Chapter 17. Online Games
Over the last seven years, online gaming has gone from a tiny fraction of the interactive entertainment business to a major market in its own right. It has many unique qualities, both good and bad, as well as unique design challenges. Because it's a technology rather than a genre, we don't look for design patterns in this chapter the way we did in the earlier ones. Instead, we address some of the design considerations that are peculiar to all kinds of online games, no matter what genre they belong to. It's a huge topic, how-ever; we could probably write an entire book about it. Unfortunately, we can cover only the highlights here.
The second half of the chapter is devoted to persistent worlds, also known as massively ...
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