The Brave New World of Multiplayer Online Games: Synchronization Issues with Smart Solutions

The technology supporting multiplayer online games (MOGs) has greatly improved in the past few years. This represents great news both for players all over the world and for researchers that are struggling behind tough problems in real-time distributed systems. Indeed, MOGs represent a peculiar class of distributed systems, sharing features, requirements, challenges, and thereby also feasible solutions. To this aim, we focus on issues and state-of art solutions related to a crucial aspect in MOG deployment: the synchronization of its nodes. In particular, we review techniques able to guarantee that the system evolves in a quick and consistent way and highlight how they can be made more effective by exploiting specific game features. To further support this claim, we also present results from an experimental evaluation we performed.