Special Issue on Netwrok and Systems Support for Games

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Network and Systems Support for Games

Special Issue of

Springer’s Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ)

Guest Editors:

Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

Grenville Armitage, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Computer games, now a very profitable economic sector and subject to both academic and industry research, continue to grow in popularity at a substantial rate. Multiplayer networked games, which enable hundreds of thousands of players to simultaneously interact with each other, are now widely used not just for entertainments, but also for socializing, business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes. The NPD Group reports that 59% of total US population (ages 2 years old and higher) play games, with 56% of them doing so online, leading to almost one third of the population playing online games, while DFC Intelligence forecasts the total number of gamers in the twenty leading online game countries to increase 51% by 2011 compared to 2006. The statistics for mobile gaming are equally impressive: it is estimated that 78.6 million people in the U.S. alone played mobile games in 2009, and downloads of mobile games increased tenfold compared to 2003. Literally millions of people spend their time and money in game worlds such as World of Warcraft, which now hosts more than 12 million subscribers with a peak of 500,000 players online at a given time, or Entropia Universe, which holds the number 1 and number 2 record for the most expensive “virtual” real estate sold for real money, each over US$300,000 per virtual property.

As these online games become more popular and significant contributors to Internet traffic, research needs to be devoted to manage and support the emerging massiveness, its traffic on the network, and the users’ quality of experience. In this special issue, we focus on multiplayer games and cover scientific, engineering, and research topics in systems and networking support to enable such games. Submissions are solicited on all aspects of networked games, including (but not limited to):

Scalability, cloud support, client-server, and P2P system architectures
Efficient message distribution and network protocol design
Latency issues and lag compensation techniques
Network traffic modeling, measurement, and impact on network infrastructure
System benchmarking, performance evaluation, and provisioning
Operating system enhancements, service platforms, and middleware
Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG)
Multiplayer usability and user behavior studies
Personal communications and conferencing in games
Mobile games, resource-constrained systems, and context-based adaptation
Networks of sensors, actuators, and haptics for games
Quality of service, quality of experience, and content adaptation
Dynamic and user-generated content authoring and management
Content creation: non-linear storytelling, object capturing, algorithmic creation
Security, authentication, accounting, and digital rights management
Cheat detection and prevention
Social networking in multiplayer games

Submission Instructions
Authors must follow the formatting and submission instructions of MMSJ here, and follow the "Submit Online" link on that page. Please make sure you mention in your cover letter that you are submitting to this special issue. If the submission is an extended version of a previously published workshop or conference paper, this should also be explicitly mentioned in the cover letter, the published paper must be cited in the submitted journal paper, and the submitted journal paper must technically extend the conference version, by 30% according to MMSJ rules; i.e., the technical contribution in the journal version must be extended beyond what was presented in the conference version.

Important Dates
Submission deadline: November 30 2011 (Hard Deadline)
First round notification: January 15 2012