"It was almost frightening, the reaction... from teenage boys"
"a threat to the moral well being"
"fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people"
"deplorable"
"definite danger to the security of the United States"
Reactions to video games considered violent? No, these are quotes from things said about Elvis Presely, and "rock and roll" music only a few decades ago. How quaint, and how ridiculous the hype and overreaction seem to us now.
The same kinds of overreaction and hype have been seen from society at large and "experts" before: Television, violent movies, comic books, "professional" wrestling to name a few.
The current poster child of the extremists these days seems to be "violent" video games, that is, video games that graphically portray violence, gore, criminal behavior, or other material considered by some to be "provocative" or otherwise objectionable. Opinion and studies have attempted to link such games to actual aggression and addiction by the players.
In this blog entry, I'm going to argue that these opinions and "studies" do not hold water.
According to statistics reported by the Entertainment Software Association 68% of US households play video games, but only about a quarter of video game players are under the age of 18: the majority of players are adults, which in fact represent the fastest growing demographic of players at around 35% of U.S. households. In fact, the average age of players is 35, and the most frequent game purchaser is one 39 years old. An amazing fact to this author is that by 2009, 25% of video game players were over 50 years old - we might have to add a key for "walker" in addition to the sprint key...hardly children, I think you'll agree.
In addition, 92% of the players under 18 (children) report that their parents are present when the purchase or rental of video games are made, and nearly two-thirds of parents believe video games are a positive part of their children's lives.
And yet, studies such as "Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature" by Anderson, "Aggression and psychopathology in adolescents with a preference for violent electronic games" by Funk et al., and "Violent video games: The newest media violence hazard" by Gentile all claim to show links between the playing of violent video games and actual aggressive and violent behavior by the players.
Is there such a link? As in any kind of investigative science such as this, there will be differing views. I believe a careful examination of reports such as those listed and a comparison with those holding opposing views must lead one to the conclusion that reports linking video game violence to actual violence suffer from poor methodologies, ignoring negative results, failing to cite academic research with differing views, and improper use of meta-analytical techniques. Craig A. Anderson, author of one of the more comprehensive papers supporting the hypothesis, and a witness before the U.S. Senate on the issue, seems to be a particularly egregious offender toward scientific accuracy and journalistic integrity.
Major studies by groups such as The Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health, The Journal of Adolescent Health, and The British Medical Journal have shown no significant link between video games and actual player violence. As is made clear in these studies, the old adage "correlation does not imply causation" holds true here, as it should in any honest scientific study. It appears to the author that most if not all of the authors of reports supporting the hypothesis have fallen into the logical fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc: "After this, therefore because of this". The mistake of this is in coming to a conclusion like these authors without considering confounding factors that could rule out any actual connection or causality. Correlations prove very little, if anything, other than a correlation exists. Is it more likely that a violent game begets violence, or that violent children prefer violent games?
Constructing a scientifically valid test of the hypothesis that violent video game play begets actual violence may be nearly impossible: The very definition of "aggression" is difficult to measure objectively. Some studies done with college students in an attempt to measure aggression objectively by allowing players to blast their "opponents" with noise bursts as "punishment" are flawed for example because of the very fact that it is viewed by the participants as a game. There is no real "punishment", the noise bursts cannot cause any real harm. There is little if any remorse in punishing your opponent if they punish you.
In addition, an accurate definition of "violence" in video games themselves is hard to come by. Is the Madden football series really violent, as some studies state, considering the societal acceptance of the real game of football, where nearly 23 deaths per year are reported on average. Is the children's game Kirby violent? After all, the protagonist swallows their enemies whole, absorbing all of their powers.
I agree wholeheartedly with Nathaniel Edwards in his blogcritics posting: "No matter what a study's results show, the media can be counted on to warp it enough to make it interesting. Typically, this means that headlines claim a greater link between violent media and aggression. There are few details in the actual news stories, and instead there are lots of sweeping claims which don't allow the reader to interpret anything."
There can be no doubt that tragedies such as The Columbine High School massacre and The Virginia Tech massacre are calamities beyond the imaginations of most of us. Expressions of condolences to the victims and their families and friends seem hollow, so horrible were the events. Nonetheless, the immediate links to violent video games made by the media and "experts" were scientifically unfounded.
A particularly bright light of reason and scientific integrity is Christopher J. Ferguson of the Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice department at Texas A&M International University. Professor Ferguson has done extensive research on violent behavior, and published landmark papers specifically covering the aspect from a video game play standpoint, along with various lay articles on the subject.
In his paper titled "The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?", Ferguson states "Some scholars have attempted to draw links between laboratory and correlational research on video game playing and school shooting incidents. This paper argues that such claims are faulty and fail to acknowledge the significant methodological and constructional divides between existing video game research and acts of serious aggression and violence. It is concluded that no significant relationship between violent video game exposure and school shooting incidents has been demonstrated in the existing scientific literature, and that data from real world violence call such a link into question."
In the paper shows how the conclusions reached by the research he studied that support the hypothesis of violent video gaming being causative of real violence are faulty. A most interesting fact revealed in the paper is that while video game play has grown explosively among children and adults, violent crime over the same period has decreased significantly, both for police arrest data and crime victimization data in the U.S., with similar results found in studies from Canada, Australia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. The interested reader is referred to the link for the paper for details of Ferguson's study.
A more approachable article for the lay reader was published by Ferguson in the September/October 2009 issue of Skeptical Enquirer titled "Violent Video Games: Dogma, Fear, and Pseudoscience" In this article, Ferguson reviews and distills research on both sides of the argument, reaching the same conclusion as found in his academic research and publications: There is no proven link between the playing of violent video games and actual violence by the players of such games, and current research and studies that claim otherwise seem to suffer from severe methodological and other issues that compromise their scientific integrity and usefulness.
In particular, Ferguson shows how these studies typically suffer from severe "citation bias", that is, a failure to honestly report on research that do not support the author's hypothesis. Even more concerning are papers, such as the aforementioned Anderson study, where the authors appear to ignore their own results in order to forward their a priori hypothesis. In particular, Anderson used four measures of aggression in his laboratory studies, and only found a very weak significance for one of them. Had proper statistical techniques been employed by the author, even this weak link would have been shown to be statistically insignificant. Nonetheless, the author chose to ignore the results that did not support his hypothesis, and published a paper based on the single, intrinsically flawed, result set.
Ferguson sums this kind of behavior, unfortunately typical on the side of the argument supporting the hypothesis with "I believe that these authors have ceased functioning as scientists and have begun functioning as activists, becoming their own pressure group. Indeed, in at least one article, the authors appear to actively advocate censorship of academic critics and to encourage psychologists to make more extreme statements in the popular press about violent video-game effects"
With respect to the links made between the tragic school shootings and the fact that the perpetrators played violent video games, Ferguson retorts "It is certainly true that most (although not all) school shooters played violent video games. So do most other boys and young men. Concluding that a school shooter likely played violent video games may seem prescient, but it is not. It is about as predictive as suggesting that they have probably worn sneakers at some time in the past, are able to grow facial hair, have testicles, or anything else that is fairly ubiquitous among males."
That legal nut cases such as Jack Thompson, a particularly troublesome and misinformed activist, have been disbarred for their antics gives a glimmer of hope that sanity will prevail. Just as Elvis is the Devil chants that were the norm now seem ludicrous, it appears the media and science are coming to their senses with respect to video games and violence. A recent paper in the medical journal The Lancet suggests "the time may have come to move beyond professional research focusing on media violence, generally, as a cause of serious aggression."
U.S. courts have blocked laws that attempt to outlaw violent video games, and most recently the U.S. Supreme court justices have agreed to review a California law that attempted to restrict the sales of video games.
We may finally get the legal protection we deserve to allow us to purchase and play the games we chose. And as more researchers like Professor Ferguson present the facts backed with proper research and scientific integrity, the spectre that the media has portrayed regarding violent real life behavior and video games will fade into oblivion.
Showing posts with label Pegged my BS Detector. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pegged my BS Detector. Show all posts
Monday, May 17, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
She Blinded Me WIth Science: Tuning Up Your BS Detectors.
PCs, operating systems, specialized hardware, 'tweaks'. Just some of the pieces in the FPS gamer's world. Like any field with such esoterica, there's plenty of snake oil to go around.
Vendors of software tempt the player with promises of improved game performance, while hardware is presented as being able to improve your pings. Mice are made with DPI ratings that need to use scientific notation. The list goes on and on.
What is the intelligent FPS gamer to make of these, and how can they be sure that their money is well spent on things that really can make a difference in their gaming acumen?
We'll tear into a couple of examples in this blog entry, and show how a healthy dose of skepticism toward many of the claims bantered about the Internet by producers of these products and posters in forums could save the gamer time and money.
I've chosen two areas that have in particular pegged my BS detector.
What? How exactly does this piece of free software know how to manage these things better than Microsoft's own OS? Each of the techniques used have been shown to have little if any merit.
It has been shown repeatedly that file fragmentation has little bearing on the performance of Windows and applications for any modern version of Windows. In the days of the FAT file system, defragmentation could make a noticeable difference, but that was because of a file system design that had outgrown its usefulness.
With modern file systems on Windows (NTFS), defragmentation is frankly a waste of time, and its biggest effect is likely physical wear and tear on your hard drive. Defragmentation is strictly a no-no for Solid State drives, and garners absolutely no benefit.
I am not saying defragmentation of the file system under certain corner cases cannot show some measurable change. It can. I am saying such a change will have no material impact in the performance of a game. I invite any reader that can show otherwise with a repeatable test that will pass muster for scientific validity to comment with references to such a test. I know of none.
The 'shutting down of background processes', whether done manually or with some program has long been a 'tweak' recommended in enthusiast forums. In particular, recommendations are made to disable Windows intrinsic services and processes. Utter BS! There is again no test I've ever seen that shows this to have any material effect on game performance. Messing with Windows facilities can have very deleterious effects on the performance and reliability of the OS, and should be considered off limits by any informed gamer.
Now doing this can certainly affect boot times: these Windows components are typically loaded during the boot processes, so this will take some time obviously. But once booted, Windows manages these components quite efficiently, moving them aside if an application such as a game needs resources. There is no material penalty leaving these alone for a gamer.
Of course, if the gamer has tons of junkware or other software installed on their gaming machine, these may cause issues. In these cases, shutting down or disabling these could benefit game play. But seriously, what sane gamer that cares about game performance plays on a machine burdened with junk?
The solution to problems like this is to have a proper gaming environment, and not install crud in the first place. See Swimming in the Septic Tank with my Gaming Buddies for how I set up my gaming machines, a model that I believe is ideal for the serious gamer.
I'm not even sure how to comment on the claim of 'cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance'. Windows manages memory. The way it should be managed. 'Memory Cleaners' and 'Extenders' have long been known to belong to the snake oil camp of PC 'tweaks'. Enough said.
Let's answer our three questions for this product.
The marketing materials and hype that surrounded this initial product were mind numbing. Oral Roberts, Tony Robbins, and Billy Mays combined. There was (and still is) however at the same time a suspicious lack of any tests with reasonable protocols and environments showing any material improvement. This kind of hype should always raise an eyebrow. Their current campaign is filled with outlandish testimonials (how many of these players paid for their cards, you might ask) that they remind me of a revival meeting. No scientifically testable numbers to be found anywhere. Big surprise.
The tests I've seen, both in-house and out, seemed to all have been done on hardware that was borderline at best for a serious gamer. While offloading the network processing from an overloaded OS and hardware platform with a mediocre on-board NIC chip may demonstrate measurable performance benefits in network response and even frame rates due to reduced CPU utilization, no gamer with the $300.00 to spend at the time was likely to be running games on such hobbled hardware. And if they were, the money could have been spent far more effectively elsewhere to improve hardware performance (RAM, CPU, add-in NIC, etc.)
I am not aware of any rigorous, scientifically valid test of these products on a modern gaming machine that show any material effect on performance in areas that matter to the gamer. Reviews by magazines and tech sites reflect this view.
In their most recent incarnation, the company has moved the performance metric to a measurement of their own creation, using tools defined and built by them. "Trust me. See the difference it makes in the flow rate of the Flux Capacitors?'' This is starting to smell like some of the marketing done in other hobbies with kook esoterica, like high-end audio products.
Let's look at our BS detector questions for this item:
If the gamer applies these three simple questions when considering a new piece of hardware, software, or the application of some 'twaek' seen in a forum, I think they will save themselves time and money, and avoid going down the rabbit hole of nonsense.
I try to look at the PC and gaming world, and the world in general, through glasses colored by logic and rationality. Take a look at my thoughts on other areas where I think the manure is deep at I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, Mutation on the Bounty, and Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming.
For a great overview of how to think using logic, rationality, and healthy skepticism, check out the materials at The James Randi Educational Foundation and their Million Dollar Challenge, most recently applied to ultra-expensive high-end speaker cables (well, almost applied: the cable vendor chickened out!)
There's also an amusing snippet How to be a Skeptic on WikiHow, check it out!
Update:
After reviewing some of the grotesque marketing tactics at the pages of Bigfoot Networks, I have made a public challenge.
I invite readers to e-mail them with a link (I wanted to put a cool "mailto" link here, but strangely the contact information for the company headquarters doesn't have an e-mail. For that matter, it doesn't have a phone number. The "Texas Office" has a phone number, but I'm not clear if the address has a suite number or a self-storage shed number. In any case, no e-mail there either. If a reader finds one, let me know! I want to donate a PC to a worthy school.)
Their lawyers (must be pretty cheap, if "Grubby" the master Warcraft player they use as a reference "earns more in a year than your average lawyer.") can contact me and my lawyers for details.
In the spirit of my earlier "Bounty" blog entries Mutation on the Bounty and I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I will open this up to a public challenge at some future date. I first want to give the Bigfoots at Bigfoot a chance to accept it.
"Grubby". That's a good one. I wonder how much pings really matter for flashing pink hooves on the royal mount, or whatever they call them in those kind of games like Warcraft where cat-like reactions are required. Not!
The challenge has beeen moved to its own entry here.
As an aside, as per the earlier bounties, I'll not be posting any anecdotal comments from readers claiming they've "seen" this particular bigfoot. If you think you can meet this challenge and are able to demonstrate the ability and willingness to suffer the penalty of a loss, or if you have an idea for a challenge related to this that you want to propose, do so via a comment or email. Again, I'll not be posting any of the "Well, I can tell the difference 'cause my cat says so" genre of comments.
Vendors of software tempt the player with promises of improved game performance, while hardware is presented as being able to improve your pings. Mice are made with DPI ratings that need to use scientific notation. The list goes on and on.
What is the intelligent FPS gamer to make of these, and how can they be sure that their money is well spent on things that really can make a difference in their gaming acumen?
We'll tear into a couple of examples in this blog entry, and show how a healthy dose of skepticism toward many of the claims bantered about the Internet by producers of these products and posters in forums could save the gamer time and money.
I've chosen two areas that have in particular pegged my BS detector.
- Game Booster, and other software that alleges to 'speed up' your PC for gaming.
- Specialized 'gaming' Network Cards, that make claims of reduced pings and latency.
- Is there a valid reason this should improve my gaming experience?
- Is there a repeatable, scientific test and measurement to validate the claims, or are they largely anecdotal and subjective?
- Even if there is a measurable difference, does it make a difference for gaming?
What? How exactly does this piece of free software know how to manage these things better than Microsoft's own OS? Each of the techniques used have been shown to have little if any merit.
It has been shown repeatedly that file fragmentation has little bearing on the performance of Windows and applications for any modern version of Windows. In the days of the FAT file system, defragmentation could make a noticeable difference, but that was because of a file system design that had outgrown its usefulness.
With modern file systems on Windows (NTFS), defragmentation is frankly a waste of time, and its biggest effect is likely physical wear and tear on your hard drive. Defragmentation is strictly a no-no for Solid State drives, and garners absolutely no benefit.
I am not saying defragmentation of the file system under certain corner cases cannot show some measurable change. It can. I am saying such a change will have no material impact in the performance of a game. I invite any reader that can show otherwise with a repeatable test that will pass muster for scientific validity to comment with references to such a test. I know of none.
The 'shutting down of background processes', whether done manually or with some program has long been a 'tweak' recommended in enthusiast forums. In particular, recommendations are made to disable Windows intrinsic services and processes. Utter BS! There is again no test I've ever seen that shows this to have any material effect on game performance. Messing with Windows facilities can have very deleterious effects on the performance and reliability of the OS, and should be considered off limits by any informed gamer.
Now doing this can certainly affect boot times: these Windows components are typically loaded during the boot processes, so this will take some time obviously. But once booted, Windows manages these components quite efficiently, moving them aside if an application such as a game needs resources. There is no material penalty leaving these alone for a gamer.
Of course, if the gamer has tons of junkware or other software installed on their gaming machine, these may cause issues. In these cases, shutting down or disabling these could benefit game play. But seriously, what sane gamer that cares about game performance plays on a machine burdened with junk?
The solution to problems like this is to have a proper gaming environment, and not install crud in the first place. See Swimming in the Septic Tank with my Gaming Buddies for how I set up my gaming machines, a model that I believe is ideal for the serious gamer.
I'm not even sure how to comment on the claim of 'cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance'. Windows manages memory. The way it should be managed. 'Memory Cleaners' and 'Extenders' have long been known to belong to the snake oil camp of PC 'tweaks'. Enough said.
Let's answer our three questions for this product.
- There's no valid reason this product should have any material affect for a properly configured gaming environment. If you have junk software baggage getting in the way of your gaming pleasure, uninstall it or just build a proper environment in the first place.
- I've seen no repeatable, scientifically valid test to validate the claims for this product when installed in a proper gaming environment. Only anecdotal claims, about as valid as the miracle cures claimed for colon cleansing.
- Since there does not appear to be a measurable difference on a properly setup PC, I'd expect the product to have no material effect. So it doesn't matter to the gamer.
The marketing materials and hype that surrounded this initial product were mind numbing. Oral Roberts, Tony Robbins, and Billy Mays combined. There was (and still is) however at the same time a suspicious lack of any tests with reasonable protocols and environments showing any material improvement. This kind of hype should always raise an eyebrow. Their current campaign is filled with outlandish testimonials (how many of these players paid for their cards, you might ask) that they remind me of a revival meeting. No scientifically testable numbers to be found anywhere. Big surprise.
The tests I've seen, both in-house and out, seemed to all have been done on hardware that was borderline at best for a serious gamer. While offloading the network processing from an overloaded OS and hardware platform with a mediocre on-board NIC chip may demonstrate measurable performance benefits in network response and even frame rates due to reduced CPU utilization, no gamer with the $300.00 to spend at the time was likely to be running games on such hobbled hardware. And if they were, the money could have been spent far more effectively elsewhere to improve hardware performance (RAM, CPU, add-in NIC, etc.)
I am not aware of any rigorous, scientifically valid test of these products on a modern gaming machine that show any material effect on performance in areas that matter to the gamer. Reviews by magazines and tech sites reflect this view.
In their most recent incarnation, the company has moved the performance metric to a measurement of their own creation, using tools defined and built by them. "Trust me. See the difference it makes in the flow rate of the Flux Capacitors?'' This is starting to smell like some of the marketing done in other hobbies with kook esoterica, like high-end audio products.
Let's look at our BS detector questions for this item:
- Pings are important to gamers. They're also largely out of the gamer's control. Once the gamer's packets are on the WAN, there's nothing they can do to improve pings. Probably the reason the company dropped this as their marketing silver bullet, and moved to new nonsense. There's no valid reason improvements in the new metric should result in a material improvement of the gaming experience.
- The only test with any sort of measurement for the current product ("Killer 2100") extant at this time is the in-house test of the in-house created metric using the in-house created tool. There have been no scientifically valid tests showing any material benefit to a gamer. Suspiciously, there are absolutely no details in the marketing diarrhea found on the company site describing the hardware configuration used for their comparison. Lots of "testimonials" though. Sound like a late night TV commercial to you?
- Even if the results of the in-house test are valid, that this would make any material difference to game play strains credulity. Like audio cable makers that charge tens of thousands of dollars for a pair of speaker cables, claiming the incredible improvements wrought by the 10 MHz bandwidth of their cable. Problem is, human hearing drops out orders of magnitude lower in the spectrum, and there has never been a scientifically valid test to show any benefit of such cables. The numbers look good in their own tests for the NIC, as they do for the speaker cables. They just don't matter.
If the gamer applies these three simple questions when considering a new piece of hardware, software, or the application of some 'twaek' seen in a forum, I think they will save themselves time and money, and avoid going down the rabbit hole of nonsense.
I try to look at the PC and gaming world, and the world in general, through glasses colored by logic and rationality. Take a look at my thoughts on other areas where I think the manure is deep at I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, Mutation on the Bounty, and Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming.
For a great overview of how to think using logic, rationality, and healthy skepticism, check out the materials at The James Randi Educational Foundation and their Million Dollar Challenge, most recently applied to ultra-expensive high-end speaker cables (well, almost applied: the cable vendor chickened out!)
There's also an amusing snippet How to be a Skeptic on WikiHow, check it out!
Update:
After reviewing some of the grotesque marketing tactics at the pages of Bigfoot Networks, I have made a public challenge.
I invite readers to e-mail them with a link (I wanted to put a cool "mailto" link here, but strangely the contact information for the company headquarters doesn't have an e-mail. For that matter, it doesn't have a phone number. The "Texas Office" has a phone number, but I'm not clear if the address has a suite number or a self-storage shed number. In any case, no e-mail there either. If a reader finds one, let me know! I want to donate a PC to a worthy school.)
Their lawyers (must be pretty cheap, if "Grubby" the master Warcraft player they use as a reference "earns more in a year than your average lawyer.") can contact me and my lawyers for details.
In the spirit of my earlier "Bounty" blog entries Mutation on the Bounty and I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, I will open this up to a public challenge at some future date. I first want to give the Bigfoots at Bigfoot a chance to accept it.
"Grubby". That's a good one. I wonder how much pings really matter for flashing pink hooves on the royal mount, or whatever they call them in those kind of games like Warcraft where cat-like reactions are required. Not!
The challenge has beeen moved to its own entry here.
As an aside, as per the earlier bounties, I'll not be posting any anecdotal comments from readers claiming they've "seen" this particular bigfoot. If you think you can meet this challenge and are able to demonstrate the ability and willingness to suffer the penalty of a loss, or if you have an idea for a challenge related to this that you want to propose, do so via a comment or email. Again, I'll not be posting any of the "Well, I can tell the difference 'cause my cat says so" genre of comments.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Perplexed Execs Dissect PhysX.
PhysX, the accelerated game physics technology from the 2002 upstart Ageia, has officially been taken off of life support by Nvidia, the GPU behemoth that acquired Ageia in early 2008. While the PhysX API continues to be actively supported and developed, the actual acceleration will only be supported by utilizing the GPGPU capabilities of the Nvidia graphics cards moving forward. The dedicated specialized add-in cards, first produced by Ageia and later licensed by other companies such as BFG, ASUS, etc. are effectively dead.
This was in my mind a case of the light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train. As I predicted in the HardOCP forums during the early days of Aegia, this was a dead man walking. GPGPU was at the time already coming into its own, and it was patently clear that graphics cards would be able to do the same types of calculations as the pricey Aegia add-in card on hardware already owned by the gamer. Perhaps not as rapidly at the time, but just as Apple found themselves hobbled by the glacial rate of performance progress for the PowerPC CPU they used in the past compared to Intel's rapid pace, it was clear that the performance progress of GPU hardware would rapidly surpass that of the custom hardware dictated by Ageia.
Owners of Nvidia GPU hardware can continue to enjoy the benefits of the PhysX technology, but owners of the various dedicated add-in cards now find themselves with expensive paperweights, unless they choose to never update their Nvidia drivers.
Accelerated game physics remains the red headed stepchild of the gaming world. The list of games that utilize the proprietary API is rather limited, with developers more likely to use their own physics technology or one of the middleware packages such as Havok.
Long term, Microsoft will surely incorporate a game physics component into DirectX with abstractions similar to the audio and graphics components. This will allow game developers to utilize a common API that shields them from the vagaries of the underlying physics 'engine', be it GPGPU based (Nvida or ATI), or middleware based (Havok, ODE, etc.)
Gamers will see better and better implementations of accelerated, complex physics in their games for certain, but we've really only seen baby steps up until now.
My prediction for the next piece of dedicated hardware that will fall by the wayside? The ridiculous voodoo-ware by Bigfoot Networks, producers of the ludicrous 'Killer' network interface card series.
One look at their marketing hype should raise red flags for any intelligent gamer. I've yet to see any of their 'tests' that are plastered all around their site contain any details of the protocols and systems involved, giving them more of the appearance of some late night infomercial for Miracle Magnetic Healing Shoe Inserts than that of a truly valid scientific test.
Surely, hardware that is about as useful to a gamer on a modern high performance gaming PC as a diamond encrusted platinum swastika is to a rabbi. I'm sure they'll find some special customers for these products, just like the makers of overpriced ($55,000.00 a pair!) speaker cables do, even though it has been shown audio kooks couldn't discern the difference between expensive cables and wire coat hangers.
I hope my favorite 'Minimum BS' PC magazine gets their hands on a recent model and puts it through the wringer. PC gaming enthusiasts have a myriad of better things to spend their hard earned cash on.
Heck, I may go buy one myself and put and end to this nonsense with a controlled scientific test.
Z9$^&$^03H#$^90efjdv28e0^#%$*( dR - Oops, sorry, I just slipped on a puddle of snake oil...
This was in my mind a case of the light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train. As I predicted in the HardOCP forums during the early days of Aegia, this was a dead man walking. GPGPU was at the time already coming into its own, and it was patently clear that graphics cards would be able to do the same types of calculations as the pricey Aegia add-in card on hardware already owned by the gamer. Perhaps not as rapidly at the time, but just as Apple found themselves hobbled by the glacial rate of performance progress for the PowerPC CPU they used in the past compared to Intel's rapid pace, it was clear that the performance progress of GPU hardware would rapidly surpass that of the custom hardware dictated by Ageia.
Owners of Nvidia GPU hardware can continue to enjoy the benefits of the PhysX technology, but owners of the various dedicated add-in cards now find themselves with expensive paperweights, unless they choose to never update their Nvidia drivers.
Accelerated game physics remains the red headed stepchild of the gaming world. The list of games that utilize the proprietary API is rather limited, with developers more likely to use their own physics technology or one of the middleware packages such as Havok.
Long term, Microsoft will surely incorporate a game physics component into DirectX with abstractions similar to the audio and graphics components. This will allow game developers to utilize a common API that shields them from the vagaries of the underlying physics 'engine', be it GPGPU based (Nvida or ATI), or middleware based (Havok, ODE, etc.)
Gamers will see better and better implementations of accelerated, complex physics in their games for certain, but we've really only seen baby steps up until now.
My prediction for the next piece of dedicated hardware that will fall by the wayside? The ridiculous voodoo-ware by Bigfoot Networks, producers of the ludicrous 'Killer' network interface card series.
One look at their marketing hype should raise red flags for any intelligent gamer. I've yet to see any of their 'tests' that are plastered all around their site contain any details of the protocols and systems involved, giving them more of the appearance of some late night infomercial for Miracle Magnetic Healing Shoe Inserts than that of a truly valid scientific test.
Surely, hardware that is about as useful to a gamer on a modern high performance gaming PC as a diamond encrusted platinum swastika is to a rabbi. I'm sure they'll find some special customers for these products, just like the makers of overpriced ($55,000.00 a pair!) speaker cables do, even though it has been shown audio kooks couldn't discern the difference between expensive cables and wire coat hangers.
I hope my favorite 'Minimum BS' PC magazine gets their hands on a recent model and puts it through the wringer. PC gaming enthusiasts have a myriad of better things to spend their hard earned cash on.
Heck, I may go buy one myself and put and end to this nonsense with a controlled scientific test.
Z9$^&$^03H#$^90efjdv28e0^#%$*( dR - Oops, sorry, I just slipped on a puddle of snake oil...
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Persistent vegetative state: Has a Do Not Resuscitate order been put on PC game development?
PC gaming, as we have known it over the past many years, is dying. It may already be brain-dead and we just don't know it yet. Certainly many of the developers that produce games for the PC platform seem to have gone comatose. By PC gaming, I mean the games where the basic game from the developers could be configured and modified ('modded') into a game that fit the players' desires.
New custom maps? No problem! New characters? You got it! New scoring modes or kit restrictions for competitive play? For certain! Custom dedicated servers with admin controlled settings? Check! LAN based private servers? You bet! In-game console? Of course! Build a completely new game from scratch using the core that can become wildly popular? Been there, done that!
Some games provided the tools to do these kinds of things, others needed clever reverse-engineering, but it could be done. Those days, I think, are drawing rapidly to a close. The market realities (depending on who you talk to, consoles such as the Xbox, Playstation, and Wii enjoy a six or seven to one sales revenue advantage overall compared to PCs) dictate this.
Developers either decide not to even develop for the PC, or do so in a lowest common denominator fashion. More and more, the development environment is a 'write once, deploy many' environment. That means the developer builds the game using the meta-environment of the development tools, and these in turn produce the 'run time' executables and assets for the deployment platforms simultaneously. In some cases, this will result in games that are the same across platforms, except perhaps for input device support. In other cases, some 'customization' can be done for each specific platform to the core (bulk) of the generated game, such as server browser functionality for the PC version that may not exist for the console versions.
In any case, this 'customization' must be fairly limited, else it starts to intrude on the whole purpose of building games using a 'write once' model: rapid development, deployment and easy updating of the core game. We see more and more laments from PC gamers about some new game being a poor 'port' from the console version. The problem is not bad ports - a port can in fact be quite excellent, with platform specific functionality added during the porting process.
The problem is the emerging model of game development no longer revolves around porting of games, but around the deliberate dumbing down of the core game design and development to fit the commonalities of the chosen deployment platforms. There is no longer any real porting done, just the gluing on of some limited platform specific functionality to the core game code vomited out by the development tools. And even more unfortunately, it seems developers put amateurs on to the job of adding these PC specific features: see Pings? We Don't Need No Stinking Pings! for a recent example of this.
The net result of more and more game developers adopting this kind of development model means more and more games are going to be built to this 'lowest common denominator' of functionality for the platforms the developer decides to deploy to.
The reality is developers are moving to this model, or are using it already. Once the development tools and environments are deemed mature, the result for them is faster, easier, and less expensive development, with vastly simplified deployment and maintenance. The complexity of these tools and environments, combined with the deep abstraction they use to enable their functionality, means making these tools available to the end-user is most unlikely, and reverse-engineering of games has become more and more difficult.
So, the developers can make a game at a lower development cost, designed and built to a lower standard of functionality and capability, and sell it at a very profitable price to a willing (mostly console playing) public. We should certainly be able to understand the reasons and motivations for the game developers and publishers to move to this model. They're in the business to make money, after all. Sadly, as this model is adopted by more developers and publishers the importance of the PC player community diminishes with each passing day.
The situation reminds me of the near death of the classic mechanical wristwatch: Introduced in the early 70's, Quartz wristwatches seemed like the Ebola of the mechanical watch making world. Soon, manufacturers of the hand made mechanical works of art were dropping like peasants during the Great Plague. Most switched over their primary manufacturing to quartz movement based watches. Simpler to make, cheaper to build, and profitable to sell. And yet, a few of them recognized that there was a market for truly well executed 'old school' technology, and that buyers would pay a premium for the privilege. This has resulted in pieces like the one from my blog entry Things Unexpectedly Technical, which sold out instantly to seven fortunate buyers for seven figure prices.
The end seems near for 'old school' PC gaming. We can only hope some developers will realize there is a market of PC connoisseurs that are willing and able to take advantage of PC games built and deployed in a PC centric fashion. Even if it means a pricier game, I for one am willing to pay for excellence.
New custom maps? No problem! New characters? You got it! New scoring modes or kit restrictions for competitive play? For certain! Custom dedicated servers with admin controlled settings? Check! LAN based private servers? You bet! In-game console? Of course! Build a completely new game from scratch using the core that can become wildly popular? Been there, done that!
Some games provided the tools to do these kinds of things, others needed clever reverse-engineering, but it could be done. Those days, I think, are drawing rapidly to a close. The market realities (depending on who you talk to, consoles such as the Xbox, Playstation, and Wii enjoy a six or seven to one sales revenue advantage overall compared to PCs) dictate this.
Developers either decide not to even develop for the PC, or do so in a lowest common denominator fashion. More and more, the development environment is a 'write once, deploy many' environment. That means the developer builds the game using the meta-environment of the development tools, and these in turn produce the 'run time' executables and assets for the deployment platforms simultaneously. In some cases, this will result in games that are the same across platforms, except perhaps for input device support. In other cases, some 'customization' can be done for each specific platform to the core (bulk) of the generated game, such as server browser functionality for the PC version that may not exist for the console versions.
In any case, this 'customization' must be fairly limited, else it starts to intrude on the whole purpose of building games using a 'write once' model: rapid development, deployment and easy updating of the core game. We see more and more laments from PC gamers about some new game being a poor 'port' from the console version. The problem is not bad ports - a port can in fact be quite excellent, with platform specific functionality added during the porting process.
The problem is the emerging model of game development no longer revolves around porting of games, but around the deliberate dumbing down of the core game design and development to fit the commonalities of the chosen deployment platforms. There is no longer any real porting done, just the gluing on of some limited platform specific functionality to the core game code vomited out by the development tools. And even more unfortunately, it seems developers put amateurs on to the job of adding these PC specific features: see Pings? We Don't Need No Stinking Pings! for a recent example of this.
The net result of more and more game developers adopting this kind of development model means more and more games are going to be built to this 'lowest common denominator' of functionality for the platforms the developer decides to deploy to.
The reality is developers are moving to this model, or are using it already. Once the development tools and environments are deemed mature, the result for them is faster, easier, and less expensive development, with vastly simplified deployment and maintenance. The complexity of these tools and environments, combined with the deep abstraction they use to enable their functionality, means making these tools available to the end-user is most unlikely, and reverse-engineering of games has become more and more difficult.
So, the developers can make a game at a lower development cost, designed and built to a lower standard of functionality and capability, and sell it at a very profitable price to a willing (mostly console playing) public. We should certainly be able to understand the reasons and motivations for the game developers and publishers to move to this model. They're in the business to make money, after all. Sadly, as this model is adopted by more developers and publishers the importance of the PC player community diminishes with each passing day.
The situation reminds me of the near death of the classic mechanical wristwatch: Introduced in the early 70's, Quartz wristwatches seemed like the Ebola of the mechanical watch making world. Soon, manufacturers of the hand made mechanical works of art were dropping like peasants during the Great Plague. Most switched over their primary manufacturing to quartz movement based watches. Simpler to make, cheaper to build, and profitable to sell. And yet, a few of them recognized that there was a market for truly well executed 'old school' technology, and that buyers would pay a premium for the privilege. This has resulted in pieces like the one from my blog entry Things Unexpectedly Technical, which sold out instantly to seven fortunate buyers for seven figure prices.
The end seems near for 'old school' PC gaming. We can only hope some developers will realize there is a market of PC connoisseurs that are willing and able to take advantage of PC games built and deployed in a PC centric fashion. Even if it means a pricier game, I for one am willing to pay for excellence.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Mutation on the Bounty.
What James 'The Amazing Randi' Randi has done in debunking nutjob psychics, fringe audiophiles and other forms of pseudoscience goes mutatis mutandis for much of the 'expert advice', 'facts', and 'tweaks' often seen in gaming enthusiast forums.
Some of my posts have dealt with just such things (see I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming. for some examples). I do this for a few reasons. I hate bullshit. I hate even more bullshit from the clueless (the truly ignorant can be forgiven - they're too clueless to know they don't know). There's enough BS in enthusiast forums to fertilize the entire planet. (As a side note, if you enjoy seeing this kind of thing blown out of the water 'boom headshot!' style, catch some episodes of the hilarious Penn & Teller: Bullshit! series).
I laid out a challenge bounty in my frames per second entry, which I'm quite sure will remain standing until we as humans are genetically altered or evolve into some kind of über gaming race. I've got another one in mind, prompted by recent posts in a myriad of Battlefield Bad Company 2 forums regarding a tweak to the MCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) for windows Vista/7, alleging greatly improved game performance. The fact that this mechanism only comes into play with respect to network throttling at rates over 10,000 packets per second seems to be utterly lost on the Jim Jones like posters of this 'miracle tweak'. This is far beyond the actual rate used by the game.
BS! I say! I firmly believe this is a classic placebo combined with a sort of mass delusion often seen with 'tweaks' like this. This facility of Windows does not even come into play in the typical gaming environment, and any gamer worth their salt is not even trying to watch streaming videos and listen to streaming music while gaming (not that even that would necessarily invoke this feature's use).
So here's the challenge: I publicly state that the first person to demonstrate a measurable and statistically significant difference in game performance (including but not limited to ping and FPS rates, measured using metrics and tools acceptable to both parties) and a statistically significant change in player score (frags per minute or some other metric agreed to by both parties) or the ability to even recognize whether the feature is enabled or not to a statistically significant level while playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, playing only the game and optionally using some VOIP communications such as Ventrilo or Teamspeak on a fresh installation of Windows 7 with no other applications installed or running other than those present in the default Windows installation, will garner a bounty of a $100.00 U.S. gift card from the author.
For a twist on the last challenge, where a challenger has nothing to lose and everything to gain by showing fault in my statements, any challenger agrees that once the detailed conditions outlined above are agreed upon by both parties, and the challenge is accepted, failure to produce supporting evidence for the hypothesis that this 'tweak' has any material affect will require the challenger to pay $100.00 U.S. within 30 days of conclusion of the challenge to the charity of the author's choice.
As before, my Shekels are safe, perhaps I can however enrich the coffers of some charities!
As an aside, I wil NOT post any comments of the 'Well, I can see the difference!' genre for this blog entry. You think you can beat the challenge? Then post your public acceptance of the challenge. Put up, or shut up!
Some of my posts have dealt with just such things (see I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!, I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!, Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming. for some examples). I do this for a few reasons. I hate bullshit. I hate even more bullshit from the clueless (the truly ignorant can be forgiven - they're too clueless to know they don't know). There's enough BS in enthusiast forums to fertilize the entire planet. (As a side note, if you enjoy seeing this kind of thing blown out of the water 'boom headshot!' style, catch some episodes of the hilarious Penn & Teller: Bullshit! series).
I laid out a challenge bounty in my frames per second entry, which I'm quite sure will remain standing until we as humans are genetically altered or evolve into some kind of über gaming race. I've got another one in mind, prompted by recent posts in a myriad of Battlefield Bad Company 2 forums regarding a tweak to the MCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) for windows Vista/7, alleging greatly improved game performance. The fact that this mechanism only comes into play with respect to network throttling at rates over 10,000 packets per second seems to be utterly lost on the Jim Jones like posters of this 'miracle tweak'. This is far beyond the actual rate used by the game.
BS! I say! I firmly believe this is a classic placebo combined with a sort of mass delusion often seen with 'tweaks' like this. This facility of Windows does not even come into play in the typical gaming environment, and any gamer worth their salt is not even trying to watch streaming videos and listen to streaming music while gaming (not that even that would necessarily invoke this feature's use).
So here's the challenge: I publicly state that the first person to demonstrate a measurable and statistically significant difference in game performance (including but not limited to ping and FPS rates, measured using metrics and tools acceptable to both parties) and a statistically significant change in player score (frags per minute or some other metric agreed to by both parties) or the ability to even recognize whether the feature is enabled or not to a statistically significant level while playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, playing only the game and optionally using some VOIP communications such as Ventrilo or Teamspeak on a fresh installation of Windows 7 with no other applications installed or running other than those present in the default Windows installation, will garner a bounty of a $100.00 U.S. gift card from the author.
For a twist on the last challenge, where a challenger has nothing to lose and everything to gain by showing fault in my statements, any challenger agrees that once the detailed conditions outlined above are agreed upon by both parties, and the challenge is accepted, failure to produce supporting evidence for the hypothesis that this 'tweak' has any material affect will require the challenger to pay $100.00 U.S. within 30 days of conclusion of the challenge to the charity of the author's choice.
As before, my Shekels are safe, perhaps I can however enrich the coffers of some charities!
As an aside, I wil NOT post any comments of the 'Well, I can see the difference!' genre for this blog entry. You think you can beat the challenge? Then post your public acceptance of the challenge. Put up, or shut up!
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I Read it in a National Enquirer Survey, it Must Be True!
Is extrapolation from forum 'game problem' posts to indicting a game as a steaming pile 'o poo the same as taking a Cosmo survey at face value?
I think so. Every day, I see Forum Fights where particularly vociferous posters scream bloody murder over their current 'problem' game, lamenting how poorly coded some part of the game is, how anserine the developers are, usually by members that have demonstrated through prior diatribes they likely couldn't tell a line of code from a line of coke.
There are of course, mixed in with the cacophonous whiners, posters with real, genuine problems. It is often stated by some in the forums that the number of complaints over a game proves that the game has problems, and not just for them, but for everybody. These posters will argue to no end that this is so, even when shown contradictory evidence such as the vast majority of players that seem to be enjoying the game without issue. To me, their claims have always been analogous to making the logical leap from seeing everyone in a hospital is ill to the population of the planet is sick.
Can we make any valid statistical inferences from what we see in a forum? I think not. I'm more on the number theory side of things, but I'm comfortable enough with my background in statistics to state that we really can't make any valid inferences on the whole population of players for a game from what we see in forums.
Basic statistics (AP High School level) reveals to the learner some facts that at first seem perhaps implausible, and that would most likely seem implausible to the lay person. That valid inferences for large populations can be made from small samples (e.g., a few hundred persons sampled from a population of say one million that is being studied), and that the larger the population under consideration the smaller the sample size needed (expressed as a percentage of the total population) do seem a bit hard to believe.
But basic statistics shows us this is so. The interested reader not already versed can see Sample Size Calculator for some quick experimentation, and Required sample sizes for hypothesis tests in the Wikipedia article Sample Size for a quick brush up on the basics.
Key to these facts is that the sample is unbiased and random. Otherwise, all bets are off. The introduction of of bias can be subtle. Say for example, you are thinking of producing a new widget that improves the flavor of coffee. You're going to take the world by storm! You want to get an idea of how many people would buy it, so you construct a survey, randomly picking a few hundred home phone numbers from the phone book of a random city with a fairly large population. Over a period of a few work days, your staff calls these random possible buyers, and queries their interest. Much to your dismay, very, very few have an interest. Was the survey proper? Can you infer that you might want to rethink your widget idea from the results?
Did you catch the two (and there of course are more) possibly fatal biases introduced by the survey? Firstly, calls were made during 'work days'. Perhaps the most interested prospective buyers work during the day, so you completely missed them in the results. Secondly, just what was the 'random' city? If it turned out to be say Salt Lake City, with a core and suburb population of well over 50% Mormon, a faith that many followers believe precludes the drinking of coffee (actually, from The Book of Mormon: "And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly."), your results are going to be wildly biased.
So much for an unbiased and random survey.
The posters in a typical game enthusiast forum produce a vastly more biased view of the population than even this woefully inadequate example survey. This is because they are self-selecting. They are there by choice, not because they were randomly selected from the population. Importantly, a high percentage of these self-selected forum members only make posts when looking for solutions to problems, game caused or otherwise, or to state some other dissatisfaction with the product. Self-selection introduces one type of Selection Bias that makes any kind of valid statistical inference nearly impossible, even after adjusting or weighting the data.
One of the more interesting studies related to this kind of problem is covered in the landmark study Comparing the Accuracy of RDD Telephone Surveys and Internet Surveys Conducted with Probability and Non-Probability Samples by David S. Yeager and Jon A. Krosnick of Stanford University. In it, the authors state:
"If the factors that determine a population member’s presence or absence in the sample are all uncorrelated with variables of interest in a study, then the observed distributions of those variables should be identical to the distributions in the population. And if the factors that determine a population member’s presence or absence in the sample are all uncorrelated with the magnitudes of associations between pairs of variables measured in the study, then the observed associations should also be identical to those in the population. However, if these conditions do not hold, then survey results may not be comparable to those that would be obtained from probability samples...More generally, the present investigation suggests that the foundations of statistical sampling theory are sustained by actual data in practice. Probability samples, even ones without especially high response rates, yield quite accurate results. In contrast, non-probability samples are not as accurate, and are sometimes strikingly inaccurate."
Quite the mouthful! Nonetheless, it cuts to the quick of the problem of trying to project the experiences of forum posters with game problems onto the general population of players of the game.
You can't, really. And doing so in a forum rant probably does nothing more than make one look like an Internet Jackass.
I think so. Every day, I see Forum Fights where particularly vociferous posters scream bloody murder over their current 'problem' game, lamenting how poorly coded some part of the game is, how anserine the developers are, usually by members that have demonstrated through prior diatribes they likely couldn't tell a line of code from a line of coke.
There are of course, mixed in with the cacophonous whiners, posters with real, genuine problems. It is often stated by some in the forums that the number of complaints over a game proves that the game has problems, and not just for them, but for everybody. These posters will argue to no end that this is so, even when shown contradictory evidence such as the vast majority of players that seem to be enjoying the game without issue. To me, their claims have always been analogous to making the logical leap from seeing everyone in a hospital is ill to the population of the planet is sick.
Can we make any valid statistical inferences from what we see in a forum? I think not. I'm more on the number theory side of things, but I'm comfortable enough with my background in statistics to state that we really can't make any valid inferences on the whole population of players for a game from what we see in forums.
Basic statistics (AP High School level) reveals to the learner some facts that at first seem perhaps implausible, and that would most likely seem implausible to the lay person. That valid inferences for large populations can be made from small samples (e.g., a few hundred persons sampled from a population of say one million that is being studied), and that the larger the population under consideration the smaller the sample size needed (expressed as a percentage of the total population) do seem a bit hard to believe.
But basic statistics shows us this is so. The interested reader not already versed can see Sample Size Calculator for some quick experimentation, and Required sample sizes for hypothesis tests in the Wikipedia article Sample Size for a quick brush up on the basics.
Key to these facts is that the sample is unbiased and random. Otherwise, all bets are off. The introduction of of bias can be subtle. Say for example, you are thinking of producing a new widget that improves the flavor of coffee. You're going to take the world by storm! You want to get an idea of how many people would buy it, so you construct a survey, randomly picking a few hundred home phone numbers from the phone book of a random city with a fairly large population. Over a period of a few work days, your staff calls these random possible buyers, and queries their interest. Much to your dismay, very, very few have an interest. Was the survey proper? Can you infer that you might want to rethink your widget idea from the results?
Did you catch the two (and there of course are more) possibly fatal biases introduced by the survey? Firstly, calls were made during 'work days'. Perhaps the most interested prospective buyers work during the day, so you completely missed them in the results. Secondly, just what was the 'random' city? If it turned out to be say Salt Lake City, with a core and suburb population of well over 50% Mormon, a faith that many followers believe precludes the drinking of coffee (actually, from The Book of Mormon: "And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly."), your results are going to be wildly biased.
So much for an unbiased and random survey.
The posters in a typical game enthusiast forum produce a vastly more biased view of the population than even this woefully inadequate example survey. This is because they are self-selecting. They are there by choice, not because they were randomly selected from the population. Importantly, a high percentage of these self-selected forum members only make posts when looking for solutions to problems, game caused or otherwise, or to state some other dissatisfaction with the product. Self-selection introduces one type of Selection Bias that makes any kind of valid statistical inference nearly impossible, even after adjusting or weighting the data.
One of the more interesting studies related to this kind of problem is covered in the landmark study Comparing the Accuracy of RDD Telephone Surveys and Internet Surveys Conducted with Probability and Non-Probability Samples by David S. Yeager and Jon A. Krosnick of Stanford University. In it, the authors state:
"If the factors that determine a population member’s presence or absence in the sample are all uncorrelated with variables of interest in a study, then the observed distributions of those variables should be identical to the distributions in the population. And if the factors that determine a population member’s presence or absence in the sample are all uncorrelated with the magnitudes of associations between pairs of variables measured in the study, then the observed associations should also be identical to those in the population. However, if these conditions do not hold, then survey results may not be comparable to those that would be obtained from probability samples...More generally, the present investigation suggests that the foundations of statistical sampling theory are sustained by actual data in practice. Probability samples, even ones without especially high response rates, yield quite accurate results. In contrast, non-probability samples are not as accurate, and are sometimes strikingly inaccurate."
Quite the mouthful! Nonetheless, it cuts to the quick of the problem of trying to project the experiences of forum posters with game problems onto the general population of players of the game.
You can't, really. And doing so in a forum rant probably does nothing more than make one look like an Internet Jackass.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
I Can See CXLVI Frames Per Second!
You can find a myriad of posts in gaming enthusiast forums debating the need, or lack thereof, of high frame rates in PC gaming. Inevitably, someone posts a claim that at least some 'X' frames per second are needed before it doesn't matter, or even that no such upper limit of 'X' exists, to which I usually reply with the title of this entry.
And just as inevitably, the 'experts' and 'pro gamers' chime in with claims that ridiculous frame rates are needed, and how they can see and notice a difference with hundreds of frames per second.
Invariably, these forum arguments boil down to someone referencing a Wikipedia article, or some other forum post, all of which seem lead back to the same 'authoritative' reference: a couple of 'articles' (one a dedicated web site) by an 'expert' making ludicrous claims based on research done by the Air Force many years ago regarding the 'persistence' of vision to a rapidly displayed single image.
The problem here (aside from the fact that the Air Force study has no real relevance with respect to our ability to utilize rapidly changing scene information) is that these two 'articles' are written by someone with no background of note, nor any expertise of any sort in the subject matter that I could discern.
In my opinion, the 'author' may also be a 'kook', having published other 'articles' of such scholarly note as 'We Made Contact', an expose on their 'scientific' analysis of newly discovered crop circles, with the conclusion that these are a response from a message sent to a distant globular cluster as part of the SETI experiments. Complete with a 'decoding' of the alien message. This 'article' demonstrates such an incredibly naive understanding of the physics involved in the transmission, or a purposeful use of misinformation in an attempt to bolster the credibility and 'wow' factor of the 'article', or both, that I'm really not sure what to make of it! Read it at "We Made Contact" for a serious laugh.
The 'gotcha' there: even though the target in question would require a round-trip message time of tens of thousands of years, the 'reply' took only a handful according to the 'expert' author of the 'scientific' article, while a trivial analysis shows that the probability of some mystery planet hosting aliens being close enough and in the needed direction yet unknown to us is nonexistent.
All this is aside from the fact you would need to believe the conclusion of the 'scientific' research of the 'author' that these Aliens exist, have somehow violated Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and even bothered to respond to us by carving these circles (and the 'Face on Mars', according to the 'study').
If you need to use this kind of thing as your authoritative reference, you might as well stop playing games, and just check with Sylvia Browne to have her tell you what your scores and stats will be.
There is no academically, scientifically sound study that supports the outlandish claims of this 'author', or the logical leaps made by many based on the 'facts' from these articles, or the claims by gamers that wildly overestimate their own physiological capabilities.
I actually heavily researched this, and consulted with real experts in the field during a venture funding analysis.
I want to be clear: I am not saying higher frame rates are not beneficial.
I am saying that the value where the ability of even gifted humans to take advantage of high frame rates is lower by a large margin than the claims of this oft referenced 'expert' and that of poseurs in forums.
Think you know better than the experts? Think you have supernatural abilities?
I publicly state here that the first person to either:
(1) Show a peer-reviewed academic/scientific study that supports the hypothesis "Humans can effectively utilize frame rates over 300 frames per second and can demonstrate a statistically significant increase in target acquisition and game score (test score) compared to 120 frames per second"
or
(2) Demonstrate such an ability under controlled and accepted scientifically valid testing protocols,
will be awarded a $100.00US prize by me.
Interested parties can post their acceptance of this challenge here or email the author. The precise terms and conditions will then be determined by both parties.
(As an aside: there is at least one game I am aware of where the physics algorithms of the game appear to be inexplicably tied to the frame rate limit settings. In this game, one can raise the default rate cap, and this allows slightly higher jumps, etc. to be accomplished. Obviously, such coding horrors do not mean the higher frame rates are the cause of better target acquisition by the player...)
My shekels are safe.
Dedicated to James "The Amazing Randi" Randi.
Debunker extraordinaire. A hero of mine.
See Google to find his $1,000,000.00 challenge to 'audiophile' kooks that think $25,000 cables sound better. Hilarity ensues with the funambulistc help of Pear Cable, maker of goof-ball speaker cables.
And just as inevitably, the 'experts' and 'pro gamers' chime in with claims that ridiculous frame rates are needed, and how they can see and notice a difference with hundreds of frames per second.
Invariably, these forum arguments boil down to someone referencing a Wikipedia article, or some other forum post, all of which seem lead back to the same 'authoritative' reference: a couple of 'articles' (one a dedicated web site) by an 'expert' making ludicrous claims based on research done by the Air Force many years ago regarding the 'persistence' of vision to a rapidly displayed single image.
The problem here (aside from the fact that the Air Force study has no real relevance with respect to our ability to utilize rapidly changing scene information) is that these two 'articles' are written by someone with no background of note, nor any expertise of any sort in the subject matter that I could discern.
In my opinion, the 'author' may also be a 'kook', having published other 'articles' of such scholarly note as 'We Made Contact', an expose on their 'scientific' analysis of newly discovered crop circles, with the conclusion that these are a response from a message sent to a distant globular cluster as part of the SETI experiments. Complete with a 'decoding' of the alien message. This 'article' demonstrates such an incredibly naive understanding of the physics involved in the transmission, or a purposeful use of misinformation in an attempt to bolster the credibility and 'wow' factor of the 'article', or both, that I'm really not sure what to make of it! Read it at "We Made Contact" for a serious laugh.
The 'gotcha' there: even though the target in question would require a round-trip message time of tens of thousands of years, the 'reply' took only a handful according to the 'expert' author of the 'scientific' article, while a trivial analysis shows that the probability of some mystery planet hosting aliens being close enough and in the needed direction yet unknown to us is nonexistent.
All this is aside from the fact you would need to believe the conclusion of the 'scientific' research of the 'author' that these Aliens exist, have somehow violated Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and even bothered to respond to us by carving these circles (and the 'Face on Mars', according to the 'study').
If you need to use this kind of thing as your authoritative reference, you might as well stop playing games, and just check with Sylvia Browne to have her tell you what your scores and stats will be.
There is no academically, scientifically sound study that supports the outlandish claims of this 'author', or the logical leaps made by many based on the 'facts' from these articles, or the claims by gamers that wildly overestimate their own physiological capabilities.
I actually heavily researched this, and consulted with real experts in the field during a venture funding analysis.
I want to be clear: I am not saying higher frame rates are not beneficial.
I am saying that the value where the ability of even gifted humans to take advantage of high frame rates is lower by a large margin than the claims of this oft referenced 'expert' and that of poseurs in forums.
Think you know better than the experts? Think you have supernatural abilities?
I publicly state here that the first person to either:
(1) Show a peer-reviewed academic/scientific study that supports the hypothesis "Humans can effectively utilize frame rates over 300 frames per second and can demonstrate a statistically significant increase in target acquisition and game score (test score) compared to 120 frames per second"
or
(2) Demonstrate such an ability under controlled and accepted scientifically valid testing protocols,
will be awarded a $100.00US prize by me.
Interested parties can post their acceptance of this challenge here or email the author. The precise terms and conditions will then be determined by both parties.
(As an aside: there is at least one game I am aware of where the physics algorithms of the game appear to be inexplicably tied to the frame rate limit settings. In this game, one can raise the default rate cap, and this allows slightly higher jumps, etc. to be accomplished. Obviously, such coding horrors do not mean the higher frame rates are the cause of better target acquisition by the player...)
My shekels are safe.
Dedicated to James "The Amazing Randi" Randi.
Debunker extraordinaire. A hero of mine.
See Google to find his $1,000,000.00 challenge to 'audiophile' kooks that think $25,000 cables sound better. Hilarity ensues with the funambulistc help of Pear Cable, maker of goof-ball speaker cables.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
How about a knowledge / intelligence filter for forums, and the internet in general?
I read a recent blog entry titled 'Idiots', where the writer lamented the state of knowledge exhibited in 'technical' forum postings. I LOL'd.
The reality is, we as posters need to be 'self-regulating', lest we fall into the class of those covered in the amusing book 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Keen.
The framework I've come up with is:
1) The questioner: Anyone can ask any question, there are no 'dumb questions.'
2) The answerer: Incumbent on them to know what they're talking about.
3) The corrector: Corrects misinformed answers. Should really know what they're talking about.
4) The Uber-corrector: Corrects the correctors. Had better be an expert.
5) The debater: Will argue points with correctors and U-correctors. Had better be an expert, else be prepared to be made an Internet jackass.
There seems to be far too many of the debater, regurgitating wikipedia information without any real understanding of the issues involved, and seemingly unwilling to do the research and footwork required to understand deep technical issues.
We owe it to fellow readers, and ourselves, to be introspective and aware of our own limits of knowledge, and committed to do our homework to ensure proper understanding of things when offering our advice to technical questions.
I'd normally let a carcass lie, but this is a great example of what being made an Internet jackass feels like, we all have the power to control whether we're made to look like a fool in public, and as the adage goes, 'payback is a bitch'. The beauty of the web is the speed of information flow. The ugliness is the vast number of self-proclaimed 'experts' that haven't a clue. That what one posts is usually there for an eternity for the world to see should be a cautionary clue to these kinds of posters. This poster, having barraged a forum with 'technical' posts way beyond their pay grade, was banned after incessantly arguing nonsense. The reaction in a different forum speaks for itself. The author will be fortunate if they don't end up sued by the parent company and the admins they libel. For the record, I am of course not an employee of EA or DICE, nor benefit in any way from either company other than buying their games.
Classic!
The reality is, we as posters need to be 'self-regulating', lest we fall into the class of those covered in the amusing book 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Keen.
The framework I've come up with is:
1) The questioner: Anyone can ask any question, there are no 'dumb questions.'
2) The answerer: Incumbent on them to know what they're talking about.
3) The corrector: Corrects misinformed answers. Should really know what they're talking about.
4) The Uber-corrector: Corrects the correctors. Had better be an expert.
5) The debater: Will argue points with correctors and U-correctors. Had better be an expert, else be prepared to be made an Internet jackass.
There seems to be far too many of the debater, regurgitating wikipedia information without any real understanding of the issues involved, and seemingly unwilling to do the research and footwork required to understand deep technical issues.
We owe it to fellow readers, and ourselves, to be introspective and aware of our own limits of knowledge, and committed to do our homework to ensure proper understanding of things when offering our advice to technical questions.
I'd normally let a carcass lie, but this is a great example of what being made an Internet jackass feels like, we all have the power to control whether we're made to look like a fool in public, and as the adage goes, 'payback is a bitch'. The beauty of the web is the speed of information flow. The ugliness is the vast number of self-proclaimed 'experts' that haven't a clue. That what one posts is usually there for an eternity for the world to see should be a cautionary clue to these kinds of posters. This poster, having barraged a forum with 'technical' posts way beyond their pay grade, was banned after incessantly arguing nonsense. The reaction in a different forum speaks for itself. The author will be fortunate if they don't end up sued by the parent company and the admins they libel. For the record, I am of course not an employee of EA or DICE, nor benefit in any way from either company other than buying their games.
Classic!
Yes, Virginia, 32-Bit Windows can use more than 4GB of physical RAM...
In one of the forums I frequent, a debate broke out in a thread over whether 32-bit editions of Microsoft Windows can in fact handle or otherwise use any physical RAM in a system over 4GB. There is still widespread misinformation posted about this, even after all the time taken by various MS engineers (such as the most amusing Raymond Chen) to clarify the facts.
Let's set the record straight.
YES! 32-bit versions of windows can take advantage of more than 4GB of physical RAM.
Example 1: The server editions.
I refer the reader to Memory Limits for Windows Releases for the canonical document.
On these systems, the application is of course limited to 2GB of userspace virtual address space. Using the (again, oft misunderstood) /3GB switch, applications that are compiled with the appropriate flag can avail themselves of a 3GB virtual address space. Utilizing processor and OS PAE capabilities, and Windows APIs such as AWE, or via Kernel mode drivers, such applications can map whatever physical RAM address space the machine exposes into their particular virtual address space. This is how things like SQL Server can have huge memory use (well over any 4GB limit) on such versions of the OS.
Far too many Internet 'experts' advise readers to use things like the /3GB switch to 'increase how much memory your program can use', completely missing that fact that the application must be compiled using the appropriate flag to do this. This can be done 'after the fact' with EDITBIN or a Hex editor, but unless you're sure the coders of the application were sane, or you've otherwise analysed the binary, you might be asking for trouble. In addition, programs compiled with '/GL' (Whole Optimization) cannot be modified using accepted post-compile methods. The end result is the reader ends up burning 1GB of address space that the OS could use for the Kernel, that ends up just sitting there wasted. I would direct the interested reader to the aforementioned Raymond's blog for an amusing, multi-year expose of this.
Example 2: The 'client' editions.
Things get a little more confusing for the 'client' versions of Windows (the consumer versions.) For these, Microsoft decided after rigorous testing that the problems exhibited by drivers and other low-level code would present too many problems when faced with RAM addresses beyond 4GB, and so disabled the 'awareness' of the OS for these versions of the OS for RAM beyond 4GB.
However, properly coded applications and drivers (e.g., Ram Disk software by SuperSpeed) can in fact utilize RAM beyond 4GB even in the 'client' 32-bit Windows versions. I used to do this every day, until the remaining reasons not to use a 64-bit OS were eliminated for me.
Here's a screenshot of this very application, running on a friend's PC with 6GB of physical RAM, providing a 5GB RAM Disk. Note that the 2GB of physical RAM above 4GB is being used perfectly well by this application running under 32-bit Windows (click to see large original):
There were valid reasons for using such 'work-arounds' for 32-bit systems to use more than 4GB of RAM in the past: driver vendors had not kept up with 64-bit systems, and often had either no drivers, or problematic ones. Those days seem long gone, and at this point, there's really no good reason not to use a fully 64-bit capable operating system, even on consumer PCs.
Nonetheless, the fact remains: Yes, Virginia, 32-bit windows can use more than 4GB of ram.
Update:
Finally! Someone at Microsoft read this, perhaps? As of early 2011, the Microsoft Developer Network's canonical document "Memory Limits for Windows Releases" has been properly updated with the correct facts:
X86 client versions with PAE enabled do have a usable 37-bit (128 GB) physical address space. The limit that these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space. That means PAE-aware drivers can actually use physical space above 4 GB if they want. For example, drivers could map the “lost” memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk.
About time...
Let's set the record straight.
YES! 32-bit versions of windows can take advantage of more than 4GB of physical RAM.
Example 1: The server editions.
I refer the reader to Memory Limits for Windows Releases for the canonical document.
On these systems, the application is of course limited to 2GB of userspace virtual address space. Using the (again, oft misunderstood) /3GB switch, applications that are compiled with the appropriate flag can avail themselves of a 3GB virtual address space. Utilizing processor and OS PAE capabilities, and Windows APIs such as AWE, or via Kernel mode drivers, such applications can map whatever physical RAM address space the machine exposes into their particular virtual address space. This is how things like SQL Server can have huge memory use (well over any 4GB limit) on such versions of the OS.
Far too many Internet 'experts' advise readers to use things like the /3GB switch to 'increase how much memory your program can use', completely missing that fact that the application must be compiled using the appropriate flag to do this. This can be done 'after the fact' with EDITBIN or a Hex editor, but unless you're sure the coders of the application were sane, or you've otherwise analysed the binary, you might be asking for trouble. In addition, programs compiled with '/GL' (Whole Optimization) cannot be modified using accepted post-compile methods. The end result is the reader ends up burning 1GB of address space that the OS could use for the Kernel, that ends up just sitting there wasted. I would direct the interested reader to the aforementioned Raymond's blog for an amusing, multi-year expose of this.
Example 2: The 'client' editions.
Things get a little more confusing for the 'client' versions of Windows (the consumer versions.) For these, Microsoft decided after rigorous testing that the problems exhibited by drivers and other low-level code would present too many problems when faced with RAM addresses beyond 4GB, and so disabled the 'awareness' of the OS for these versions of the OS for RAM beyond 4GB.
However, properly coded applications and drivers (e.g., Ram Disk software by SuperSpeed) can in fact utilize RAM beyond 4GB even in the 'client' 32-bit Windows versions. I used to do this every day, until the remaining reasons not to use a 64-bit OS were eliminated for me.
Here's a screenshot of this very application, running on a friend's PC with 6GB of physical RAM, providing a 5GB RAM Disk. Note that the 2GB of physical RAM above 4GB is being used perfectly well by this application running under 32-bit Windows (click to see large original):
There were valid reasons for using such 'work-arounds' for 32-bit systems to use more than 4GB of RAM in the past: driver vendors had not kept up with 64-bit systems, and often had either no drivers, or problematic ones. Those days seem long gone, and at this point, there's really no good reason not to use a fully 64-bit capable operating system, even on consumer PCs.
Nonetheless, the fact remains: Yes, Virginia, 32-bit windows can use more than 4GB of ram.
Update:
Finally! Someone at Microsoft read this, perhaps? As of early 2011, the Microsoft Developer Network's canonical document "Memory Limits for Windows Releases" has been properly updated with the correct facts:
X86 client versions with PAE enabled do have a usable 37-bit (128 GB) physical address space. The limit that these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space. That means PAE-aware drivers can actually use physical space above 4 GB if they want. For example, drivers could map the “lost” memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk.
About time...
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
How could it possibly be my router causing connection issues?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming.
Every day, in PC game enthusiast forums around the world, posters having connectivity problems (or not) with their PC game are advised 'You need to forward your ports!', usually by posters claiming to be 'experienced gamers' or 'network experts'.
Most blindly follow this advice, not even understanding what it means to 'forward a port', much less the ramifications of doing so. My intent is to set the record straight for the reader, so that they may better understand the how, what, when, why, and where of port forwarding. I have greatly simplified and generalized the terminology and examples, which may offend experts, but is appropriate for the intended audience.
To be clear, forwarding of ports is seldom if ever required to allow the client of the online PC game to function properly. Unnecessarily forwarding ports is not only undesirable, it may expose the gamer to security risks, and can interfere with proper functioning of their environment, including games.
The typical PC gamer has a pretty simple environment: Their PC, a router, a modem (perhaps a unit that combines the two functions of router and modem), and...and that's it. The router serves the function of shepherding traffic from the gamer's local area network (LAN) to the wide area network (WAN), where the online game servers 'live'. The modem provides the electronic means for the gamer to access the WAN infrastructure. In some cases, these two functions (router and modem) are combined into a single unit, variously called a router or modem, depending on who you're asking. Often, gamers have a router in their environment without knowing it - they've been told 'that's your modem'.
Why these pieces of hardware are used comes down to the subject of addresses. Each PC in a network must be assigned a unique address. The gamer is probably familiar with these. They're the number sets like '192.168.1.123' you might see for you PC on your LAN, or the '74.125.19.106' you might see if you ping http://www.google.com/. You've probably heard them called the 'IP address'. The important thing is that each PC must have a unique address. Much like your mail goes to a unique address, if different households could have the same address, you can imagine the mess that would ensue.
Now early in the days of the 'net', the groups defining various standards and protocols decided it would be wise to have addresses that were 'public', that is, known to the world as the address to send to, and 'private', that is, addresses that the 'outside' (WAN) world can't even see. This was done for many reasons including reducing the need for public addresses to be used, and to allow enterprises to split up a 'public' address into one or more internal 'private' addresses.
The router's primary function is to manage, control, and manipulate the barrier between the 'private' LAN and the 'public' WAN.
In a typical environment, the modem provides the connection to the WAN, giving the user on the 'inside' of the modem connection some public IP address on the WAN assigned by their ISP. The router takes the traffic from the PCs on the LAN and passes it on through the modem to the destination server on the WAN. We'll call this the 'request' to the server. The server does whatever it needs to process the request, and responds to the WAN address of the gamer. We'll call this the 'reply' from the server.
The router will keep track of requests sent out to the WAN, and in general only allow traffic from the WAN to a PC on the LAN if it determines that traffic is an appropriate reply from a server to a request from a PC on the LAN. Now the router/modem usually have one, and only one public WAN address assigned to them. What are we to do if we have several PCs on our lan that all want to make requests to the same server on the WAN and get their respective replies? The router does this for us through a mechanism generically called Network Address Translation, or NAT for short. There are many details we won't delve into here, a good overview can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation, with some useful references. Readers that wish a more in depth treatment might use the superb books by Comer at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/.
The problem NAT solves is analogous to sending mail between two apartment buildings. We know the street address where we want to send it (the IP address), and the apartment number. In the IP world, the apartment number is called the 'port'. For our PC game, the game client (what the gamer plays) needs to send requests to the game server(s), and it does so by sending requests to the IP address of the server, and including the port that address should go to on the server. The request needs to have a 'return address' so the server can reply, so the game will add the address of the game client, and the desired return port to the request.
Now as we've said, the client is on a private address. The server can't see this or do anything with it. So the router changes the address information, replacing the private LAN address with its public WAN address, and remembers the return address port for the request. If more than one PC on the LAN make a request to a server and specify the same return port, the router notices this, and changes the return port along with the return IP address, keeping track of which PC corresponds to which requested return port the router sends in the request to the server. When the server replies, it uses the return address of the client, which will be the public IP (WAN) address of the gamer, and the return port, which may have been changed from the actual return port by the router.
When the router sees this traffic, it peeks into the packet and determines which PC belongs to the requested return port. The router changes the return port to the one originally in the PC's request, if needed, changes the return IP address to that of the correct PC, and passes the traffic onto the LAN, where the PC that made the request will receive its reply from the server.
In general, we don't want random traffic coming from the WAN into our LAN. Because the router peeks into traffic to determine if it even belongs on the LAN, random attempts to enter the LAN are thwarted. Unless the user specifically needs to have requests from the WAN enter the lan (to a server of some sort on our LAN to reply to), this is precisely what we desire. Routers usually include some kind of 'firewall' capability, which considerably enhances the security of the client<->server interchanges, and provides even more probative capability toward unsolicited traffic from the WAN. We will not detail firewall functionality.
What if the gamer needs to have a server on the LAN that can be accessed by others on the WAN? How might we accomplish this? This is where the feature of the router called 'port forwarding' comes into play. The user can configure their router, and set it to allow traffic from the WAN to its WAN address into the LAN. The user does this by specifying what PC is going to reply to traffic on which port(s). For example, if we wanted to run our own web server on our LAN (or game server, just change the nomenclature and numbers), it would need to get requests on port 80, the default port number for HTTP (browser) traffic. If the PC running our web server on our LAN had an address of say 192.168.1.2, we would configure the router to forward any traffic from the WAN to its WAN address with a destination port of 80 to the PC at 192.168.1.2. When the web server (or game server) replies to the request, it is sent through the router back to the WAN address of the original requester. The same kinds of manipulations to the address happen via NAT as with the game client example, just in reverse. So forwarding is for clients on the WAN to get to a server on your LAN. Pretty simple, no?
Now, to kill the dragon!
Modern PC games played online need the game client to make requests to the game server. The game server, and other game clients, do not make requests to the game client. There are exceptions to this, namely some peer-to-peer games, and cases where one of the clients is also running the game server on one of their PCs. Both fall into the generalized description of a server from earlier. But in general, modern games are client-server based, where the server is run by a provider on the WAN, and the gamer plays the client on the LAN. At no time do the servers try to make an 'inbound' request to the client. Hence, forwarding of any ports to play the game is completely unnecessary, and accomplishes nothing. Forwarding ports when not explicitly required poses a security risk to the user, and can in fact interfere with proper traffic flow for games.
The game's client makes the requests, the router handles the manipulation and shepherding of the traffic to the server on the WAN and the corresponding reply traffic from the server on the WAN to the game client on the LAN. Not the other way around!
Unfortunately, 'You need to forward your ports!' is one tough dragon to slay, and this myth is constantly perpetuated in forums, and even by occasionally by misinformed game publisher support staff. There are even whole web sites devoted to the subject, with applications to automate this unnecessary and potentially security compromising router feature for the uninformed user.
Unless you are instructed that your game requires ports to be forwarded from an authoritative source (the game manual, the game developers, or in some cases the publisher with the caveat noted earlier), you are likely not required to do it. Abandon all hope ye that consider enthusiast forums to be an authoritative source!
To humanize it, think of it this way: You, in your household, act as the 'router' and 'firewall' in a way for traffic in and out of your house (your LAN). You, and others in the house are free to go out from the house to seek information (onto the WAN). When someone comes knocking at the door with the answer, you can peek through the peephole on your door and decide if you expected them, and let them into your house. If a stranger comes knocking, you're likely to decide they're uninvited, and not let them in. Port forwarding is giving a stranger the key to your door. In fact, its giving the key to your door to everyone in the world that knows how to get to your door! The 'experienced gamers' and 'net experts' that tell you there's no danger in forwarding ports when it's not explicitly required are doing just that: telling you it's OK to give the key to your front door to everyone on the planet. I'd venture most intelligent readers wold never subscribe to such nonsense.
How many readers in game enthusiast forums do you think blindly forward ports to 'fix' problems? How many of those same readers will download the latest coolest 'tweak tool' for the game when offered up on the forum? How hard do you think it would be to perhaps list some real ports for the game, and throw an extra one in that the later downloaded 'tweak tool' actually listens on, allowing a remote intruder in to the victim's PC to run amok? If you don't know how to verify exactly why a game should need ports forwarded, exactly which ports should be forwarded, and know exactly how to do this, you probably shouldn't. Since port forwarding, with a properly configured and behaving modem/router is not needed by any modern PC game client, you probably shouldn't anyway.
Before ending and in all fairness, it should be noted that some misbehaving or otherwise buggy routers can be 'worked around' by forwarding ports where this would not normally be required. Part of this 'You need to forward your ports!' malarkey is undoubtedly from uniformed users seeing this 'fix' an issue, not understanding that the problem in fact is elsewhere and the 'fix' is a bandage that may cause other problems and security issues. Used properly, this can allow routers that restrict the user to NAT other than Type 1/Cone to mimic a properly behaving full-cone router for a game. This will of course be limited to only one PC on the LAN side and will not allow multiple players to simultaneously play from the LAN if this work-around is needed. See Troubleshooting Multi-Player PC Game Connectivity Issues for examples of this.
I hope after reading this, the reader has a clarified understanding of what port forwarding is, and when its use is appropriate.
Most blindly follow this advice, not even understanding what it means to 'forward a port', much less the ramifications of doing so. My intent is to set the record straight for the reader, so that they may better understand the how, what, when, why, and where of port forwarding. I have greatly simplified and generalized the terminology and examples, which may offend experts, but is appropriate for the intended audience.
To be clear, forwarding of ports is seldom if ever required to allow the client of the online PC game to function properly. Unnecessarily forwarding ports is not only undesirable, it may expose the gamer to security risks, and can interfere with proper functioning of their environment, including games.
The typical PC gamer has a pretty simple environment: Their PC, a router, a modem (perhaps a unit that combines the two functions of router and modem), and...and that's it. The router serves the function of shepherding traffic from the gamer's local area network (LAN) to the wide area network (WAN), where the online game servers 'live'. The modem provides the electronic means for the gamer to access the WAN infrastructure. In some cases, these two functions (router and modem) are combined into a single unit, variously called a router or modem, depending on who you're asking. Often, gamers have a router in their environment without knowing it - they've been told 'that's your modem'.
Why these pieces of hardware are used comes down to the subject of addresses. Each PC in a network must be assigned a unique address. The gamer is probably familiar with these. They're the number sets like '192.168.1.123' you might see for you PC on your LAN, or the '74.125.19.106' you might see if you ping http://www.google.com/. You've probably heard them called the 'IP address'. The important thing is that each PC must have a unique address. Much like your mail goes to a unique address, if different households could have the same address, you can imagine the mess that would ensue.
Now early in the days of the 'net', the groups defining various standards and protocols decided it would be wise to have addresses that were 'public', that is, known to the world as the address to send to, and 'private', that is, addresses that the 'outside' (WAN) world can't even see. This was done for many reasons including reducing the need for public addresses to be used, and to allow enterprises to split up a 'public' address into one or more internal 'private' addresses.
The router's primary function is to manage, control, and manipulate the barrier between the 'private' LAN and the 'public' WAN.
In a typical environment, the modem provides the connection to the WAN, giving the user on the 'inside' of the modem connection some public IP address on the WAN assigned by their ISP. The router takes the traffic from the PCs on the LAN and passes it on through the modem to the destination server on the WAN. We'll call this the 'request' to the server. The server does whatever it needs to process the request, and responds to the WAN address of the gamer. We'll call this the 'reply' from the server.
The router will keep track of requests sent out to the WAN, and in general only allow traffic from the WAN to a PC on the LAN if it determines that traffic is an appropriate reply from a server to a request from a PC on the LAN. Now the router/modem usually have one, and only one public WAN address assigned to them. What are we to do if we have several PCs on our lan that all want to make requests to the same server on the WAN and get their respective replies? The router does this for us through a mechanism generically called Network Address Translation, or NAT for short. There are many details we won't delve into here, a good overview can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation, with some useful references. Readers that wish a more in depth treatment might use the superb books by Comer at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/.
The problem NAT solves is analogous to sending mail between two apartment buildings. We know the street address where we want to send it (the IP address), and the apartment number. In the IP world, the apartment number is called the 'port'. For our PC game, the game client (what the gamer plays) needs to send requests to the game server(s), and it does so by sending requests to the IP address of the server, and including the port that address should go to on the server. The request needs to have a 'return address' so the server can reply, so the game will add the address of the game client, and the desired return port to the request.
Now as we've said, the client is on a private address. The server can't see this or do anything with it. So the router changes the address information, replacing the private LAN address with its public WAN address, and remembers the return address port for the request. If more than one PC on the LAN make a request to a server and specify the same return port, the router notices this, and changes the return port along with the return IP address, keeping track of which PC corresponds to which requested return port the router sends in the request to the server. When the server replies, it uses the return address of the client, which will be the public IP (WAN) address of the gamer, and the return port, which may have been changed from the actual return port by the router.
When the router sees this traffic, it peeks into the packet and determines which PC belongs to the requested return port. The router changes the return port to the one originally in the PC's request, if needed, changes the return IP address to that of the correct PC, and passes the traffic onto the LAN, where the PC that made the request will receive its reply from the server.
In general, we don't want random traffic coming from the WAN into our LAN. Because the router peeks into traffic to determine if it even belongs on the LAN, random attempts to enter the LAN are thwarted. Unless the user specifically needs to have requests from the WAN enter the lan (to a server of some sort on our LAN to reply to), this is precisely what we desire. Routers usually include some kind of 'firewall' capability, which considerably enhances the security of the client<->server interchanges, and provides even more probative capability toward unsolicited traffic from the WAN. We will not detail firewall functionality.
What if the gamer needs to have a server on the LAN that can be accessed by others on the WAN? How might we accomplish this? This is where the feature of the router called 'port forwarding' comes into play. The user can configure their router, and set it to allow traffic from the WAN to its WAN address into the LAN. The user does this by specifying what PC is going to reply to traffic on which port(s). For example, if we wanted to run our own web server on our LAN (or game server, just change the nomenclature and numbers), it would need to get requests on port 80, the default port number for HTTP (browser) traffic. If the PC running our web server on our LAN had an address of say 192.168.1.2, we would configure the router to forward any traffic from the WAN to its WAN address with a destination port of 80 to the PC at 192.168.1.2. When the web server (or game server) replies to the request, it is sent through the router back to the WAN address of the original requester. The same kinds of manipulations to the address happen via NAT as with the game client example, just in reverse. So forwarding is for clients on the WAN to get to a server on your LAN. Pretty simple, no?
Now, to kill the dragon!
Modern PC games played online need the game client to make requests to the game server. The game server, and other game clients, do not make requests to the game client. There are exceptions to this, namely some peer-to-peer games, and cases where one of the clients is also running the game server on one of their PCs. Both fall into the generalized description of a server from earlier. But in general, modern games are client-server based, where the server is run by a provider on the WAN, and the gamer plays the client on the LAN. At no time do the servers try to make an 'inbound' request to the client. Hence, forwarding of any ports to play the game is completely unnecessary, and accomplishes nothing. Forwarding ports when not explicitly required poses a security risk to the user, and can in fact interfere with proper traffic flow for games.
The game's client makes the requests, the router handles the manipulation and shepherding of the traffic to the server on the WAN and the corresponding reply traffic from the server on the WAN to the game client on the LAN. Not the other way around!
Unfortunately, 'You need to forward your ports!' is one tough dragon to slay, and this myth is constantly perpetuated in forums, and even by occasionally by misinformed game publisher support staff. There are even whole web sites devoted to the subject, with applications to automate this unnecessary and potentially security compromising router feature for the uninformed user.
Unless you are instructed that your game requires ports to be forwarded from an authoritative source (the game manual, the game developers, or in some cases the publisher with the caveat noted earlier), you are likely not required to do it. Abandon all hope ye that consider enthusiast forums to be an authoritative source!
To humanize it, think of it this way: You, in your household, act as the 'router' and 'firewall' in a way for traffic in and out of your house (your LAN). You, and others in the house are free to go out from the house to seek information (onto the WAN). When someone comes knocking at the door with the answer, you can peek through the peephole on your door and decide if you expected them, and let them into your house. If a stranger comes knocking, you're likely to decide they're uninvited, and not let them in. Port forwarding is giving a stranger the key to your door. In fact, its giving the key to your door to everyone in the world that knows how to get to your door! The 'experienced gamers' and 'net experts' that tell you there's no danger in forwarding ports when it's not explicitly required are doing just that: telling you it's OK to give the key to your front door to everyone on the planet. I'd venture most intelligent readers wold never subscribe to such nonsense.
How many readers in game enthusiast forums do you think blindly forward ports to 'fix' problems? How many of those same readers will download the latest coolest 'tweak tool' for the game when offered up on the forum? How hard do you think it would be to perhaps list some real ports for the game, and throw an extra one in that the later downloaded 'tweak tool' actually listens on, allowing a remote intruder in to the victim's PC to run amok? If you don't know how to verify exactly why a game should need ports forwarded, exactly which ports should be forwarded, and know exactly how to do this, you probably shouldn't. Since port forwarding, with a properly configured and behaving modem/router is not needed by any modern PC game client, you probably shouldn't anyway.
Before ending and in all fairness, it should be noted that some misbehaving or otherwise buggy routers can be 'worked around' by forwarding ports where this would not normally be required. Part of this 'You need to forward your ports!' malarkey is undoubtedly from uniformed users seeing this 'fix' an issue, not understanding that the problem in fact is elsewhere and the 'fix' is a bandage that may cause other problems and security issues. Used properly, this can allow routers that restrict the user to NAT other than Type 1/Cone to mimic a properly behaving full-cone router for a game. This will of course be limited to only one PC on the LAN side and will not allow multiple players to simultaneously play from the LAN if this work-around is needed. See Troubleshooting Multi-Player PC Game Connectivity Issues for examples of this.
I hope after reading this, the reader has a clarified understanding of what port forwarding is, and when its use is appropriate.
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