Living City, a Collaborative Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game

TL;DR

This paper details the design and implementation of Living City, a browser-based MMO game that runs fully in web browsers, focusing on architecture, game balancing, social dynamics, and security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel browser-based MMO architecture with real-time features, balancing algorithms, and social interaction analysis, developed at the University of Messina.

Findings

Effective game balancing algorithms implemented

Analysis of social and psychological player interactions

Strategies for concurrency handling and cheating prevention

Abstract

This work presents the design and implementation of our Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Living City, a simulation game fully developed at the University of Messina. Living City is a persistent and real-time digital world, running in the Web browser environment and accessible from users without any client-side installation. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games attract the attention of Computer Scientists both for their architectural peculiarity and the close interconnection with the social network phenomenon. We will cover these two aspects paying particular attention to some aspects of the project: game balancing (e.g. algorithms behind time and money balancing); business logic (e.g., handling concurrency, cheating avoidance and availability) and, finally, social and psychological aspects involved in the collaboration of players, analyzing their activities and interconnections.