Chief Executive Lawrence Probst of Electronic Arts has agreed to pay $81 million to America On-Line (AOL) for the privilege of being the exclusive provider of networked games to AOL. It seems that the idea is to profit from Metcalf's Law, which states that the power of a network rises in proportion to the square of its size. Playing games across a network is more exciting when individual players can compete against each other within the Gaming Space of the network. Probst has concern for the current lack of bandwidth, which makes operation of the games slow.

A reduction in Network Gaming Bandwidth is possible by giving attention to the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and High Level Architecture (HLA) gaming protocols used by the military to control network-based interactive battlefield simulations. DIS and HLA are designed to reduce dependence on the widespread availability of communication networks with broad bandwidth.