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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Some other answers are saying that the information gets sent fast enough through the internet, but that isn’t really true for many games. For example, in games where players are shooting at each other in real time, 10 milliseconds will make a difference between hitting a moving player and missing, and that’s way faster than the 100+ milliseconds of wait time you could have playing against someone across the world.
The real answer takes some explanation and I recommend reading this article on “lag compensation”: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensating_Methods_in_Client/Server_In-game_Protocol_Design_and_Optimization
To give a quick summary/simplification, the first thing to understand is that there are 3 computers all working together to collaborate on the “truth” of what happens in the game you’re playing with your friend across the world: your computer, your friend’s computer, and the game’s own computer. When you do an action, like shooting at your friend or moving, your computer sends that information to the other computers, and because the info arrives as different times, all 3 might not agree on whether the shot hit, so there are different techniques they use. A simple example would be to always trust the computer of the person taking the shot. And just revise history for the person who got shot (they think they escaped for 100ms, but then suddenly the game tells them they died). But that simple approach might have several disadvantages, like you might be able to peek around a corner and shoot someone quickly without them ever seeing you. So there are several other techniques that also help achieve fairness and a smooth-feeling game. Ultimately it can never be perfectly seamless – these games will always have slight bits of time-travel or players experiencing differences in what happened.
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