Network game design: hints and implications of player interaction

While psychologists analyze network game-playing behavior in terms of players’ social interaction and experience, understanding user behavior is equally important to network researchers, because how users act determines how well network systems, such as online games, perform. To gain a better understanding of patterns of player interaction and their implications for game design, we analyze a 1, 356-millionpacket trace of ShenZhou Online, a mid-sized commercial MMORPG. This work is dedicated to draw out hints and implications of player interaction patterns, which is inferred from network-level traces, for online games. We find that the dispersion of players in a virtual world is heavy-tailed, which implies that static and fixed-size partitioning of game worlds is inadequate. Neighbors and teammates tend to be closer to each other in network topology. This property is an advantage, because message delivery between the hosts of interacting players can be faster than between those of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Kuan-Ta Chen, Chin-Laung Lei
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NETGAMES 2006, Network Topology, Player Interaction, Social Interaction