Massively Multi-player Games and the Systems That Love Them

Massively multi-player games (MMOs) are persistent-state worlds with thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants. Predictions about the growth of the market vary, but the trend is unambiguous: these games are becoming an increasingly important form of experience and entertainment, and players are flocking to them world-wide.

From their natal inception (so-called "Multi-user Dungeons" running on time-shared computers) to today, MMOs have always presented interesting challenges to programmers, computer scientists, and systems administrators. To service today's player, fully-distributed systems of hundreds of computers must be constructed to manage these games and provide low-latency, complex environments for thousands of simultaneous players. And unlike stateless protocols (such at HTTP), the state of the player, game, and connection must be meticulously maintained. Deploy such a system in an environment where thousands of bright users are actively trying to cheat and/or break the system, and one is immediately presented with a challenging set of problems.

This talk will discuss the challenges of writing and deploying MMOs, some of which are relatively unique to the domain. Some of these challenges include the creation of on-line, functional economies and societies; deploying distributed transactional systems; creating highly synchronized state distribution systems; security; and the management of these systems (including software deployment, version management, updates, etc.)