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" What you do first is practically from muscle memory: Sprint across open ground and up the stairs to an elevated sniper&amp;#039;s perch, where you instantly drop down and begin sighting down your scope. If you&amp;#039;re the camping type, this is standard operating procedure for an online match in a first-person shooter (FPS). You find your position, you watch for the alleys and windows where enemies tend to appear, and you wait for one or more suckers to die for your personal cause\u2014racking up a kill count worthy of leaderboards and other accolades. In MAG, or Massive Action Game, a PlayStation 3-\u2013exclusive shooter, you may be tempted to follow the camping procedures. And why wouldn&amp;#039;t you? The graphics and gameplay mechanics will feel familiar to anyone who&amp;#039;s killed or been killed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3 or any number of multiplayer-centric titles. But there is a major difference between MAG and other games: Instead of hosting an eight- to 12-person fight, MAG has the means to provide players with a 200- to 256- player battle.  What happens in a battle so big is thrilling. At first, you&amp;#039;ll see a wave of attackers arriving via parachute. The sheer number of enemies will stop you in your tracks. With more than 100 players on each side, there might be a dozen targets to fire on at any time. The muffled rifle fire, explosions and other canned sound effects that present the illusion of warfare in other shooters are replaced by the scattered, unnerving pop of rounds being fired in real-time by human players across an expansive battlefield. As volume of fire builds, you can see muzzle flashes way off in the distance, the virtual equivalent of a kilometer or more. The cumulative effect is something new to the First-Person Shooter: dread. How to Make a Shooter Feel Like War  Dread is different from panic, which is in ready supply in shooters. The player-versus-player FPS can be boiled down to a series of sudden adrenaline spikes, as some enemy soldier pops out of a window to fire a grenade at you, or you spin around just in time to see a crouched figure lunging at you with a knife. In that desperate millisecond, who gets the drop on who? The environments in an FPS like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are painstakingly designed to generate those moments, and tend to be more like a giant playground than a realistic battlefield, full of nifty little tunnels, walkways and cubbie holes to scamper in and across. The combat can be ridiculously fun, but also inherently childish\u2014it&amp;#039;s a cross between a paintball game and a water gun fight. With the exception of a few particularly grueling game modes or ultra-realistic (and, in general, wildly unpopular) games, multiplayer battles are defined by players bouncing around a map in a kamikaze froth, hoping to kill as many opposing team members as possible before, inevitably, they&amp;#039;re gunned down themselves, only to magically pop back into existence 5 to 10 seconds later. If you average two kills for every time you die, welcome to video game Valhalla. Death is as frequent as it is meaningless; an afterthought compared to the gunfighter&amp;#039;s rush of winning or losing those split-second standoffs. By throwing hundreds of players against each other at once, Zipper Interactive, the Sony-owned studio that&amp;#039;s best known for its SOCOM series of shooters, is attempting to create the first competitive multiplayer experience that feels like war. From that sniper&amp;#039;s perch you can watch enemies land on rooftops and dirt roads, and track individual squads breaking off to capture their own objectives. Your own squad leader might be issuing commands over your headset, or he can visually tag those objectives on the map. Before those paratroopers reach cover, though, you have a choice. Do you drop as many distant targets as possible, before a rocket, sniper or lucky burst ends your killing spree? Or do you follow orders, leave your perch, and hustle over to a corner of the map that some anonymous teen with lieutenant stripes and a headset says needs defending? And if you do stubbornly up your kill count, assuming your squad will soldier on without you, what if everyone is doing the same thing? Will 256 bundles of free will and aggression add up to a war-sized shooter, or a complete mess? Fighting Lag: The Technical Hurdles The first hurdle facing Zipper is technical. Anyone who&amp;#039;s played enough online shooters has been booted out of countless matches because the host\u2014often one of the players&amp;#039; computers or consoles\u2014suddenly loses its internet connection, crashes, or otherwise fails. A less-than-optimal connection can be even worse, causing the game to lag or stutter as the hardware struggles to process the raw data associated with a dozen or more players interacting in a shared online environment. Imagine 10 or 20 times the number of players in an even larger environment. Dropped or lagging matches could easily become the rule, not the exception. MAG isn&amp;#039;t the first game that supposedly wouldn&amp;#039;t work on any hardware other than the PS3\u2014the mightiest gaming console, in terms of computational power\u2014but when it comes to large-scale multiplayer, it might be the first time that claim is believable. Fighting Lag: The Technical Hurdles (Continued) From a developer&amp;#039;s perspective, the typical online shooter is a nightmare of quantum-mechanics-tinged interactions\u2014you have to process the world in as much detail as possible as each player&amp;#039;s view sweeps across it, and as they act upon it. You also have to determine the potential interactions of players who can&amp;#039;t even see each other, whether they&amp;#039;re firing through a wall or lobbing a grenade onto a rooftop. According to Zipper&amp;#039;s technical director, Jason Tartaglia, processing power is inherently limited, &amp;quot;so you don&amp;#039;t want to spend a lot of it drawing what&amp;#039;s on the other side of a wall. But you still have to figure out who&amp;#039;s standing behind a given polygon. In the traditional model, you use less polys, you have less detail, to cope with this. &amp;quot;The PS3&amp;#039;s unique Cell-processor architecture allowed Zipper to take this and other graphics-associated tasks, and essentially chop them up into discrete, manageable segments. So, instead of creating a processing chokepoint every time two players face off around a piece of cover, developers assign one of the consoles Synergistic Processor Units (SPU) to constantly manage all of the &amp;quot;occluders,&amp;quot; or solid objects. Think of that SPU as a sort of line judge, who specializes in sorting out the technicalities of fighting through and over cover, and signals when the inside of a building becomes occupied, which means it needs to be rendered, and when it&amp;#039;s empty and can thus collapse back into the processor-less ether. There are a range of similar specific tasks that can be doled out across the console&amp;#039;s Cell chipset, but that occluder SPU in particular frees up the console to render more polygons, with more detail. Zipper was apparently surprised by the multitasking properties of the PS3, which not only allowed for the nonbuggy interaction of 256 players, but supported better visuals than the team originally expected. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s enough horsepower in that machine that we can just solve some problems with brute force,&amp;quot; Tartaglia says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not typically something that&amp;#039;s done in game development. You&amp;#039;re always looking for a cheap way out, to fool the player into thinking the world is bigger and more detailed than it is.&amp;quot; Zipper attempted to address the issue of dropped matches with another brute force approach\u2014MAG is hosted entirely on Zipper&amp;#039;s dedicated servers, with no need for client-side hosting. So far, the results have been mixed. The recent public beta of MAG ran incredibly smoothly, with no real lagging and minimal in-game crashes. However, the servers were down for long stretches. Zipper claims that its server issues will be addressed by launch, and that the point of an open beta is to identify those problems that need fixing. Training Lone Gunmen Gamers to be Soldiers But there&amp;#039;s another question that hasn&amp;#039;t been answered by the betas. Technically, Zipper and Sony appear to have accomplished their mission of creating a war-scale shooter. There&amp;#039;s still the matter of whether players will fight like soldiers, or like an army of lone gunmen. The game has a novel approach to leadership\u2014once players collect enough experience to reach level 15, they&amp;#039;re qualified to start commanding squads, platoons, and eventually a full 128-person army. They can actively assign objectives and passively impart minor abilities, such as faster reload times, to any troops in their vicinity. And whereas most voice chatting is restricted to a player&amp;#039;s squad, commanders can talk to each other freely. Some amount of tactical know-how is helpful, but actual charisma is optional\u2014accomplishing a designated objective, or even killing a guy relatively close to one, grants an experience point bonus to that commander&amp;#039;s troops. Bad or unpopular leaders can also be voted out of their command. This is a new dimension for gaming, a kind of officer recruitment strategy that could take months to prove itself. Plenty of dedicated gamers reached command-worthy ranks during the recent beta, but since the biggest, 256-player matches weren&amp;#039;t available to more casual players, the real leadership test is about to begin. Will newbies submit to the chain of command? Or will they simply rack up kills wherever they please, while their army loses battle after battle? The impact of rogue players could go beyond individual games\u2014in the spare narrative of MAG, three factions of mercenaries are actively slaughtering each other, and each battle helps determine the global standings of each organization. A handful of exceptional leaders could turn the tide of the so-called Shadow War, but not if their forces are simply nursing their kill ratios. Zipper Interactive Designer Ben Jones claims that even in the first of the two public betas, leaders were working together. &amp;quot;The amount of communication was incredible,&amp;quot; says Jones. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really impressive to watch one squad pin a bunker down, while another clears out the left flank. And that was without any objectives set by us.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s all very promising, but of the dozens of matches I played, only one felt like I was part of a cohesive unit. As we defended an installation, our squad leader would say where the attackers were grouping\u2014nothing too fancy, just to the left or the right\u2014or that there was a sniper somewhere, so look out. The effect of even that minimal communication was that we kept our heads, no one went AWOL to knife some random enemies in the back, and even when we died, we all seemed to return to our original posts, like good little soldiers. Fifteen minutes later, though, I was in a new game, and a new squad, and no one said a word to me. In that silence, any notion of tactics or camaraderie slipped away. So did the sense of being in a war. Technologically, MAG is what it claims to be\u2014a smooth, reliable, massive action game, apparently made possible by an investment in stable server architecture, and the processor-juggling talents of the world&amp;#039;s most powerful console. But without effective and active commanders, it&amp;#039;s just a bigger gang fight than the ones in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or Halo 3. In the absence of orders, I ran towards the sounds of gunfire, hoping to puncture at least two or three organs before someone perforated my own. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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