High Availability - does it have a role in game systems?

I think so. Check out mmorpg's (massively multiplayer online role-playing game ) . The more sophisticated and the more popular the game, the more critical that it's available.

Again, I'm going to begin by going back to ancient times to review how far we've come in this particular genre of online gaming. Anyone remember the Commodore PET? I have one, and it still works with the tape player! Well, can't have a computer without games (lesson from the inventors of Unix, read my post on that subject later) even if the machine had huge green pixels for text based Basic programming. I'm telling you, the creativity that went into this one particular game, I forget what it was called, but it was 3d like before 3d graphics were available. The only way to describe it was a shoot em up space flight simulator with tie fighters(from the original Star Wars for you younger people). I mean, at the time I couldn't believe you could write such an advanced graphical game with such limited memory, cpu power and gawdy ascii text characters. But it was very cool. An excellent example of maximizing absolutely whatever was available, that is hardware and software resource to produce, of all things, a 3d space game out of green text. As far as the code goes, this was definitely Nasa lunar module stuff. But I digress. This particular game was not multiplayer.

What was available at the time and was sort of "multiplayer" was a game called Galaxy by Avalon Hill. Each player up to 20 players would take a turn to select their home planet and send ships out to conquer other players' worlds. Some strategy was involved since each player did not know how many if any ships would be sent out and what outcomes would occur when each players ships would arrive at different points at different times to duke it out with the local defenders. I said sort of mulitplayer because basically it runs on only one computer. Everyone gathers around to see the battles to figure out whether their decision to attack or defened was successful. And each player takes a turn at that keyboard to enter his directives without anyone seeing of course. Planets which produced ships quicker were highly valued and became a quick target for all players. Multiplayer yes, multimachine over network, not yet available. I managed high school computer science making games like that (or well playing them).

Jump ahead almost 10 years later, I'm now a Novell engineer thanks to a 6 week course and a couple of exams and castle wolfenstein was becoming a blur as far as 3d games were concerned. This would be regarded as ancient times for some graduates of college right now, castle what?!. But the company that created that game was obviously visionary. That same company; Id software, would all of sudden bring out a game called Doom. And I believe that is when the flood gates were opened. I remember very clearly, my team had completed networking all the PC's (running OS/2, DOS and windows 3.1) including a small group of Apple Macs (Mac II's, Mac se30) using Novell Netware. It's around Christmas time and we were quite proud of ourselves for the accomplishment, at least I was. So, I came up with the idea of celebrating by us playing Doom over a private Lan. And sure enough my guys were shooting at me or I was shooting at them and this was all a new experience. I could see them run by and they could see me shoot them, and of course the monsters would kill us at the same time. This was sophisticated stuff on many levels (no pun intended). You can download source code and other tools from Id software to build your own games under the GNU Public License. But no database or dedicated central server was involved. This was more a peer to peer communications network. You simply started over from the beginning if you ran out of lives. Maybe you could save your position for later continuance. But system availability didn't factor in yet.

With the advent of the Internet, services of all types provided by small, medium and large corporations all demanded availability from their servers. Otherwise they might miss an online order or two, perhaps more than one or two I think, we could ask Amazon. Mmorpg's are no exception. Central to every aspect of the online experience must be made redundant; player sign-in, game access, tracking player progress, coordinating other players, managing the playing environment. Any of these components could fail and the online vendor will face a customer service issue. Not unlike the auction players in the bidding war on eBay's system. Funny, it is a bit like a game isn't it...sometimes an expensive one.

Most notable mmorpg is eve-online, screen shot from eve:



I can only image what is operating behind the scenes to enable the entire system to function with so much that may be going on between players, their desktop clients or browsers and between the backend servers. Are their database servers configured for replication and failover? As the requests and responses flow back and forth are network switches managing that traffic with a cluster of web servers using secure protocols? Are the hardware components to meet each service, i.e. web server, application processing, and database storage structured in tiers to manage load and improve hacker security? Questions likely to be answered only by actually building such an infrastructure to see it apply in the world of online gaming. But if we were to dissect eBay's infrastructure and conclude that auction bidding is in fact an elaborate game with capitalistic consequences then we could also conclude what was good enough for practical ecommerce is good enough for creative conquest of remote star systems.