Rendezvous: supporting real-time collaborative mobile gaming in high latency environments

Despite the ever increasing popularity of handheld, networked gaming consoles, fully interactive real-time, multiplayer games designed for these platforms have yet to become a reality. This is primarily caused by the reliance of these handheld devices on telecoms networks such as GPRS and 3G to enable communications between players, introducing network latencies beyond the capacity of existing games and supporting consistency mechanisms to operate successfully.This paper motivates the need for a new approach to consistency in mobile multiplayer gaming environments, and introduces Rendezvous, a novel solution to the high latency consistency problem, based on the concept of elegant recovery from an inconsistent shared state, rather than the more traditional approach of prevention of the initial inconsistency. The paper goes on to present preliminary design, implementation and evaluation of Rendezvous, with respect to its application to a mobile real-time multiplayer game written for the smart phone platform called Knockabout