Building Community and Collaboration Applications for MMOGs

Supporting collaborative activities among the online players are one of the major challenges in the area of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), since they increase the richness of gaming experience and create more engaged communities. To this direction, our study has focused on the provision of services supporting and enhancing the players' in-game community and collaboration activities. We have designed and implemented innovative tools exploiting a game adaptation technology, namely, the In-game Graphical Insertion Technology (IGIT), which permits the addition of web-based applications without any need from the game developers to modify the game at all, nor from the game players to change their game installation. The developed tools follow a design adapted to the MMOG players' needs and are based on the latest advances on Web 2.0 technology. Their provision is performed through the core element of our system, which is the so-called Community Network Game (CNG) Server. One of the important features provided by the implemented system's underlying framework is the utilization of enhanced Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology for the distribution of user-generated live video streams. In this paper, we focus on the architecture of the CNG Server as well as on the design and implementation of the online community and collaboration tools. 1. Introduction One of the most interesting potentials that Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) developers and operator have is that they can offer to the online players the possibility to interact with a large number of other players as well as to collaborate and compete in a large variety of gaming situations. The majority of these activities are made in the context of online communities that can be built around the game and where players of MMOGs tend to join to connect with people with common interests and passions and to share their in-game experience [1]. The Community Network Game (CNG) [2] is an EU-funded research and innovation project that researches and develops in-game activities using the In-game Graphical Insertion Technology (IGIT) and that proposes an architecture that combines efficiently the client-server infrastructure for the MMOG activities with a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay for the delivery of user-generated live video. IGIT is an innovative technology that permits replacing game’s objects and inserting User-Generated Content (UGC) within the game in real time. Using IGIT, the in-game avatars can be customized with players’ images, external 3D objects can be inserted within the game screen, and