lthough Lag is something that we all feel, that we all suffer from, and that we all HATE – it is strangely undefined. First Person Shooter players will quickly pipe up that Ping is the measure of Lag, but we at EndLagNow.org disagree. Ping is a measure of Latency, which is a scientific measurement of how long it takes data to get from the game server to the gamer’s PC. We definitely think Ping is A cause, but just not THE cause. We have all been in plenty of games where everyone’s Ping is super low, yet we still suffer from Lag.


Lag on the other hand, is something that happens that takes you out of the fun of the game. This could be your screen freezing, you clicking the mouse button but nothing happens, you dieing before ever seeing your opponent... it’s an event in a game that sucks and makes you really frustrated.

While Lag has no official metric, Bigfoot Networks’ CEO Harlan Beverly published a whitepaper (PDF) describing something called Lags-Per-Minute. He calls this “the number of perceived Lag events per minute that a user might experience”. We like this definition, because it is just generic enough for you to be able to count the frustration events in a minute while playing your game. Also goes on to describe his research on Lag and other causes of it besides Ping.

Finally, we at EndLagNow.org have put together a chart that takes some of the data from his white paper in an attempt to categorize Lag. These aren’t the only types of Lag out there, but it seems like a pretty comprehensive list to us:

Game freezing	Nothing is moving on the screen, including yourself
Screen stuttering	Everything is moving, but slowly
Warping	Yourself or others seem to jump ahead suddenly
Rubber-banding	Yourself or others seem to ‘snap’ back to where you just were
Vanishing	Others suddenly vanish from the screen
Delayed Responses	When your actions/movements feel sluggish (slow)
Timeout	When you lose connection to the game
Screen Jumping	When the screen appears to jump rather than smoothly move the field of view.
Pause and Sudden Catch-up	Game freezes and then moves extra fast to catch up
Game out of synch	When something or someone you thought was there, wasn’t

Know other types of Lag? Tell us here. Gotta better definition for it? Let us know. Got a way to measure it? Cool, we’d love to hear it.