Say I’d like a cool game server. It actually needs to do a few other things, besides serve the games. It needs to:

• Authenticate users.
• Allow them to manage their precious data.

Reading those back over, I realize that I really need a bunch of servers — LDAP servers, web servers — besides game servers. In fact, it might be best if:

• User and group information were stored in LDAP.
• Account management and authentication was handled over the web.
• The web server delegated to LDAP to check the auth credentials.

The game server would be a small, dumb server that handled game data requests from proxies. The user would actually connect to a web server and play the game based on data in the result body.