There's been a technical thread running through the last few Language of Videogaming features, and this week is no exception. One of the major considerations when playing games online is the amount of time it takes for your machine to send and receive instructions from the host machine. To help determine this, a small program called a 'ping' was created. Ping is a tool that sends a small piece of data to a different computer. The other computer responds as quickly as it can, and the time between the sending and receiving of the ping is called the ping time. Ping can be used to determine if a remote computer is there and, at the same time, determine the quality of the connection between the two computers. That's all there is to it, folks. Essentially, the shorter the ping-time (counted in milliseconds), the better your connection to the Internet.

Next week we'll be looking at Interspacial Co-ordinate Interpolation. Only joking! We made that up... but spookily, it sounds as if it might exist. If it does and you know what it means, drop us a line.