HSCEG GamSimTechMeth

High-Speed Coordination in Electronic Games

Project Leader Project Co-leader
Carl Gutwin
University of Saskatchewan
Nicholas Graham
Queen’s University

Team sports involve closely-coupled, high-speed coordination. Expert players interact with split-second timing, maintaining awareness of where other players are and predicting what they will do next. The immense popularity of team games in the real world has analogues in the digital world, but high-speed interaction and coordination is often missing. 

Critical factors in networked systems will be analyzed to develop interaction techniques and design guidelines that rely on system-level support (toolkits, architectures, design patterns, reusable code and reference implementations). Novel latency-reduction techniques, temporally sensitive consistency maintenance algorithms, and visualization techniques to maximize players’ abilities to adapt to online environments for digital games will be based on studies of human limits on team coordination. 

HSCEG will develop tools for high-speed networked games that allow true coordination amongst players.