Cloud gaming is broken and unplayable

"There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip". (Old English Proverb)

If you believe everything that Wikipedia tells you (and of course I do), it owes its derivation to an Ancient Greek tale in which one of Jason's Argonauts returns home, is about to knock back his first vino when he's whisked off to hunt a wild boar. He's killed, and never gets to quaff the wine.

When you're examining the many things that can go wrong with gaming 'in the cloud', you begin to wish it was only wild boars you had to worry about.

"Gaming in the cloud" - we're talking here about laudable projects like OnLive and Gaikai. In a nutshell, the idea is you connect via the Internet to a server which runs the game itself, and sends the already rendered video and audio back to your computer (or console, or dumb terminal) in response to your gameplay controls.

A compelling proposition, annoyingly flawed

It's just so compelling. Solves DRM issues, means you don't have to spend out on an expensive gaming PC or high-end console - it's all in the cloud. And perhaps, sadly, pie in the sky.

The arguments have raged either way for months regarding video compression technologies, bandwidth, server farms the size of Alaska and the temperature of the Sun. But as is the nature of the beast, I think gaming in the cloud's wild boar is latency. Unavoidably.

Why so sure? Because gamers are already complaining about it, and that's with the console in their front room. Back in the days when LCD screens were the new thing, we worried about the amount of time it took for the pixels to change colour. Any delay above 25 or 30ms was too slow, Counterstrike players were telling us.

Today, LCDs are very fast, very effective displays for gaming. But most of us play on TVs, and they have processing circuitry, and processing circuitry introduces delays, and this upsets gamers. Trawl the AV groups online and you'll find long discussions on which TV has the best 'game' mode to switch off processing to remove these latencies. You'll see timecoded test shots side by side that illustrate that you cannot possibly hit the figure in front of your gun, because at the time you see it under your crosshairs, it's already ten feet away inside the console's brain.

Why do we have to calibrate Guitar Hero using the Options menu when we play it on our TV? Because the delays of the processing circuitry mean that what our ears hear and what our eyes actually see may come at different times.

And it makes it unplayable.

Dave Perry of Gaikai plays this down: "There's two levels of latency. There's one level of it that you don't notice; found between controllers and TVs where player input is processed. There's latency everywhere, and much of it is acceptable. The Wii controller I believe has about 100 milliseconds latency to it. So there's a certain amount of latency that's acceptable. I was talking to the Guitar Hero guys and they told me that their limit was 55 milliseconds, and that's actually an incredibly short amount of time."

Learning from musicians

And Guitar Hero is an entirely linear, predictable game! Your brain can correct for this type of linear latency; musicians have to cope with it when recording all the time, playing ahead of the beat where there is latency in their ear cans from the signal processing. You already know the next note, so you can adjust. But interestingly, research shows that ensemble musicians find it difficult to adjust for latencies greater than 65ms or so, so there are limits to our abilities to adjust even for these linear media.

With gaming, just as in a fighter plane, you can learn to 'lead' a target, and in the early days of online gaming on dial up connections, we had to do just that. But a shooter is intrinsically more unpredictable than music. If my target switches direction unexpectedly, then I can't predict where my crosshairs need to be to adjust for the latency.

Now consider that any system like OnLive or Gaikai requires connection to the server via the Internet.

TechRadar recently carried a comment from Guy de Beer of PlayCast, another cloud gaming project, that explained that the key figure to look for was "the end-to-end latency which depends on average on
the performance of 30 different systems (routers, firewalls, servers, optics) and 10 different protocols." and that since the internet is a 'non-guaranteed quality of service' network, no one could really predict
what actual latency figures might be.

OK, so at this stage, no one can predict what the network latency of OnLive or Gaikai may turn out to be. Dave Perry wants to build more servers than OnLive to keep ping times lower, OnLive wants to minimise the video encoding time to reduce latency. But one fact is certain - their systems will suffer from substantial latency.

My point is simple. Latency is cumulative. If gamers are complaining about latency already, then aren't these complaints necessarily going to get much worse when you add tens or even hundreds of milliseconds on top?

We all so desperately want these pioneering cloud projects to work. But when the data packets are distracted by the inevitable wild boars crashing through the Internet, latency problems can only ever get worse, not better.

Tim Ponting is a director at PC gaming download service Awomo.com