how it is possible that computers are so fast that dozens of people from across the world can play video games together simultaneously?

Question

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that 40 years ago we were barely able to move pixels across a screen and now there are games where even hundreds of people can play games like first person shooters on servers simultaneously where reactions down to the millisecond commonly decide the outcome of a game. How can we match the inputs of everyone and have them appear on someone else’s screen? Is it simply that information travels at the speed of light and we are really good at organizing it?

In: 20

Answer 1

In reality no one is playing exactly simultaneously. The latency is the delay between you and the server you are playing on, and all of those other people have their own latency as well. So what you see happened on their side between .02 and a up to a full second before and vice-versa