartment
complex, and tend to be very serious gamers. There is even the capability for players to
express themselves verbally and physically – I refer to this as physiological warfare
as they can make fun of other players, taunt them, make obscene or eye catching jesters to
confuse or distract you just enough to take you out of your zone of playing the game.
Finding a multi-player game
With thousands of quake servers running out on the Internet it might seem as though it
would be difficult to find a game. No so, each game server has the ability to inform one
or more master servers of its existence. These game servers can exist anywhere including
in people’s homes, apartment manager’s offices, or Internet service provider
data centers worldwide. When you want to go find a game you contact master servers for
their list of available game servers that are active. From these active lists you can
determine how many game servers are available, how many players are playing each game,
what type of game is being played (Deathmatch, Team Fortress, etc.), and even who are the
actual players playing the game. From there you can select which game meets the criteria
you’re looking for and then join that game. A number of tools (such as GameSpy) are
available to help you complete this task quickly and easily – these tools actually
run outside of the Quake game. When you find the game of your liking it’s easy at
that point to join the game. This method of finding a game is somewhat unique to Quake.
Other Internet games often incorporate some of this functionality into the game program
running on the customers’ PC or game console. These game programs don’t need to
run anything externally to find multiplayer games out on the Internet.
What if I don’t like shoot-em-up?
ID’s Quake game is just one example of the extent that games have infiltrated the
vast depths of the Internet. Considering that thousands of Quake servers running around
the world and that Quake represents only one of the most popular online games (not even
the most popular) gives you reason to believe that there are a large number of people
playing these games. But there are many different types of games to choose from other than
just the shoot-em-up variety (also called first person shooter games). There are
role-playing games, card games, board games, strategy games, casino games, sports games,
fantasy sports games, etc. With thousands of PC game titles out there to choose from as
well as an increasing list of similar or additional titles available for game consoles,
the choices available to gamers continues to expand.
Online gaming promotes subscription-based games
Online games combined with a protected local storage on game consoles will also usher
in a relatively new approach towards subscription games. These games will not have to be
purchased from retail stores or even rented from your local video store. Instead these
games can be downloaded on demand or upon subscription. Like renting a movie, gamers will
have the capability to borrow (rent) the use of this game to see how they like it and then
either renew the subscription or allow it to laps (which effectively removes this
downloaded game from their console’s hard drive). Perhaps the real attraction
to Internet games is that they don’t represent a one-size fits all approach games.
Each game provides a baseline of features and capability that can be customized in many
ways to the tastes of the operator or the target audience (the players). The extent of
these customizations is left to the ingenuity of those who buy and play the game – a
very customer centric approach.
Check out these other Birds-Eye.Net papers/products regarding
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