Providing Community and Collaboration Services to Mmog Players

Most of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) aim to support and improve the community activities among their members. The Community Network Game (CNG) project has focused on services supporting players during their in-game community and collaboration activities. The tools we offer use an innovative technology, namely the In-game Graphical Insertion Technology (IGIT), which permits the addition of web-based applications without having to modify the game code. These tools follow a design adapted to the needs of MMOG players. They are provided by the so-called CNG Server and have been implemented based on recent advances in Web 2.0 technology. The in-game collaboration activities provided by the underlying framework are also enhanced using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology for the distribution of user-originated live video. In this paper, we concentrate our focus on the architecture of the server as well as on the design and implementation of the community and collaboration tools.