The human factors of consistency maintenance in multiplayer computer games
Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Infrastructural experiences: an empirical study of an online arcade game platform in China
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Interactive TV/arcade games have been entertaining people for over 50 years. Nowadays a large number of legacy TV/arcade games have been ported to new platforms such as PCs by emulation. However, they generally require that the players be co-located to interact with one computer that emulates the game. This paper proposes a novel approach to turning those single-computer games into multi-computer games such that multiple players can play their favorite legacy games in real time over a computer network. The main challenge in this work is how to synchronize multiple replicas of a game without semantic knowledge about or modifications to the game. We have developed a novel synchronization algorithm and a working system to validate the ideas. In this paper we present the approach, especially the synchronization algorithm, and evaluate its effectiveness under a variety of network conditions. In future research we will extend this work on mobile devices.