NetGames ‘05 — Day 2

NetGames ‘05 — Day 2: "The second day of the NetGames workshop was a bit more relaxed for participants as the program consisted of just technical sessions (see the preview and impressions of the first day here). But the impact of industry participation on the first day was clear — several speakers (and questioners) referred back to some of the comments by the panelists and keynote speaker in their presentations. Day 2 focused on networking, which is the general research area of much of the NetGames community.

Each year NetGames has a session devoted to how network effects impact gameplay in different types of games and this year’s papers studied the effect of latency on MMORPG and racing games. In addition, there was a session on network measurements of games in which the goal is generally to develop a traffic characterization of a certain type of game in order to develop models or just to gain some understanding of the network behavior of games. This work is a bit controversial in that some folks don’t find much use in just measuring network behavior without some ideas about how to improve that behavior, or identifying the implications. I disagree with this view a little (I’m also biased in favor of network measurement work in general) — it takes quite a bit of effort to do a solid traffic characterization. And though it"