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Virtual worlds and massive multiplayer online games are amongst the most popular applications on the Internet. In order to host these applications a reliable architecture is required. It is essential for the architecture to handle high user loads, maintain a complex game state, promptly respond to game inter-actions, and prevent cheating, amongst other properties. Many of today’s Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) use client-server architectures to provide multiplayer service. Clients (players) send their actions to a server. The latter calculates the game state and publishes the information to the clients. Although the client-server architecture has been widely adopted in the past for MMOG, it suffers from many limitations. First, applications based on a client-server architecture are difficult to support and maintain given the dynamic user base of online games. Such architectures do not easily scale (or handle heavy loads). Also, the server constitutes a single point of failure. We argue that peer-to-peer architec-tures can provide better support for MMOG. Peer-to-peer architectures can enable the user base to scale to a large number. They also limit disruptions experienced by players due to other nodes failing. This research designs and implements a peer-to-peer architecture for MMOG. The peer-to-peer ar-chitecture aims at reducing message latency over the network and on the application layer. We refine the communication between nodes in the architecture to reduce network latency by using SPDY, a protocol designed to reduce web page load time. For the application layer, an event-driven paradigm was used to process messages. Through user load simulation, we show that our peer-to-peer design is able to process and reliably deliver messages in a timely manner. Furthermore, by distributing the work conducted by a game server, our research shows that a peer-to-peer architecture responds quicker to requests compared to client-server models