If Santa Claus fails to show up this year, don't worry, it's nothing to do with you. He's too deep in Mega Wars III combat to come to his sleigh, along with thousands of other mythical folks, like Muad-Dib, Beowulf and Mithrandir, in any one of hundreds of online, multi-player computer games that are quickly becoming the rage among those with micros, modems and the income to pay the phone bill to hook up to the mainframe that hosts the game.

The live multi-player games are taking on a life on their own evolving far beyond their Dungeons and Dragons origins. MegaWars III is the hottest current game and probably the most complex. Created by Kesmai Crop for Compuserve (one of the biggest online computer service networks in the US), MegaWars III can have more than 1,000 players and each game lasts three months. The action is spread over 2,000 star systems and players vie for control of galactic real estate.

To stay alive in the MegaWars universe players join alliances that shift and change abruptly during the struggle. Individual players can win prizes but the alliances are the real victors.

Recently a group called the Dorsai (after Gordon Dickson's science fiction trilogy) produced a new wrinkle; it's said that the Dorsai planted spies in the tanks of rival alliances and were thus able to win several crucial space battles. As a result, the Dorsai have dominated MegaWars III to the point where many other players are getting fed up.

The Dorsai then announced that it was breaking up, but now rumours abound that they've simply reformed under a new name - the Elite - and that as the current game goes on the Dorsai will re-appear to trounce their rivals once again.

Multi-player games are an expensive habit: registration with Compuserve costs $40 and prime time play costs $12.50 an hour at 300 baud, not to mention the phone bills. Less expensive are the role-playing fantasy games that require a player to make only a couple of moves a week. Some players are active in many games, from the live fury of MegaWars to the quieter role-playing games. There is even a monthly magazine, Computer Gaming World, devoted to multi-player games.

Watching all this with considerable interest are the phone companies, the makers of modems, and business analysts.

Doomsters see the rapidly expanding volume of personal computer communications over phone lines as producing a monumental headache very soon. The average phone call lasts four or five minutes, but the average data link occupies 25 minutes. Optimists argue that the phone companies will be able to employ packed-switching techniques, and that more local phone companies will step up their fibre-optic installation plans. There are already 1.5 light seconds of fibre-optic links in the US and it's expanding rapidly.

If the phone companies don't take care of the business, they could lose it to cable TV companies. These are in a slump as the US has become saturated with television choices. Many big corporations lost big bucks in the cable market in the last year.

A boom in multi-player games using cable networks as a cheap alternative would give the cable companies a much-needed boost.

Another pointer to the future in multi-player games lies in the introduction of new high-speed dial-up modems. Several 2,400 baud models were on show at Comdex in November, priced between $750 and $1,500.

The current crop of games are not strong on graphics. Indeed, even a black and white full screen graphic with only two bits per pixel takes a 1,200 baud modem four minutes to transmit. (Full colour graphics would take half an hour or more at 1,200.)

Since most players in today's games are still using 300 baud, the limitations are severe, however, while a 300 baud modem takes 3.2 hours to download a floppy disk, a 2,400 modem needs only 24 minutes, and a 9,600 unit would have that down to six minutes.

Since a lot of companies are staggering under heavy phone charges due to the use of 300 baud devices, there exists a strong incentive to upgrade to 2,400. That in turn will bring down the cost of new modems and make them an attractive proposition to the Dorsai and their chums; at which point live multi-player games could blossom with the same graphics power as today's games on disks.

Chris Rowley