The effects of consistency maintenance methods on player experience and performance in networked games

Network lag is a fact of life for networked games. Lag can cause game states to diverge at different nodes in the network, making it difficult to maintain the illusion of a single shared space. Traditional lag compensation techniques help reduce inconsistency in networked games; however, these techniques do not address what to do when states actually have diverged. Traditional consistency maintenance (CM) does not specify how to make game- critical decisions when players' views of the shared state are different, nor does it indicate how to repair inconsistencies. These two issues -- decision-making and error repair -- can have substantial effects on players' gaming experience. To address this shortcoming, we have characterized a range of algorithmic choices for decision- making and error repair. We report on a study confirming that these algorithms can have significant effects on player experience and performance, and showing that they are often more important than degree of consistency itself.