The effects of consistency maintenance methods on player experience and performance in networked games

Abstract

Network lag is a fact of life for networked games. Lag can cause game states to diverge at different nodes in the network, making it difficult to maintain the illusion of a single shared space. Traditional lag compensation techniques help reduce inconsistency in networked games; however, these techniques do not address what to do when states actually have diverged. Traditional consistency maintenance (CM) does not specify how to make gamecritical decisions when players' views of the shared state are different, nor does it indicate how to repair inconsistencies. These two issues - decision-making and error repair - can have substantial effects on players' gaming experience. To address this shortcoming, we have characterized a range of algorithmic choices for decisionmaking and error repair. We report on a study confirming that these algorithms can have significant effects on player experience and performance, and showing that they are often more important than degree of consistency itself. Copyright © 2014 ACM.