{"title":"Cheat detection and prevention in P2P MOGs","authors":"Kévin Huguenin, Amir Yahyavi, Bettina Kemme","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080988","url":null,"abstract":"Scalability and fairness are keys to the success of massively multi-player on-line games. The first is necessary for the technical viability of the game while the latter is required for the wide adoption by players. Although they achieve better scalability, peer-to-peer games are more prone to cheating as players have access to and manipulate sensitive game data [2]. While in centralized games cheat detection and prevention can be achieved by having the server verify the players' actions and reduce the information sent to players to the minimal amount required to render the game world, in decentralized games, it is more difficult as natural trade-offs between respon siveness, scalability, verification and information disclosure appear together with the issues of trust and collusion.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127365743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A framework for experimenting distributed connectivity strategies in DVEs","authors":"Romain Cavagna, M. Abdallah","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080993","url":null,"abstract":"A key challenge in Distributed Virtual Environments' (DVE) research has always been the possibility to compare new connectivity strategies with state of the art solutions without having to re-implement it. Indeed, when considering distributed connectivity strategies that allow multiple processes (eventually the end-user processes) to distribute the computation of a specific DVE task (i.e., objects discovery, neighbors discovery, positions updates, etc.), it has always been very difficult to efficiently compare the already proposed solutions with the new ones on the same exact implementation and assumption bases. Our Open Virtual Environment (OVE) project aims at being among the first very easy to use open source C++ GPL v3 frameworks that answer this need by providing all the necessary tools for an easy implementation of new propositions. Three spatially organized peer-to-peer network overlays are given as an example, thus laying down the bases for other connectivity strategies to be implemented and compared.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"167 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116419790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
K. Raaen, H. Espeland, H. Stensland, Andreas Petlund, P. Halvorsen, C. Griwodz
{"title":"A demonstration of a lockless, relaxed atomicity state parallel game server (LEARS)","authors":"K. Raaen, H. Espeland, H. Stensland, Andreas Petlund, P. Halvorsen, C. Griwodz","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080994","url":null,"abstract":"Games where thousands of players can interact concurrently pose many challenges with regards to the massive parallelism. Earlier work within the field suggests that this is difficult due to synchronization issues. In this paper, we present an implementation of a game server architecture based on a model that allows for massive parallelism. The system is evaluated using traces from live game sessions that has been scaled up to generate massive workloads. We measure the differences in server response time for all objects that need timely updates. We also measure how the response time for the multithreaded implementation varies with the number of threads used. Our results show that the case of implementing a game-server can actually be highly parallel problem.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131102818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AntReckoning: Dead reckoning using interest modeling by pheromones","authors":"Amir Yahyavi, Kévin Huguenin, Bettina Kemme","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080977","url":null,"abstract":"In games, the goals and interests of players are key factors in their behavior. However, techniques used by networked games to cope with infrequent updates and message loss, such as dead reckoning, estimate a player's movements based on previous observations only. The estimations are typically done using dynamics of motion, taking only inertia and external factors (e.g., gravity, wind) into account while completely ignoring the player's goals (e.g., chasing other players or collecting objects). This paper proposes AntReckoning: a dead reckoning algorithm, inspired from ant colonies, which models the players' interests to predict their movements. AntReckoning incorporates a player's interest in specific locations, objects, and avatars in the equations of motion in the form of attraction forces. In practice, these points of interest generate pheromones, which fade and spread in the game world, and are a source of attraction. Our simulations using mobility traces from World of Warcraft and Quake III show that AntReckoning improves the accuracy by up to 30% over traditional dead reckoning techniques.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131766424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MMORPG player behavior model based on player action categories","authors":"M. Sužnjević, Ivana Stupar, M. Matijasevic","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080982","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we present the modeling of player behavior for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). We have performed action specific measurements of player sessions in terms of the previously defined action categories for MMORPGs (Trading, Questing, Dungeons, Raiding, and Player versus Player Combat). We explore the hourly trends in user behavior and form models based on observed patterns. We explore the session duration as well as lengths and probability of session segments (i.e., parts of the session consisting of only one category of player actions). Our aim is to create the user behavior model and to combine it with previously established traffic models in order to be able to explain, predict, and generate network traffic of MMORPGs more accurately. As a case study we use World of Warcraft.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117031055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supporting first person shooter games with competing traffic in 802.11e MAC","authors":"Hanghang Qi, D. Malone, Ashwin Murali, D. Botvich","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080986","url":null,"abstract":"As real-time multi-player games are increasingly popular network applications nowadays and 802.11 wireless are widely used, it is common that games are played over 802.11 networks. However, game performance can be degraded when competing with background traffic. In this paper, we propose Application Divided Resource Allocation (ADRA) scheme based on 802.11e to support games in a mixed traffic 802.11 environment. Parameter selection and performance improvement are analyzed with our analytic model. Testbed verification validates the effectiveness of our scheme and analysis which provides significant improvements to games performance while sustaining the performance of the background traffic.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125461452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SpotCheck: An efficient defense against information exposure cheats","authors":"Sam Moffatt, A. Dua, Wu-chang Feng","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080984","url":null,"abstract":"A lot of hidden information is present in client programs of most existing online multi-player games. This hidden information is necessary for clients to render a player's view of the game. However, the same hidden information can be exploited by cheaters to gain an unfair advantage over other players. Eliminating hidden information from the game client comes at a significant cost to the server, since it must now send the data required to render a client's view on-demand. Consequently, the burden of tracking a player's view shifts from the client to the server, hindering scalability and degrading game performance. We propose SpotCheck, a more scalable approach for detecting information exposure cheats. The key idea is that servers still disseminate game state information on-demand, but clients retain the burden of tracking a player's view. After each move, clients must submit a descriptor pertaining to the player's view. The server then randomly chooses to validate the descriptor and sends back relevant game state information. Our experimental results show, that SpotCheck can reduce the server CPU overhead by as much as half when compared to the alternative, while still being an effective defense against information exposure cheats.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122499357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cheat-proof peer-to-peer trading card games","authors":"Daniel Pittman, Chris GauthierDickey","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080985","url":null,"abstract":"In trading card games (TCGs), players create a deck of cards from a subset of all cards in the game to compete with other players. Each card in the deck has some feature or ability that may be used strategically to help a player defeat her opponent. Recently, trading card games have been moving from physical cards to digital, online versions. We propose a cheat-proof peer-to-peer protocol for implementing online trading card games. We break down actions common to all TCGs and explain how they can be executed between two players without the need for a third party referee (which usually requires an unbiased server). In each action, the player is either prevented from cheating or if they do cheat, the opponent will be able to prove they have done so. We conclude by showing how these methods are secure and how they may be intermixed for other styles of TCGs and other peer-to-peer games.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"63 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116817710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A flexible connectivity architecture for avatar management in P2P virtual environments","authors":"Eliya Buyukkaya, M. Abdallah","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080992","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper addresses the efficient management of avatar states in P2P virtual environments (VEs) by building on our previously proposed Relaxed Triangulation (RT) overlay, designed to accommodate the dynamic nature of VEs by drastically reducing the maintenance cost inherent to the well-known Delaunay construct. Given that our RT overlay no longer supports greedy routing, we propose in this paper to complement our RT overlay with a message routing algorithm that guarantees message delivery on top of RT.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124255356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Craig Jordan, M. Knapp, Dan Mitchell, M. Claypool, Kathi Fisler
{"title":"CounterMeasures: A game for teaching computer security","authors":"Craig Jordan, M. Knapp, Dan Mitchell, M. Claypool, Kathi Fisler","doi":"10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080983","url":null,"abstract":"Computer security has become vital for protecting users, applications and data, yet the field still faces severe shortages in skilled professionals. Typical methods to teach security from textbooks and academic papers are not engaging and take considerable time. Our hypothesis is that a security game that closely emulates real-world systems can improve learning about computer security above and beyond just reading technical documents. Our security game, CounterMeasures, provides a game-type environment for learning and practicing security skills through a series of guided objectives. CounterMeasures uses a real, interactive shell for input and targets a real server for exploits to provide an environment resembling security systems currently deployed. Evaluation with 20 test subjects illustrates the merits and shows the potential of our approach.","PeriodicalId":338878,"journal":{"name":"2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126436995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}