Gaming over a Wireless Home Network

In case you missed it, gaming is huge. We mean HUGE. The video gaming
industry is, believe it or not, bigger than the entertainment industry generated
by Hollywood. Billions of dollars per year are spent on PC game software
and hardware and on gaming consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox. You
probably know a bit about gaming — we bet you’ve at least played Minesweeper
on your PC or Pong on an Atari when you were a kid. But what you
might not know is that video gaming has moved online in a big way. And for
that, you need a network.
All three of the big gaming console vendors — Sony (www.us.playstation.
com), Microsoft (www.xbox.com), and Nintendo (www.gamecube.com) — have
created inexpensive networking kits for their latest consoles that let you connect
your console to a broadband Internet connection (such as a cable or
digital subscriber line [DSL]) to play against people anywhere in the world.
Online PC gaming has also become a huge phenomenon, with games such as
EverQuest Online attracting millions of users.
A big challenge for anyone getting into online gaming is finding a way to get
consoles and PCs in different parts of the house connected to your Internet
connection. For example, if you have an Xbox, it’s probably in your living
room or home theater, and we’re willing to bet that your cable or DSL modem
is in the home office. Lots of folks string a Cat 5e Ethernet cable down the
hall and hook it into their game machine — a great approach if you don’t
mind tripping over that cable at 2 a.m. when you let the dogs out. Enter your
wireless home network, a much better approach to getting these gaming
devices online.
In this chapter, we talk about some of the hardware requirements for getting
a gaming PC or game console online. In the case of gaming consoles, you’ll
need to pick up some extra gear because none of the current online kits contain
wireless gear. We also talk about some of the steps that you need to take
in order to configure your router (or the router in your access point [AP], if
they’re the same box in your wireless local area network [LAN]) to get your
online gaming up and running.
We’re approaching this chapter with the assumption that your wireless
gaming network will be connecting to the Internet using some sort of alwayson,
broadband connection such as DSL or a cable modem, using a home
router (either the one built into your access point or a separate one). We
have two reasons for this assumption: First, we think that online gaming
works much, much better on a broadband connection; second, because with
some console systems (particularly the Xbox), you are required to have a
broadband connection to use online gaming.
One of the biggest things that broadband brings is speed to your gaming
experience. A big part of online gaming is not so much how quickly you can
kill your opponent or crossover your dribble but how quickly the central
gaming host computer in the middle of it all knows that you performed a certain
action (and recognizes it). How frustrating to fire a missile at a helicopter
only to find out that the helicopter blew you up first because the system registered
its firing before yours. The time that it takes for your gaming commands
to cross the Internet — in gaming, at least — is often a matter of
virtual life or death.
Get your online game on!
The biggest trend in PC gaming (besides the
ever-improving quality of graphics enabled by
the newest hardware) is the development of
online gaming. Broadband Internet connectivity
has become widespread — about a quarter of
Americans use broadband at home, according to
the Pew Internet Life Survey. This has allowed
online PC gaming to grow beyond simplistic (and
low-speed) Java games (which still can be fun —
check out games.yahoo.com) and move
toward high-speed, graphics–intensive, multiplayer
games like Quake III.
If you’ve not yet checked out online gaming, you
might not realize what a big deal it is. In parts of
the world where broadband is ubiquitous — like
South Korea, where almost every home is wired
with DSL or cable — broadband online games
boast tens of millions of users. Here in the United
States, this trend has not quite reached those
proportions, but there are still millions of users
playing various multi-player online games. Face
it — it’s just plain fun to reach out and blow up
your buddy’s tank from 1,000 miles away.
You can find out how fast your connection is by pinging the other machines
or the central server. (Pinging is a process where you use an application on
your computer — usually just called ping, accessible from the DOS or CMD
window — to send a signal to another computer and see how long it takes to
get there and back, like a sonar beam on a submarine pinging another sub.)