The Acm Student Magazine

Please note the offering numbers for fulfilling claims or single order purchase below. this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page or initial screen of the document. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or [email protected]. Articles, letters, and suggestions are welcomed. For submission information, please contact [email protected]. Do you know what a " LAN party " is? Have you ever participated in a LAN party? If your answer is " no, " you do not know how much fun you are missing. A LAN party is a formal, and sometimes informal, ad-hoc gathering of computer game aficionados, in which dozens of players compete against each other over a local area network (LAN). Gamers look forward to playing against some other human beings, instead of playing against the machine. One can do this over a residential connection (be it dialup or broadband), but there is so much more excitement when the players are actually collo-cated: the joy of doing well mixed with the " despair " of losing yet another round fill the same room. Players are eager to leave the solitude of their room to discover the solidarity of a LAN party. In a way, a LAN party demonstrates that computer networks enable people not only to communicate, find information, do business, and even make money, but to have fun as well. The popularity of computer games (a multibillion dollar industry) is taken to a new dimension with networking. Gaming is simply just more fun when you have real, human opponents against you. However, what is the software driving these games, and what role does the network play? Our first article by Aaron McCoy, Declan Delaney and Tomas Ward titled " Game-state Fidelity Across Distributed Interactive Games " will introduce you to the technologies behind network games. Designing a great game is not easy. Creating a great network game is even harder. One of the most serious problems game designers face is how to maintain …