Gaming Device Sync Windows for Fair Multi-Player Rounds
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing multi-player gaming systems lack mechanisms to ensure fairness and synchronization across gaming devices, allowing players to gain an unfair advantage by observing others' selections and game results.
Innovation Solution
A controller synchronizes gaming devices through sync commands and timers, ensuring a lock-step gameplay experience by managing sync windows and updating timers, and generates modified game events based on player inputs to determine winners fairly.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If gaming devices operate independently without synchronization, then each device can play games autonomously, but players can gain unfair advantages by observing other players' selections and results
Solution Approach 1:
A controller acts as an intermediary between multiple gaming devices, receiving sync commands from a synchronization server and distributing timing information to ensure simultaneous operation. This mediator coordinates the timing of game events across devices without requiring direct peer-to-peer synchronization, resolving the fairness issue while managing complexity through a centralized coordination approach
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements periodic synchronization cycles where the controller receives sync commands at regular intervals and updates timing information to gaming devices. This periodic coordination ensures that all devices operate within synchronized time windows, preventing players from observing others' selections while maintaining autonomous game play through structured timing cycles
2Reliability
If the controller sends frequent sync update commands to maintain synchronization, then gameplay fairness is maintained, but network traffic and processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The controller sends sync update commands at periodic intervals rather than continuously, maintaining synchronization accuracy while reducing network traffic. The timing of these periodic updates is optimized to ensure that synchronization information is refreshed before timing drift becomes problematic, balancing accuracy requirements with network resource consumption
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary synchronization setup and timing configuration before gameplay begins, establishing the synchronization framework in advance. This preliminary action reduces the need for frequent updates during actual play, as the timing structure is already in place and only needs periodic maintenance rather than continuous reconfiguration
Data Source
AI summary
Multi-player games in which players cooperate and/or compete with one another over the course of several rounds of the game are disclosed. A controller may synchronize gaming devices used by the players during the multi-player games. The controller may send sync commands to the gaming devices. In response to the sync commands, the gaming devices may start a sync timer which defines a window in which certain guarded operations may be accepted by the gaming devices. The controller may send periodic sync update commands to the gaming devices which cause the gaming devices to update their respect sync timers to a time remaining of a master sync timer or window maintained by the controller. The controller may ensure that play of the multi-player game proceeds in a relatively lock-step manner across the gaming devices.