Welcome to the world of game network programming :) it's an exciting place!
Yes, you have to be more-or-less real time, so you must compensate for latency, unreliable/slow connections, jitter, etc. If you're used to the web and the request/response model, you have to throw all of this out the window. The 200ms delay "hack" is pretty much standard practice, the window will differ from game to game (smaller in FPS's), but it's usually there.
Most games use UDP, since transmission of any single package doesn't have to be reliable, and in case some packets are lost, it's cheaper to re-calculate the state diff and resend one slightly larger package instead of two (or more) standard-size packages. Sometimes this can result in a "blink".
With sending around seeds and other "secret" data, you have to make a trade-off, since sending too much allows for cheating (map hacks, wall hacks, etc), but sending too little will create unpleasant surprises (enemy "teleporting" from around the corner).
Also often it's cheaper to run most of the calculations on the client (even including the critical stuff like hit tests, damage calculation, etc), and only occasionally verify the results on the server - especially in MMO's. Clients that are found suspicious get verified more often, and eventually get penalized / kicked.
Source: never actually wrote a networked game, but love reading about this stuff.
Some interesting case studies are anything by Id Software (Quake etc), and Lineage (that's mostly tales of a friend who is a hardcore player and a developer; he'd have the relevant source code open in a separate window while playing).
Yes, you have to be more-or-less real time, so you must compensate for latency, unreliable/slow connections, jitter, etc. If you're used to the web and the request/response model, you have to throw all of this out the window. The 200ms delay "hack" is pretty much standard practice, the window will differ from game to game (smaller in FPS's), but it's usually there.
Most games use UDP, since transmission of any single package doesn't have to be reliable, and in case some packets are lost, it's cheaper to re-calculate the state diff and resend one slightly larger package instead of two (or more) standard-size packages. Sometimes this can result in a "blink".
With sending around seeds and other "secret" data, you have to make a trade-off, since sending too much allows for cheating (map hacks, wall hacks, etc), but sending too little will create unpleasant surprises (enemy "teleporting" from around the corner).
Also often it's cheaper to run most of the calculations on the client (even including the critical stuff like hit tests, damage calculation, etc), and only occasionally verify the results on the server - especially in MMO's. Clients that are found suspicious get verified more often, and eventually get penalized / kicked.
Source: never actually wrote a networked game, but love reading about this stuff.