MMO games can do user generated content

BACK IN 2007 Sony computer entertainment president Phil Harrison coined the term 'gaming 3.0'. The term was floated as a bit of marketing puff for Sony's terrible online Home avatar-based community. Taking the bones of user generated content (UGC) from web 2.0 applications like Youtube and Myspace, Harrison envisioned using that to create gaming 3.0.

The idea was that sites, applications and games could be driven by UGC to create social, collaborative and dynamic online content that would be continually updated by users.

Gaming 3.0 for Home might have been flim-flammery but it was prescient and Harrison extrapolated the idea when he saw Media Molecule working on Little Big Planet (LBP) in the same year. The massively successful and insanely addictive LBP was tailored for gaming 3.0 and web 2.0 with integrated, easy-to-use platform design tools. The idea was that users could create ceaseless permutations of gaming content that could be uploaded and played by other players.

Now that works and it works well. But how translatable is that framework into Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, feeding UGC in real time? Professor Raouf Hamzaoui at De Montfort University thinks it is not just theoretically possible, he is working on a project to make it happen.

De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) is taking part in a Community Network Game (CNG) project to distribute UGC and embed it in MMO games that can support thousands of players simultaneously. In theory, the idea is to mash gaming 3.0 and LBP content updates with games like World of Warcraft or Second Life.

"A consortium was formed in late 2008 to bid for a European Commission Information and Communication Technologies call for proposals. DMU was invited to join the consortium because of its expertise in multimedia communications," Hamzaoui told The INQUIRER.

The problem for current networks is coping with delivering real time UGC for MMO games. Content has to be provided on the fly and could kill the network, whereas it should be a seamlessly integrated experience.

"CNG UGC capabilities are not hard coded into the game and therefore have the flexibility for being changed by the community operator (which may be also the MMOG operator)," Hamzaoui said. "It is important to clarify that we understand UGC in a broad sense. UGC can include textures and objects added to the game but also video of the game captured from the screen and annotated by the user before being shared with other gamers. The challenge of CNG is both on technology and making sure that UGC will enhance the experience of the users and would not disturb the game."

At the moment, the professor said the logistics involved in offering seamless UCG integration are difficult but feasible for the CNG project.

"The community activities including UGC will be controlled by a separate server. The server may be operated by the MMOG operator. Each CNG server may serve a different segment of users and may be covering different geographical areas. There might be a connection between the MMOG server and the CNG servers to share user data."

The CNG team is working on game adaptation technology to allow texture replacement, game size modification and game overlay. Each technology is designed to create a better user experience when uploading content.

"CNG will develop an interception layer and alter the game's directives for replacing the game's assets with assets that will be generated by the project's utilities. CNG will use the interception layer for decreasing the game window size and surrounding it with new windows. CNG will use the interception layer for redesigning the game visualisation area and adding web browser objects to the game frame area to host online web pages."

But one of the biggest hurdles for the team is rolling this out on a massive scale. MMO gamers are probably some of the most demanding PC users and if the CNG project doesn't provide an optimised UCG experience they won't stick around.

The difficulty for the professor's team is allowing a large number of MMOG gamers to share a high volume of UGC without interrupting game play and without the need to upload the data to a server.

To meet the challenge, the team at DMU are involved in the development of a peer-to-peer (P2P) system which should allow MMO gamers to stream live video of their game to other gamers. This lets every MMOG user become a source of high-quality live video - no easy feat to integrate well. High bit-rate video with thousands of people playing simultaneously is a network choker. The professor's task to overcome this is to design congestion control mechanisms. These will give the player the maximum amount of UGC without taking the network out of commission.

"The P2P live video system is still in the design stage [but] any MMOG player should be able to multicast live video. The video can potentially be received by any other player in the P2P network," Hamzaoui said.

To achieve this, the video traffic shouldn't overwhelm the upload or download bandwidth. If it did, it would kill the game. The team needs to hit an absolute equilibrium on client-server traffic or the game will go down and the MMO gamers will weep. The team uses a "mesh-based topology" for all P2P network traffic to create balance.

"A peer should be automatically attached to a subset of all P2P overlays according to its distance to the different sources and to the capacity of the other peers in its surroundings. UDP is used as the transport protocol, and the video data is protected against packet loss at the application layer with rateless codes in conjunction with receiver feedback," Hamzaoui explained.

The incorporation of this technology running under the hood will enhance the social aspect of gaming. The professor hopes it will open up collaborative toolsets for gamers so they can instant message, file share, blog, and audio and video chat in game. DMU's part of the project will also develop tools to capture, edit, annotate, and upload videos of the game to video sharing sites.

The project would be lacking if it didn't have the eyes and ears of MMO games developers and publishers but CNG has already whetted the appetite for some. As well as speaking with a raft of MMO games developers, the CNG has a member on its consortium. Brighton based games developer Redbedlam released a Roman MMORPG game and is a project member, adding practical advice to the mix.

The benefits from the project are obvious. The team is building cost-effective community tools and developers won't have to recode their current MMO titles to incorporate UGC. It should also enable the creation of separate communities within a single MMO game and offer another potential revenue stream for the ad-men.

Professor Hamzaoui thinks that creating the element of UGC in MMO games will take off in the near future.

"The use of UGC, especially to support social networking in MMOGs, will become more and more important. A recent Nielsen report shows that Americans spend almost 23 per cent of their online time on social networking services and just over 10 per cent on online games."

Combining UGC and social interaction could see online gamers moving to MMO titles they had previously avoided, and would also increase the number of gamers playing, keeping everyone happy.

The CNG project will end in August 2012 and is a closed development effort so you can't sign up. However, the professor told us that the partners will be happy to exploit the results. Hopefully that means we'll be able to catch up this time next year to see if they managed to keep those demanding MMO fans happy. µ