Participants of distributed gaming have experienced areas of expansion in recent years. These participants are enabled to play new games and play existing games in novel ways. For example, games today are often played by several participants simultaneously over remote networks. Distributed gaming already takes a variety of forms including Internet and/or online games, as well as simple participation events, such as audience polling. Existing distributed games already pose issues in game management and control. However, several of the complex issues with distributed games have only become more difficult with the expansion into new areas and ways of gaming. One issue involves communication with the participants. Another issue is the ability to scale for large numbers of participants. These two issues make the fundamental task of keeping all the participants updated, into a significant challenge. One approach to address these issues is one-way broadcast updating. However, this broadcast or multicast approach presents significant security challenges.
Games of skill and chance have an intrinsic excitement and entertainment value. Any game is greatly enhanced by a participant's ability to know how their performance compares in relation to other participants and/or to historical performance for the game throughout the contest. However, competition will naturally create incentives to enhance performance in a manner outside the rules of the game, i.e., to cheat. Some games provide a lucrative prize based on performance, which creates even greater incentives to break the rules of the game. Network based games over the Internet, television, radio, or other complex technology utilizing a one-way multicast or broadcast system create more complicated issues in detection and prevention of cheating. Unlike a server controlled contest, there are a variety of ways unobserved competitive participants are able to unfairly manipulate a game that has such a broadcast architecture.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds