In action gaming two types of network game architectures prevail

• Peer to peer - involves two or more gamers talking to each other, each running the game itself and only exchanging input data. This reduces network traffic to a minimum, but brings several other problems to the table, like coping with lost traffic. Each game must wait for the input from the others before it can simulate the next frame.
• Client/Server - involves one machine running the game and dictating to all the clients what the state of play is and what they should be displaying. Effectively the clients become pretty much dumb terminals transmitting the user input to the server, and letting it handle almost everything.

It is impossible to say that one has prevailed more than the other as games like Doom uses peer-to-peer, but as the internet as we know it today began to take shape, almost all on-line games have some degree of client/server architecture to them.