A lot of work going on in the background the next month. While organising lectures and workshops for the Fall term, the project also provided me with the opportunity to give two talks in October. It has been... well, more than two years since the last time I presented a paper at an in-person event, still in Brazil, so there is of course a lot of expectations and anxieties about it. As for the work per se, the two talks will directly address the Cloud Gaming Atlas project, although from particularly different angle.
On 08.10, at Bischofsvilla, I will give a talk regarding the regulation of temperature in data centre facilities. As part of the Postdoctoral Colloquium of the Literature, Art, and Media Studies Department, this talk will approach cooling and fire prevention systems as important infrastructure involved in a broader "techno-termal" orientation to media in the age of streaming platforms. On 13.10 I will travel to Estonia to present a short paper in the workshop Video games and environmental issues: Current and future challenges, which is part of the next Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference. The paper seeks to entangle the current discussions on 'green games' and 'green gaming' (which are significantly driven by the idea of engaging with climate communication through games, but also with attempts to establish climate councils and approve climate policy regulations within the games industry) with perspectives from media infrastructure studies. The main argument is that the current focus of the discussions over CO2 emissions produced by game developers and publishers, while important to assess the share of studios and further industry actors in the climate crisis, is less than effective to assess the problematic issues of rising energy consumption, which is predicted to escalate with the massive assemblage of geo-distributed data centres for cloud gaming provided by IT infrastructure companies. More updates about the conferences soon...
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screenshot from Szymon Adamus, Dec 1, 2015. Input lag - what is it and why is it so important (YouTube video). Here are some thoughts and entries written down while doing the annotated citations of the article 'When infrastructure becomes failure: a material analysis of the limitations of cloud gaming services', by Sean Willett:
Cloud gaming, again "No longer do people need thousands of dollars and a familiarity with computer hardware to enjoy high-end PC gaming. Instead, they simply need a functioning laptop and $25 for every 20 hours of play to obtain (what is marketed as) a near identical experience to playing on a high-end PC". Here he discusses the diverse attempts to implement cloud gaming. Gaming lagged behind other media venues, though: "The most infamous of these services, OnLive, launched in 2010. As with GeForce Now, OnLive was met with a wave of positive press, with one tech journalist describing the service as ‘feeling exactly as if [he] had installed the software on [his] local computer’ (Bray, 2010). Another described OnLive as ‘the easy path to instant gratification gaming’ (Takahashi, 2010). Audiences did not agree. OnLive struggled to grow its user base despite the positive press, with user reviews citing high input latency and poor picture quality as major deterrents to regular use (Leadbetter, 2010). After laying off all of its employees, the company behind OnLive dissolved in 2012 – only two years after the launch of the service (Hollister, 2012). As other media took to the clouds, gaming stayed firmly on the figurative ground". Then he states the article's main goal: “In the following essay, I describe the physical and technical limitations that cause infrastructure failure, and use evidence drawn from the fields of critical infrastructure studies and game studies to explain why this kind of externally introduced failure is so disruptive to digital games". Infrastructural failure: “Despite what Nvidia’s marketing appears to claim, high latency and subpar image quality in streaming cannot be eradicated with more powerful GPUs. These problems are consequences of infrastructure, caused by the distance between players and data centers, the quality of players’ internet connections, and other material factors – all variables that Nvidia is unable to control”. Then he goes to explain with some detail how the human-machine relationship has to function during gameplay so that the player can feel s/he is playing something. He also describes why input lag is a challenge to cloud gaming infrastructure: "The most obvious of these potential glitches is input lag. When using a cloud service such as GeForce Now, a player interacts with the streaming game by entering inputs using a controller or keyboard. These inputs must then be sent over the internet to the remote GPU running the game, where they are translated into in-game actions. The player sees the effect of their inputs after the GPU’s video output travels back through the internet to be displayed on their PC. This entire process can only happen as fast as the network can allow, with factors like the distance between the player and the GPU or the quality of the player’s internet connection dictating the speed at which this information can be exchanged. If this process happens slowly enough, it manifests as input lag: a noticeable delay between a player’s input and the corresponding in-game action taking place on their screen. This delay can sever the already tenuous relationship between player action and perception, a relationship all gameplay is ultimately dependent on. (...) [players] must instead be able to perceive in-game events as the direct consequence of their actions. If perception can no longer be relied on by the player, then gameplay itself can no longer exist". "Another problem is video compression. As computer hardware becomes more powerful and games continue to strive for graphical fidelity, the amount of bandwidth needed to transmit a video feed from a big-budget game also grows accordingly. This is not much of a problem for people with access to high-end fibre-optic networks, but bandwidth limitations can result in people in rural or undeveloped areas being locked out of the service. Since cloud gaming providers do not own the infrastructure they use (não contava com Stadia e Amazon), and thus are incapable of upgrading internet cable networks to allow for higher bandwidth limits, they must instead use encoding algorithms to compress their video output to an appropriate size. Ideally, this compressed version of the video output is then decoded and expanded by the player’s PC. However, if the network speed drops, the player’s PC will not have enough time to properly decode the compressed video output before it is shown to the player. This causes the video quality of the game to drop accordingly. Video streaming services like Netflix and Youtube must also deal with this problem, but have the crucial advantage of predictability – video progresses in a linear fashion, and can thus be preemptively loaded onto the user’s PC".(good old buffering) In summary, the main challenges to cloud gaming infra are input lag; video compression; non-linear video progression (which means it can’t be buffered like in film streaming). Every time a Hulu video stops to load in the middle of a scene or an iTunes song refuses to play, infrastructure is failing and, through this failure, is being made visible. "Almost all big-budget “AAA” games require players to develop context-specific skills (such as aiming attacks, timing jumps, or dodging obstacles) to overcome rule-based challenges, an experience that is easily disrupted by the infrastructural problems caused by game streaming. (...) When infrastructure becomes failure, the player fails as well". Generative failure: "One of the digital games used in the marketing for Nvidia’s Geforce Now, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG), is a competition. 100 unarmed players drop into an island, where they must scavenge for equipment and weapons. The last surviving person wins. Players can be taken down with only a handful of shots, and the rush to claim limited resources regularly leads to panicked firefights. In these moments, players can only rely on their skill at the game: their ability to react to danger, to use the right equipment and, most importantly, to aim quickly and accurately. However, in order to rely on their skill, players must also rely on their PC’s ability to receive and process their inputs – or, in the case of a cloud streaming service, for their remote GPU’s ability to receive and process their inputs". "The amount of time between input and action needed to cause this perceptual dissonance is around 200 ms for most people (Andres et al., 2016), but dedicated members of the PC gaming community consider input lag over 100 ms unacceptable (Display Lag, n.d.)". Some good insights: "While infrastructure has been described by Parks (2015: 355) as ‘stuff you can kick’, a reference to the material nature of distribution systems, this is an example of infrastructure kicking back. Input lag and other network issues exert a material force upon people, creating a challenge that exists outside of the game-world and that cannot be overcome within the game. With cloud streaming, if the network fails, the player fails. Failure begets failure". So we can say infrastructure is kicking back also through analyses of waste and carbon footprints associated to data centre technology scaling up. Infrastructures are most of the times stuff you can kick, but they can also kick back due to the natural resources they require. How to compensate for it is one of the big questions posed by the industry's struggles towards sustainability. "Though 100 players enter every match, only one can ever emerge the victor. The rest will fail, learn from their mistakes, and try again. Over time, players become more skilled at the game, and more likely to win any given match. (...) This cycle of failure is the primary draw of skill-based games. Players submit willingly to this ‘consensual failure’ in order to improve themselves and, with enough play, to achieve a feeling of personal growth and achievement. Crucially, the ability for players to improve and succeed is contingent on failure being conquerable – the rules of the game must be consistent and comprehensible". The future of cloud gaming: Any streaming company that wants to be accepted by players has to prevent infrastructural failure from causing player failure. "So can Nvidia’s GeForce Now and the other new attempts at cloud gaming avoid failure in a market that has been historically defined by failure? Unless these companies plan on laying down fiber optic cables across the country, or on building data centres in every American city, then no." He was not counting with the fact that the infrastructural assemblages for gaming (among other things) would be provided by big tech and IT conglomerates entering the sector. The infrastructure does not need to be provided by the game industry or game hardware companies. Everyone in game development and publishing is now lagging behind or, to put it with more precision, depending on the infrastructure and models provided by such conglomerates... See the case of Amazon and Google entering the cloud gaming market. "What’s more, companies hoping to remotely stream games have to contend with the entities that actually control network infrastructure in North America: internet service providers. Broadband caps enforced by companies like Sprint and AT&T are another obstacle to fast, reliable game streaming, and would affect users regardless of their location or access to fiber-optic cabling". Very EU-Can-based thinking. Besides, he did not see it coming, but it was precisely what happened. AWS and Alphabet are capable of providing such infrastructure for highly demanding IT service markets. Developers would not have to contend with the entities controlling the infrastructure of networked computing in the cloud, as they have already been swallowed up by them. It is more of a case of mutually orienting each other now, perhaps. An interesting suggestion: "Turn based games avoid issues with input lag by not running in ‘real time’, and role-playing games often move at a slow enough pace that mild latency would only have a negligible effect on game performance". But then not all competition-based games should be understood the way he puts it, I think: "By removing skill-based challenges and focusing instead on exploration, decision making, and player experiences, non-skill-based games actively challenge the violent, competition-oriented games that serve as the status-quo in the digital games industry". His concluding remarks: "If game streaming could work, then it would have to be in a very different cloud from the one we have now. A cloud that is less about centralization and control, and one that is more concerned about experience and access. One that understands the game cannot simply be removed from the player, separated over hundreds of kilometers, and made vulnerable to the invasions of the real". |
AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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