Virtual Apocalypse
Asheron’s call 2, a mmorpg, is about to end on dec. 30. It couldn’t garner enough players, so turbine decided to shut it down. How to end a world, asks terra nova. Unfortunately in this case not with a bang but a whimper, writes Clive Thompson for wired news.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about archival and preservation of digital goods in general and games in particular over the last few months. One particularly impressive example of digital preservation can be found in the game emulation scene, imho. The fervor, expertise and comprehensive coverage found in what is essentially a grassroots movement operating in a legal grey area is truly astounding. People are into this for various reasons (piracy, an obsession with collecting, the technical challenges of reverse-engineering and coding efficient emulators,…) but overall it seems to work surprisingly well. Just google rom+set+torrent and you’ll see what i mean.
Preserving mmogs isn’t quite as simple, of course. Typically only the client software sees wide distribution, while server software remains a guarded treasure. As with anything worth pirating though, efforts of reverse-engineering and emulating the servers are bound to succeed sooner or later and there are server emulators for many successful mmogs available. These obviously stand on shaky legal grounds however.
Even if you get your own servers up and running, you’re still missing all the character data and player-generated content. You can’t quite expect a game publisher to release database dumps upon closing shop, no? And how would you go about migrating your existing player base to a new server without official support? It’s one thing to keep a game in a playable state, but something different to keep your persistent virtual world going. The difference probably lacks significance in games where players can hardly make a lasting dent in their virtual surroundings (like world of warcraft), but a game like second life (where a majority of in-game content is player-generated) wouldn’t be the same if you just “keep it playable”, starting afresh.
Ultimately any attempt to preserve a dying mmog is futile – perhaps you can save the game, but you can’t save the world. So the question remains: how to end a world? I’d hope in dignity and with memorable grandeur, but business interests probably render this wishful thinking.
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