Turn on the console or PC, start a game, enter a game: in three simple steps it is possible to go from any daily activity to an entirely digital world, made of pixels and in which to interact with people from all over the world. Online gaming, on whatever device it is played on, is one of the most important realities of the entire gaming sector, and includes both gameplay carried out online and various side activities, from support models to cloud gaming: in short, video gaming is increasingly online. Precisely for this reason it becomes essential to know the technologies involved in online gaming: behind the apparent simplicity, in fact, there are often particularly interesting devices.
Take for example matchmaking, an English term that indicates the activity of searching for a match. More experienced gamers will remember how it was a totally manual operation: each online video game had its own server browser, which provided a list of active servers to which you could connect, providing information about latency, mode, number of connected players and so on. In short, starting a game was an action carried out by the gamer, who had to choose one of the servers from those proposed on the list. Nowadays, however, matchmaking is completely managed independently by the video game: it will start a search, inserting the gamer into a server that is often not even identifiable except by the IP address. In this case, matchmaking is carried out by the game based on various criteria: for example geographical, favoring the server closest to the player, latency, placing players with similar values on the same server, and even skill, where the player’s statistics are considered to put him together with other players with statistics – so skills, for that matter is a gross simplification – similar to his.
RNG algorithms, an acronym that indicates random number generators, are also very important. The question, in this case, is conceptual: how to re-propose the random components, protagonists in countless games, in a video game rigidly programmed by code? The answer lies in Random Number Generators: programs capable of generating a random and unpredictable number with each interaction, on the basis of which a fortuitous event can be set. Such measures are found in countless online situations: a typical example is that of casino games. Let’s consider roulette, inevitable protagonist in the offer of online operators: if the game were managed by a script it would be enough to read the code to know perfectly which sequence of numbers would be expected, eluding the very essence of the gameplay; an RNG, on the other hand, always guarantees the right randomness. Let’s also think about all those multiplayer video games where there are actions with certain probabilities of success: typically role-playing games, generally the more powerful a move is the more likely it is to fail. How likely? It depends on the number randomly generated by the appropriate code. The importance of randomness in modern videogaming also emerges in components unrelated to gameplay: just think of loot boxes, purchased objects which only once opened, exactly like a pack of stickers, will reveal their randomly generated contents.
Let’s also think about streaming: a huge protagonist of video gaming thanks to live shows, gameplay and countless formats from digital creators, streaming is directly present in online gaming in two very important roles. The first is that of cloud gaming: services such as GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming or the progenitor, and now defunct, Google Stadia, allow – or used to allow – to play the most recent titles without a console or a PC, making a connected device sufficient to a broadband network. In other words, streaming gaming: the video game is installed and run on a remote server, on which the gamer controls arrive and from which the game images come, transmitted in streaming to the final device. A technology which, although not yet dominant, shows the potential to be a major protagonist in the future of videogaming. The second protagonist of streaming in online gaming is voice chat: not only are there expressly dedicated programs, from Discord to Mumble, but numerous online video games integrate the possibility of speaking directly with other players. This is an application of VoIP technology, an acronym for Voice Over Internet Protocol: simply, your voice is streamed onto the game server, audible according to various criteria by other gamers. Some titles may feature a team chat, audible to all members, others a proximity chat, audible to anyone within a certain distance; the result, common to both cases, will be to be able to communicate simply by speaking into the microphone.
#Online #gaming #technologies