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Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games Figure 2.5 Galaxy War, early 1970s. Reproduced by permission of Id Software, Inc. 2.2.1 PLATO Perhaps the first online network community was PLATO (which initially was supposedly not an acronym for anything, but later became an acronym for Programming Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) that had users log into mainframe servers and interact from their terminals [PLATO]. PLATO included various communication mechanisms such as email and split-screen chat and, of course, online games. Two popular PLATO games were Empire, a multiship space simulation game and Airfight, what may have been the precursor to Microsoft flight simulator. There was even a version of Spacewar written for PLATO. These early online games were networked only in the sense that a terminal was connected to a mainframe, much like other interactive applications (such as a remote login shell or an email client) of the day. Thus, the game architecture featured a thin game client (the terminal) with all the computation and communication between avatars taking place on the server. The network performance of early systems was thus determined by the terminal communication with the mainframe server via the protocol used by the Telnet program [RFC854]. A Telnet connection uses the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to transmit the data users type with control information. Typically, the Telnet client will send characters entered by keystrokes and wait for the acknowledgment (echo) to display them on the screen. From the user perspective, a typical measure of performance is the echo delay, the time it takes for a segment sent by the source to be acknowledged. Having characters echoed across a TCP connection in this manner can sometimes lead to unpredictable response times to user input. 2.2.2 MultiUser Dungeons MultiUser Dungeons (MUDs) rose to popularity shortly after PLATO, providing a virtual environment for users to interact with the world and with each other with some game- play elements. MUDs are effectively online chat sessions with game-play elements and structure; they have multiple places for players to move to and interact in like an adventure game, and may include elements such as combat and traps, as well as puzzles, spells and even simple economics. Early MUDs had text-based interfaces that allowed players to type in basic commands, such as go east or open door (Figure 2.6). Typically, characters

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