 first, interactive multi-party gaming is built on session-oriented group communication, which relies on standard signaling relations and largely benefits from additional presence and conference information as provided by SIP. Second, an increasing number of massive multiplayer games offers sidebar voice and chat conferencing services to enrich communication among players. Sidebar conferences in games can just be treated like any (cascaded) SIP session. A context-aware integration of voice conferencing with multiplayer networked gaming has been presented in [14] along with a SIP-based refer- ence architecture. The authors foresee a tight coupling of game and conference servers by SIP means, which will lead to an automated conference reconfigu- ration based on third party call control (see Section 6.2.1), whenever a switch in the gaming context occurs. For example, if a player changes a room in some game arena, its audio conference will then include the players in the new room and not the old ones. This solution fully complies with the SIP conferencing approach, for which reason the architectural realizations extend from a strictly centralized to a fully distributed model. Even though today's popular games do not employ SIP standard messag- ing, this large software market remains open as an appropriate candidate for migrating to SIP, which in turn may facilitate more elaborate, less expensive, distributed architectures for game deployment. 6.1.4 Presence and Instant Messaging Session dialogs and conferencing are person-oriented services that abstract from specific communication channels and from devices. The way and the inst- ance of favorable information exchange not only depends on content and exter- nal demands, but on the individual contexts of each involved party. Compared to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), it is one of the predom- inant features of the Internet to rigorously preserve this abstraction of user presence over technical entities + Congruously-in taking up earlier, propri- etary solu