Achieving critical consistency through progressive slowdown in highly interactive Multi-Player Online Games

Multi-Player Online Games (MPOGs) have attracted enormous users in recent years. In contrast to the large number of low interactive MPOGs, the choices of highly interactive MPOGs are limited and most of them do not accept players whose network connections are slow due to the complexity involved in consistency maintenance. Most MPOGs adopt a data-centric consistency maintenance mechanism that only ensures the consistency of the final states, which however does not work well for highly interactive MPOGs because consistent views of incremental state changes are also important in those games. Instead of striving for a general solution for all highly interactive MPOGs, we advocate tailored solutions for different kinds of games by exploiting their semantics. To showcase this idea, we present the critical consistency model for highly interactive two-player online ball games, which only requires consistent views to be reached at critical states. We further contribute the progressive slowdown latency compensation technique to achieve critical consistency, which is demonstrated by an online table tennis game P2T2 (Peer-to- Peer Table Tennis).