Towards Understanding the Evolution of Wars in Virtual and Real Worlds

Emerging massively multiplayer online real time strategy games require complex game server architecture to make the transmission of the state information of a huge number of units generated by a lot of players feasible. This architecture design is supported by network traffic simulations based on the accurate characterization of player behavior. However, these characteristics of player behavior in RTS games have not been investigated yet, thus, this is the main motivation of this paper. In particular, we introduce a method that can identify the war periods in real-time strategy game sessions based on non-intrusive measurements thus, it is possible to analyze a vast number of game plays. The paper also presents some early results comparing the real and gaming worlds.