Living City, a Collaborative Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game

The present work analyzes the design and implementation of a Browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Living City, a Simulation game developed in a persistent and real-time digital world, running in the Web browser environment and accessible from users without any client installation. Actually Massively Multiplayer Online Games attract the attention of Computer Scientists both for their architectural peculiarity and the close interconnection with the social network phenomenon. We will cover these two aspects paying particular attention to some interesting points of the design (e.g. the game concept and the game structure), the game balancing (e.g. algorithms behind time and money balancing), the business logic (e.g. handling concurrency, cheating avoidance and availability), and nally social and sychological aspects involved in the collaboration of players, analyzing their activities and interconnections.