Abstract: In a decentralised multi-user online virtual environment, object responsibility is efficiently allocated to a controlling peer. The virtual environment is divided into a plurality of cells, and control of each cell is allocated to a responsible peer. Each responsible peer participates in a distributed hash table (DHT) to effect integration of the cells to effect the virtual environment. When a communications and processing load on the responsible peer controlling a cell exceeds a threshold, a second peer creates and takes control responsibility for an object comprising a bounded interest management region covering a region of load. Within the bounded interest management region, objects are removed or de-associated from the associated cell and instead associated with the bounded interest management region.