Ever since Sega decided to include a 56k modem as part of the Dreamcast hardware, the gaming media has been buzzing with the potential for online console gaming. "Play against real people anytime you want!" they say. "You get the whole screen to yourself, and you can play against more than four people!" It sounds really great until you start looking at the technology and reality behind online gaming. I'll admit that I haven't tried online gaming on a console yet. All of my experience in this comes from playing endless sessions of Team Fortress Classic and Diablo 2 on my PC. Still, the fundamentals are the same. With that out of the way, I'm going to present to you, in my opinion, the three biggest problems with online gaming.

The number one problem with online gaming is lag; no doubt about it. That's my opinion of course, but even many fortunate broadband users wouldn't disagree with me. In case you've never played a game online, I'll explain what lag is. Basically, online games are run from a "server". This computer runs the game code itself. It determines where the enemies are, what they are doing and where you are. Your computer is really just used to display the graphics of the game; the game itself is taking place on the server which could be across town, or on the other side of the country. Lag comes in when your computer/console doesn't get information from the game server fast enough. What does this do to a game? Well, basically, things can happen in the game that you're simply not aware of. Enemies can hit you before you even have a chance to see them, much less avoid them. Similarly, you can try to attack enemies that aren't really there. Sometimes you can move to a new location when suddenly the game just pops you back where you were a few seconds ago because it didn't "know" that you were moving. The worst part about lag is that it can come from a variety of locations. In Diablo 2 for example, most people play the game on servers that are maintained by Blizzard (they made the game). Unfortunately, the game is so popular that they are often running above capacity. So lag occurs. Meanwhile, you're connecting to the Internet through an ISP (AOL or Seganet for example). This ISP can have similar problems with overload during peak hours of the day, or malfunctions at any time. Even if both ends of the connection are working properly, the data has to be bounced across the country through several other computers to get where it's going, and anything can go wrong along the way. There are two other things that cause lag. One is the amount of time it takes to get the signal from your PC to the server and back again (ping), and the other is the amount of data your connection can give or take in a second (bandwidth). Both of these problems are basically solved with broadband connections (which most of the country doesn't have yet), but all gamers are subject to poorly maintained game servers as discussed in the first point. Although lag is very horrible, I've been playing Diablo 2 every day for the past 3 weeks, and I'm still having fun. The thing is, I'm a hard-core gamer. How will casual consumers take to online gaming? With this behind us, let's take a look at some other problems with online gaming.

The second biggest problem with online gaming is definitely the people. People are the dynamic variable in online gaming that makes it worthwhile, but they also pose some problems to game designers and players alike. I originally started playing Diablo 2 online in "open" mode. I could play the game on my own computer (no lag!) and go online to talk and trade items with other players. It was literally the best of both worlds--for about two weeks. That's when I realized that people were duplicating items. Of course, this ruins the game for any legitimate player. Once you've played Diablo 2 through one time, the main reason to continue playing is to build wealth in the way of finding good items and trading them. If people are duping items, then yours are practically worthless. So, from here I was forced onto the battle.net "Realms" where lag abounds and cheating is no more. This online environment is maintained by Blizzard and they carefully monitor character data to prevent duping and cheating. Well, it doesn't always work. It took a while, but people eventually found out how to cheat here as well, although it's much harder. So Blizzard deletes some dupes when they can, and they plug up the hole, and eventually, someone finds another way to dupe. It's not nearly as bad as playing "open", but it demonstrates a point for us. There is a core of individuals that you cannot stop, who are intent on cheating and will tarnish every online game that is released now or in the near future. Sure, that sounds a bit extreme, but until I see a major online game successfully prevent cheating, I'll continue to believe it. On top of this, other players can generally be very mean people. In Diablo 2, they will often try to trick you. The tricks generally involve some ploy or another to steal your valuable items. If you're smart, they're very easy to avoid, but many players are young and a bit naïve (even though the game is rated "M"). Some people, when possible, will also try to kill your character (In Diablo, depending on how you play, this can result in loss of gold and experience, or it can permanently destroy your character if you play "Hardcore" mode). Still, you can almost see this as part of the game.

The final problem with online gaming is on the design side. It involves the costs of developing and marketing an online game. To develop an online game, take the normal costs associated with development and start adding to it. I can't give you any exact figures obviously, but the additional testing alone could be costly. If the designers want to provide a "Realm" as in Diablo 2, they need to be prepared to spend even more money to maintain the servers, or else, they'll have to charge a fee. Blizzard pre-sold something like three million copies of Diablo 2, and they knew that the game was going to be a smash success before the pre-orders even came in. On the other hand, most online game designers can expect to fail in the market (this depends on your definition of failure, naturally). With this in mind, most companies will want to charge a monthly fee for the online portion of their games as a cushion for failure. Eventually, we'll probably see services that will host multiple games for a single fee (like Playonline), but the bottom line is that this will be a major deterrent to all casual gamers. This is the reason that Nintendo is so hesitant to get online. They already want to make the hardware as inexpensive as possible, do they really want to tack on monthly fees to their favorite games so that players can fight nameless foes instead of having a great time talking smack with the friends in their room? If they don't charge fees, then why do it at all when online gaming is currently, for the most part, a niche market?

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that I don't hate online gaming. On the contrary, I've spent countless hours playing Diablo 2 in the last few weeks alone. My favorite online games are first person shooters (although I've vowed never to play them online with a phone modem again, because action games nearly unplayable with lag). There are many things that can only be done in online games, and they could result in the best gaming experiences we've ever had. I just don't think that online gaming is ready for prime time yet, and I respect Nintendo's decision not to put online gaming at the forefront of their battle plan. Time for some more Diablo...

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