Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Cows, Cars, and the Internet (04 Sep 2004) In the home, the parents could decide that their applications and use of the Internet had a greater value than their children's online game play. Or, in the case of a former Cambridge researcher, Derek McAuley, the parent might be a game player who can't have any delay in the time it takes for his data to travel across the network, called latency, or he'll lose the game. McAuley became interested in the model that Key and Black are developing when he was playing the game Counterstrike. His opponent took out his character before he could get in his own hit because his children's nanny was surfing the Web at the same time, causing high latency. If he'd had a congestion pricing system in place, he could have assigned more value to online game play over Web surfing. Article URL: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=355 Read 126 more articles from Microsoft sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Book Review: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy