Guest Editor’s Introduction: Massively Multiplayer Online Games Technologies and Applications

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) entail a number of new challenges to science, engineering, and industry. The challenges can be categorized into three areas that are closely linked to each other, namely: computing, information, and communication. Computers capable of dealing with massive data and computations per time unit are essential for online games demanding interactive rates or real-time, but it is not least true we need enough network bandwidth in order to guarantee that the game updates across the network are conveyed and received without lags. Recall that online games as, for example, World of Warcraft has over ten million subscribers with a peak of about half a million players interacting simultaneously within a virtual world. In more general terms, we can even say that computer games constitute the driving force behind the new generation of high-end GPU-based personal computers that produce stunning graphics and deliver massive general-purpose computations. Thus, this special issue covers enabling technologies for MMOGs in the three aforementioned areas, i.e., the computing (e.g., load balancing), information (e.g., persistent worlds), and communication (e.g., networking architectures).