how people on opposite sides of the earth can play video games together seemlessly when these games require split second actions
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They don’t. Servers are usually divided by region for this reason. The latency of a straight up wire around the world would be less than a second but would still be significant for things like fighting games. Fighting games are especially tough for online play since the entire focus of play is on the other player objects. There is usually little/nothing else to interact with, so keeping state in-sync is extremely important. Small desyncs can be handled gracefully but once it reaches a certain point the two games can’t be synced and it would have to be terminated.
Things like racing games are a little easier since the players don’t actually interact as much. In realistic racers where players cannot affect the state of the track at all, you can actually play with infinite (indefinite) latency. That is to say that you don’t actually need to play at the same time, you can just record your run and replay it on the other side. You can then race against this recording as many times as you like.
FPS games are kind of a middle ground between things like fighting and racing games, since most of the gameplay involves roving around a map that doesn’t change (usually) but then the apex of the action is all player interaction. You couldn’t really play against a straight up recording in this case but you can fudge the latency in other ways. For example, dead reckoning. If you know the latency of a player you can calculate what their position WOULD be given their current speed and heading. If you do this with relatively low latency, then corrections and adjustments will be barely noticeable, since the expected and actual positions will be extremely close. In higher latency scenarios, you’ll notice players ‘flickering’ or ‘teleporting’ more.
An extremely pathological case exists in FPS games, however. Since players moving under dead reckoning move under pure inertia, rather than intelligence. So if you as a player run up to a corner and stop, because you’re aware of an opponent is around the corner, an opponent with high latency will see you to continue moving past that corner for however long their latency interval is. If the opponent puts a shot into your character before the latency resolves your position back behind the wall, this shot will more often then not be registered as valid by the latency resolution system. Even if it doesn’t register as valid, the opponent is still aware of your position when they wouldn’t have otherwise known that. This means that players with a higher latency actually have an advantage, which is why they are often kicked from FPS servers.
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