Craig Tiller and Adam Lake

The current generation of consoles all possess the capability to create a networked, multiplayer experience. In effect, multiplayer networked gameplay has gone mainstream. On the Xbox 360, there are 771,476 people playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online this very minute (4:37 p.m. on 11/28/2009). Several portable devices, such as the Nintendo DS and Apple’s iPhone, enable multiplayer networked experiences. Significant numbers of men, women, and children now spend their entertainment dollars and time socializing through online games.

Each of the authors in this section addresses critical components in the networked multiplayer architecture: security, scalability, social network harvesting, and streaming. First, in the gem “Secure Channel Communication,” we discuss the issues related to creating and maintaining secure communication and the various attacks and responses posed in a networked gaming environment. Next, leveraging social network APIs to obtain player data is discussed in the gem “Social Networks in Games: Playing with Your Facebook Friends.” This allows a game developer, with the user’s permission, to gain access to a player’s Facebook friends list to be leveraged to create a multiplayer experience. The third gem, “Asynchronous I/O for Scalable Game Servers,” deals with the issues of scaling the I/O system architecture to handle the large number of requests generated in networked multiplayer scenarios. Finally, the gem “Introduction to 3D Streaming Technology in Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” was written by Kevin He at Blizzard and includes source code to a terrain streaming application. This article is longer than a typical gem but contains many details useful for those creating such a large system.

It is our hope that you will find these gems useful in your own applications and that you will contribute your own innovations to this exciting and important area of game development.