A gaming hobby is generally a steady one; there are hardly very many surprises that can make us truly genuflect with awe. Innovations come and go and we, as gamers, move on like the animals of the Serengeti, from one water hole to the next, unfazed and unperturbed. Every once in a while though, comes something that stirs up the horde. Like a group of hungry lionesses, they stalk from behind, sizing up our numbers, willing one or a few to break away.

OnLive wants to be those lionesses and it wants us to be the unwary gazelles and the odd zebra or two who decide that there’s nothing wrong with trotting over to relax under the shade of yonder tree. Okay, enough with the metaphors already. What is OnLive, you ask?

As it stands, OnLive is mostly a concept, a remarkably ambitious one at that. When suggestions are made that console-makers won’t be able to compete until 2022 (“We have at least 11 years to establish our business before there is a clone”—Steve Perlman, Founder of OnLive), you know that someone wants to make his point and resolve quite clear; OnLive is apparently the next step forward in bringing gaming to masses. Imagine this scenario: you’ve not tinkered with your PC hardware for while and it’s fallen behind enough such that the new-fangled Mirror’s Edge game everyone’s raving about will chug on your system. So instead of going through the pain of upgrading all the while trying to create a semblance of future-proofing (a plan fraught with fail, usually), you decide to just pay for the game and run it as is. Is that possible? Doesn’t that sound like a console? Well, ‘I’m not sure’ and ‘yes’ are the answers.

See, what one is doing is actually subscribing to a service from whence you purchase your full games. The quirk here is that you’re not actually going to play them on your godforsaken machine: that, you’re not. Rather, somewhere in some distant land lies a cloud computing server with more powerful hardware than you’ll ever see in your lifetime (for the average gamer, that is) and that is what actually runs the game. All you have to do, in Matrix terms, is “jack in” and let the system deal with the grunt work. *cue a very Neo “Woah!”* According to Steve Perlman, “It took many years of development, testing, and refinement to get it to work through the vast range of Internet hookups in the home” (OnLive Interview, MTV Multiplayer). He also added: “To make OnLive work involved fundamental work in psychophysical science; custom chip, hardware and wireless engineering; complex real-time software — from the lowest- to highest-level, and real-time network engineering down to the sub-packet level.” Now, this sounds too good to be true and you’re probably wondering how the magic happens.

Firstly, claims have made from OnLive’s parents that it actually uses a video compression algorithm that can “encode and decode video into data in about one millisecond” (1/1000ths of second). Yes, that’s what you’re actually going to be playing: literally a “video”-game. And I hate the fact that I made that stupid pun but for once, it makes sense. That’s why, all you—the gamer—will need is a PC capable of receiving said data and then decoding it while you do what you have to with your preferred control system (keyboard, mouse or OnLive’s proprietary wireless controller) and then the end-user data is sent back to the server. Alternatively, you can use OnLive’s own “micro” console which is a USB-powered dongle of sorts that houses an HDMI port (for output to an HDTV) and an Ethernet port, among other things. This micro console is being pitched as a “competitively priced” video decoder that is specifically designed to carry out the OnLive dream as efficiently as possible. It also boasts Bluetooth connectivity and optical output for audio.

Something as revolutionary like this will surely ignite the masses and it has clearly done so, with polite yet flaming words being hurled already. Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbutter wants this “to be brilliant so much that it’s almost painful” but offers warnings to the ambitious developers on a technical level. He speaks of the hardware issues particularly in terms of numbers when it comes to servicing the clientele as well as flaws he sees with the video encoding technology. These are important particularly given that OnLive will apparently be able to output 720p video at 60FPS whilst taking into account the constant end-user to server data streams with regards to input signals and its corresponding response. No mention has been made of the resolutions that will be achievable when playing on a standard PC monitor. Similarly, the very first warning bell in gamers’ minds would be that of latency. Having run his own Counterstrike server for a while, Another Castle writer Derek Chow commented, “Running something as old as CS1.6 still gave us hell with regards to latency and [expletive indicating faeces]“. Since instead of optimised game data streams, encoded video streams are being passed, one also wonders about the bandwidth requirements. Those, too, are high: “standard def” will require a minimum of 1.5Mbps whereas “720p60″ hungers for a meatier 5Mbps.

In response to Mr Leadbutter, visionary Steve Perlman defended his product with some interesting numbers: 9 content partners (including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and THQ), a round trip latency from “pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen” of less than 80ms and that the custom chip running these complex algorithms costs “under $20 to make”.

Now, all this is very exciting and I personally can’t wait to see how the drama unfolds. Until then, I have a simple question for Mr Perlman: What the hell is psychophysics and what does it have to do with OnLive?