Get rid of Lag

[SE fanboy]

There's an interesting back-and-forth discussion over at Terra Nova on the subject of gameplay and labour; as the boundaries between work and play become blurred, what are the issues and where will the trend lead?

Unless you're a pro gamer or gold farmer, playing games is unlikely to net you any real-world salary, and yet many of us log into MMOs to continue our "daily grind". A serious commitment to World of Warcraft, for example, can leave one with a raid schedule more gruelling than a day job. The boundary blurs elsewhere, too, when you carry out a complicated task in-game that you couldn't do in real life.

The difference is that by playing a game, you have control over what you do, rather than relinquishing the reins to an employer. Perhaps this will lead to higher self-employment and entrepreneurship amongst gamers--certainly worlds like Second Life let you work in-game for real cash. A warning, though--once the game becomes a job, the roles may reverse, leaving real life as the fun distraction.

People say I need this in StarcRaft
Wanna cookie

[MiThRaZoR]

There's an interesting back-and-forth discussion over at Terra Nova on the subject of gameplay and labour; as the boundaries between work and play become blurred, what are the issues and where will the trend lead?

Unless you're a pro gamer or gold farmer, playing games is unlikely to net you any real-world salary, and yet many of us log into MMOs to continue our "daily grind". A serious commitment to World of Warcraft, for example, can leave one with a raid schedule more gruelling than a day job. The boundary blurs elsewhere, too, when you carry out a complicated task in-game that you couldn't do in real life.

The difference is that by playing a game, you have control over what you do, rather than relinquishing the reins to an employer. Perhaps this will lead to higher self-employment and entrepreneurship amongst gamers--certainly worlds like Second Life let you work in-game for real cash. A warning, though--once the game becomes a job, the roles may reverse, leaving real life as the fun distraction.

People say I need this in StarcRaft
Wanna cookie

Umm, you posted the wrong article.

Bigfoot Networks is a startup that's recently obtained $4 million in venture capital funding. Founded by MBA students, the company has a grand ambition--to eliminate lag in online gaming by a vague-sounding "Network Gaming Accelerator" card.

The card will be on show at E3, where curious journos can fire piercing questions such as "So what does it actually do?", but until then we'll have to speculate. According to FORTUNE Small Business, the card "communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster". However, according to Bigfoot Networks' own white paper on lag, the majority of the bottlenecks involved in lag are client-side and server-side CPU limitations--not network latency.

The paper's references to latency spikes and packet loss imply that Bigfoot Network's magic solution to lag might involve creating a dedicated network processor (offloading network-related load from the client CPU), allowing the TCP/IP stack to be specifically tuned for low, consistent latency. However, as Greg Costikyan points out, games are designed to allow for network transmission delays--it might only be a product that appeals to gamers for whom every millisecond counts.

[Nighthawk]

Hahahahaha!

Ummm...

Anyway, that thing sounds very useful for my online Halo playing. What with my 48kbp modem and all.

The problem is, how much will it cost and exactly how much will it improve? It could just be the same old.. ummm, thing... in a different wrapper. Sounds good in theory, but will it go as well as it's rumoured to?

[WhatRuOn]

Ummm, I'm not sure what to comment on, so I'll go with the MMO comment.

When I used to be heavily involved in MMOs I actually made decent money on Ebay. Once a month I would rake in anywhere between $500-1000 selling accounts and in-game items. Unfortunatly I had to give it up because the games seriously get in the way of your social life and I almost lost my girlfriend.