CLOUD COMPUTING and GAMING
Traditionally story-telling games have always been one-dimensional, with every single player experiencing the same plot, the same action sequences. How, in this changing times, can you appeal to the masses that are lured towards multiplayer games that offer playability with people from all around the world. You’re bound to have a different experience every single time — players having different strategies, different level of playing; not the same old bot that won’t harm you unless you’re nudging them.
Game developers have ventured into the realm of data-driven story telling as a result. The very second you start the game, every single interactions of yours with the NPCs (non-playable characters), the game objects is recorded. This data is processed in the machine learning archives and correspondingly, the game moulds and tailors the experience according to your engagement with it henceforth. Essentially with you creating your own story, not being told one.
WB games in particular, operate on AWS’s vast array of cloud computing tools. Data feeds pulled from the player’s system are handled by a queuing system built on top of Apache Kafka. Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) processes the data using Apache Spark (a lightning-fast large scale analytics system) and immediately pipelined into Amazon’s storage service S3. Another part of the pipeline loads this data into Amazon Redshift, a cloud-based data warehouse service, from where players can draw their data. Amazon’s SageMaker (Machine Learning tool) trains the machine into taking actions and the live data is transformed into decisions apparent in game.
This massive pull-process-store-implement system has to be implemented real time and at a rapid rate, so as not to hinder the user experience. It is not feasible by a group of employees sitting in the office 24*7 for a span of multiple years. The amount of data that undergoes this cycle is unfathomable. AWS’s suite of tools ensures this process is not only viable but done consistently so that the devs can focus on the creative part of it.