to rs ’ In tr od uc ti on Networked Games in the Midst of the Clouds

Over the past decade, networked games have grown in popularity, catalyzed by the spread of mobile and residential Internet connections with high capacities and low latencies, which encourage game developers to incorporate networked features into their products. Although networked games have demonstrated commercial, artistic, and technical successes, challenges and opportunities remain as computer technologies continue to grow. Powerful, inexpensive PCs and game consoles could offer immersive, multiplayer gameplay but must still overcome players’ geographic dispersion to be fun. Cloud computing promises new models for game computation but introduces the issue of how to deliver interactive game content to players. Cheap, alwaysconnected mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets provide a new frontier for game development, but with the connectivity and security challenges that come with mobile, wireless networks. Underneath all this is the question of how to connect clients and servers over shared and unpredictably congested IP networks.1 This special issue aims to bring together new research results from a variety of backgrounds that address these common core challenges.