The growth of the online gaming industry relating to the Internet

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1 Author Darren Beasley Abstract The growth of the online gaming industry relating to the Internet While technology has been advancing over time, Internet gaming entertainment has been evolving with it. Initially only a few people were able to play a game with each other from different sites. As Internet bandwidth and availability increased, online gaming advanced to utilise the new technology. The Online Entertainment industry now commands a $6 Billion market. This market has emerged from being nonexistent during the last 30 years. This paper looks at the history of the Internet and the corresponding evolution of online gaming. Keywords MMORPG, Internet, MUD Glossary DNS Domain Name System ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange MUD Multi User Dungeon TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol MMORPG Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game PLATO Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency NCP Network Control Protocol BCPL Basic Combined Programming Language MUDDL Multi User Dungeon Definition Language NSFNET National Science Foundation Network CREN Corporation for Research and Educational Networking WWW World Wide Web T1 1.5Mbps T3 43Mbps Introduction Public opinion is that online gaming emerged within the last decade. In fact it first emerged over 30 years ago. The progression of online gaming has been very closely related to the hardware that has been available at the time. Many issues brought about the new market of online gaming: Advances in video card technology New networking protocols New security measures on the internet Upgrade to the internet backbone, networking lines and networking hardware

2 The MMORPG (Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game) created using technology available today is at the very forefront of entertainment, providing the highest degree of immersion and most interactive experience. Background Online gaming allows people to interact together in a computer game over a network. Huge virtual worlds are continually running on hundreds of servers for users to interact with each other and the virtual world they inhabit. Initially these games started out as MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) in which people can type commands such as /look and be returned with text describing the room. They can talk to each other and interact with objects in the rooms. The First online game In the 1960 s the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system was designed. Its purpose was Computer Based Education. It would become remembered for its contribution to the online community due to its communication features. The PLATO system was based at the University of Illinois and connected a small classroom of terminals to a central mainframe. A student using one of the terminals would see a question on his display and type the answer. This was sent to the mainframe, processed and then the user was sent the next question. PLATO is a timeshare system (one of the first operated in public), which enabled it to deal with many students logged on simultaneously. Timeshare works by swapping users in and out of central mainframe memory and Extended Core Storage (ECS) thousands of times a minute, rapidly enough that the users may not even notice the pause. This technology provided a sound basis for a multiplayer game and soon the first was developed. By 1972 it would be able to support users. In 1969 Rick Blomme wrote a 2-player version of the game Spacewar for the PLATO service. During the same time period ARPANET was formed, linking four nodes at the Universities of California (UTAH), California (Santa Barbara), SRI (in Stanford) and the University of Utah. It used NCP to allow hosts to communicate with each other. ARPA is the same group that would soon be responsible for creating the networking protocol allowing a huge number of users to interact simultaneously. ARPANET would prove to be the foundation for the Internet. Evolution of the Internet and MUD During the early/mid 70 s several more multiplayer games would appear on PLATO. In 1973 Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA began work on the protocol TCP/IP. The intention of the protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to connect and communicate with each other. Robert MetCalfe helped with development of Ethernet in This would prove to be a significant development for moving data extremely quickly over a LAN. I mention this as I feel it contributed greatly to availability of multiplayer options in

3 games prior to the Internet being available to a large amount of the general public. By allowing them to play against each other on local networks it paved the way to introduce them to multiplayer gaming over the Internet. In 1978/1979 at Essex University, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle create the first MUD. 1 Trubshaw built the database definition language, originally in assembler but he only had 50k of memory on the DEC-10 system so decided to rewrite the whole thing in BCPL. This would prove to be used by many others after as the definitive MUDDL. Bartle helped with some of the game play issues during this time. The game had the functionality to allow people to speak to one another, 20 rooms and to use 10 basic commands to interact with objects in the game such as GET and DROP. Trubshaw left the University and Bartle continued to develop the MUD. Implementing a points system (giving users a score) and moving the objects to a separate include file. The players were not just limited to Essex University as at the same time a research project with Packet switching to the USA was being conducted. In 1981 the first few external users logged in to play the MUD. With more external lines added to the DEC-10 system it was soon swamped with players. To ensure this did not consume all the University s resources they decided to limit access to off peak hours (2am-6am) This original MUD was licensed to CompuServe and is still running to this day. In 1980 Ken and Roberta Williams form Online Systems and produce the first game that combined text with graphics. The game was not a multiplayer online adventure but provided a template for ones to come. Up to this point the multi player gaming community had not been commercialised. This soon changed when in 1982 Bill Louden, in charge of Games at CompuServe, purchased an ASCII space combat simulator called DEC wars for $50. This was released in 1983 under the title Mega Wars 1 and became the longest running for-pay online game in history (though it has recently been overtaken by MUD2, a direct sequel of the original MUD). 1 Early MUD History, by Richard Bartle 15 th November

Internet technology was also evolving quickly at this point. The National Science Foundation created its own backbone called CSNET for network institutions without access to ARPANET.

4 Internet technology was also evolving quickly at this point. The National Science Foundation created its own backbone called CSNET for network institutions without access to ARPANET. On January 1 st 1983 every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. This became the Internet standard and replaced NCP. University of Wisconsin created DNS making it much easier for people to connect to servers by name without having to remember long strings of numbers. This is a key event, as without it the Internet would not have appealed to a large majority of the public and would not have been accepted by them. 1984, CompuServe releases another MUD, Islands of Kesmai. 2 They charged the equivalent of $12 per hour that a user was connected to the system. In direct competition Mark Jacobs installs 8 phone lines to his house from which to run his text based role-playing game Aradath. He charged $40 per month flat rate. This is believed to be the first professionally run flat rate service. By charging a flat rate it gives the product more appeal to the hardcore gamer, as they will not need to worry about their time online. BITNET and CSNET merge to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). CSNET decided to upgrade to T1 connections, 25times faster than the previous circuits. The new infrastructure was named NSFNET, and the old lines remained being called CSNET. The T1 NSFNET backbone was completed in In 1987 Kesmai produced the first Massively multiplayer game with graphics entitled Air Warrior After the NSFNET T1 Backbone was completed in 1988 traffic increased so quickly plans were immediately made to upgrade the network again. By 1991 all its sites were connected to a T3 Backbone. 2 History of the Internet, by Dave@cs.cf.ac.uk

5 1992 The World Wide Web was introduced Online services price war begins when prodigy cut their fixed rate costs and charge $3 per hour online. Other service providers lower their prices to compete. This enables a greater demand for online games. Usage of Online games rises to double what it was previously Internet versions of the text based MUDs that were designed previously are released, totalling over Quake is released. People set up servers the world over. At peak times there will be over people fighting in quake servers. From here on games were designed with Internet connectivity as an option Origin releases Ultima Online for play across the Internet. Even though it has many bugs and connection problems at first it still manages to gain subscribers during the first 3months. According to USA Today 3 more than half a million people now partake in online fantasy worlds. With fierce competition from many manufacturers over this market this only looks set to increase saw the first Cyber bank online. Many other banks followed suit and it soon became common practice to give credit card details over the web for purchasing products. The public becomes familiar with giving account information over the Internet and this allows Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to request credit card details over the web. As they do not need to employ staff to answer phones or check through post for billing, finance checks, this saves the software company a great deal of money. As the games started to evolve to include more people and more items, the amount of data needing to be transmitted to the Client increased. Lag, Packet loss and Latency are major concerns that have to be dealt with. One of the current largest MMORPG s at the moment is Everquest. It has over subscribers paying $10 every month. Recently they have brought online a UK only server. This was to allow UK users to gain better connectivity to an Everquest server. A very significant technology that was created in 1996 by John Carmack for the online computer game Quakeworld is client side prediction code. This code would allow the client to predict based on a person s last action where they would likely be next. This would then be shown on the player s screen while awaiting confirmation that the player had indeed moved there to arrive with the next packet. This allowed people to seem to move much more smoothly in online worlds and can 3 Online Games on a roll with Role-playing, USA Today, 09/08/ Last Viewed

6 make the difference of a game being playable or not for someone with a slow connection. Similar code is used in MMORPG today to good affect. Performance Issues It is very important for software providers to ensure they provide reliable fast network access to their servers and that all pre-requisites for their software are clearly stated. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against Origin Systems and Electronic Arts due to the game they produced, Ultima Online. They were charged with : (the quotes are taken from To Sue or not to Sue 4 ) "The Defendants falsely and fraudulently represented that Ultima Online did not require a $10 monthly subscription fee separate from a player's Internet connection fees." The monthly fee required to play the game was not advertised to the customer before purchasing the game. "...falsely and fraudulently represented that the game could be played in real time. The true facts are that 'lag' time exists." Due to the bad lag that existed in the game the players felt in unfair the game company had claimed Ultima online was real time. 5 "...falsely and fraudulently indicated that Ultima Online did not require possession and/or use of a credit card by its participants." The game did not state the requirement of a credit card to for players to pay for their account. "...falsely and fraudulently represented the minimum computer requirements as lower than what is actually required to play." The minimum computer specifications they stated were not sufficient to play the game. 4 To Sue or not to Sue, by Desslock, April 17 th Last viewed 18 th November 2001

7 "The true facts are that Ultima Online servers break down daily for hours at a time on a daily basis and Ultima Online cannot be played 24 hours a day everyday." There was no warning that the servers would commonly be off line for maintenance. Eventually a settlement was reached in which Electronic Arts agreed to pay $ to charity. Since then computer game retailers have been very careful to correctly label their software. Game engine evolution Advances in video card technology now allow 3D graphical representations of 50 or so people on screen at the same time. Graphics of online games are updated regularly, to take advantage of new video card and computer processing speed capabilities. This helps keep their game looking up to date. However it does mean people must buy an up to date video card in order to continue playing a game they enjoy, or to enable them to keep up with other players they are competing against. One of the most recent MMORPG, Everquest, has recently even introduced Voice recognition software compatibility to enable users with disabilities access to the game as well. Security A major problem for software development companies is pirate software and hacked games. Online gaming gives the companies producing the games a lot of protection against these. For example, currently it s estimated than 1in every 2 games in Asia is illegal. For MMORPGs each user must have an account key to be able to create an account, this ensures every individual who wishes to play the game must purchase it. Account keys will not be able to be found elsewhere as they will have already been used or someone will not wish to give theirs out, as it will prevent them from playing. This requires account keys to be generated randomly as if there is a simple algorithm to generating them (earlier versions of windows suffered this problem) they can be hacked with ease. Games such as half-life have used a similar method, requiring a key to play the game. Though as no account is set up any key will work for anyone as long as someone else doesn t try to use that key online at the same time. I believe in time all software will adopt this technique of requiring a key to register the user online before the software can be used. This will not be brought about until software developers feel they can do this without alienating a large portion of their non-internet enabled customer base.

8 Once the MMORPG user has registered their account they will be charged a subscription fee, usually every month, to account for server bandwidth, server maintenance and customer support. Of course some will also be direct profit to the company. This enables a game to generate revenue long after it has gone on sale, though the nature of MMORPG is the requirement to continually change the virtual world to ensure users do not get bored with it and cancel their subscription. Future Current MMORPGs allow thousands of people to communicate and interact with each other. The Online gaming market is now worth over $6 Billion. The number of WWW network hosts now stands at over 800Million. IPv6 will soon be the standard protocol for the web, enabling millions more to connect and more efficient routing of packets. Broadband access is becoming more popular world wide providing fast access. This will allow more games to be designed for online use in the future, allowing people the ultimate puzzle, conquest, competition, interaction; each other. A Graph to show progression of Internet capacity Primary Backbone Bandwidth (Kb) Conclusion Year Number of hosts Hosts Backbones Over a short period of time significant advances have been made in both entertainment software and networking. The software market followed technological advances made to network infrastructures and protocols. The number of Internet users is increasing dramatically day by day and the demand for virtual world online games will only increase with it. More games every day are designed solely for play over the

9 Internet and the ones that do not provide support for it. Game consoles now also have Internet access built into the architecture. Looking towards the future this will be the forefront of the gaming entertainment industry. References To Sue or not to Sue, by Desslock. 17 th April Ultima Online Volunteers Sue Origin, by Sam Parker 20 th September History of Online Games, by Jessica Mulligan Early MUD History, by Richard Bartle 15 th November History of Online Gaming, by Jessica Mulligan 8 th November History of the Internet, by Dave@cs.cf.ac.uk Everquest or Evercrack?, by USA Today 9 th August PLATO: The emergence of Online Community, by David R Woolley The History of the Internet, by Dave Kristula August The Size and Growth of the Internet, by K G Coffman & Andrew Odlyzko The History of Quakeworld, by John Callaham

10 Background Reading Modern Plato gives individual lessons to 900, by Norman D Hinton Computer Networking, by Bradley Mitchell Gamespot guide to online RPG s, by Gamespot Doom on the Internet via TCP/IP, by Scott Coleman Massive Multiplayer Entertainment, by Mark Ashur 17 th July Most Influential Games of all time, by Colin Oguro

Online Games what are they? First person shooter ( first person view) (Some) Types of games

Online Games what are they? First person shooter ( first person view) (Some) Types of games Online Games what are they? Virtual worlds: Many people playing roles beyond their day to day experience Entertainment, escapism, community many reasons World of Warcraft Second Life Quake 4 Associate