FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Online Gaming
Online gaming has grown from a tiny fraction of the interactive entertainment business into a major market in its own right. In this chapter, you'll learn about some of the features and design challenges that set online gaming apart from the more traditional single-player or multiplayer local games. Online gaming is a technology rather than a genre, a mechanism for connecting players together rather than a particular pattern of gameplay. Therefore, this chapter doesn't look for design commonalities as the chapters on game genres did. Instead, it addresses some of the design considerations peculiar to online games no matter what genre those games belong to. It's a huge topic, however, and there is only room in this book for the highlights.
Don't confuse online gaming, as this book uses the term, with online gambling or online casino gaming. Online gambling is a different industry, and is not covered here.
The second half of the chapter is devoted to online games that are persistent worlds, also known as massively multiplayer online games, or MMOGs. Raph Koster, lead designer of both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and Tess Snider, lead programmer at Trion World Network, provided a great deal of assistance with this material.
This chapter uses the term online games to refer to multiplayer distributed games in which the players' machines are connected by a network. (This is as opposed to multiplayer local games in which all the players play on one machine and look at the same screen.) While online games can, in principle, include solitaire games that happen to be provided via the Internet, such as Bejeweled, the online aspect of solitaire games is incidental rather than essential to the experience. Bejeweled is simply a puzzle game. Online games do not need to be distributed over the Internet; games played over a local area network (LAN) also qualify as online games.
