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Archiving the History of Virtual Worlds
eldavojohn writes "Some members of the University of Texas are trying to create a repository to store the histories of online virtual worlds. They hope that game makers will take advantage of this repository as they define standards of how to save interactions not only between players and the virtual worlds but also other players. How many times have I destroyed you in a duel? Let's check the records!"
It looks like they are discussing recording the primary in-game events (they list the WoW plague outbreak and the death of Morpheus). This makes it sound like they really just want a nifty little wiki dedicated to each game. When they start talking about interactions between players, significance starts becoming very important. Are we talking statistics? Chat logs?
With real world history, we have the benefit of a (somewhat) objective viewpoint from which to determine how much the world has truly been impacted. With these games, and I say this carefully, who cares?
The statistics are important - how many people stopped playing after Morpheus died or the outbreak made them think the game was unfair. But do they represent history in a virtual world, where death is mutable and guilds form and die in weeks instead of years?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
The ability to store 'demo' captures has been in Unreal since UT1 in the late 90s. I discovered this when I ran a server for deathmatch games and decided to keep a log of every game played. The format is a timestamped delta encoding of every movement, entity and actor in the level. Of course it occupies quite a lot of file space.
Many years later I stumbled upon a few gigabytes of this data on a backup disk. Watching through old games from different player viewpoints was very entertaining. Then it occured to me that certain players were behaving strangely. In my spare time I started thinking about how to analyse this data and eventually discovered it was possible to tell with a *high level of certainty* that some players were cheating all along.
Now I don't play online computer games much any more, but I still see the same problems and chuckle at games like WoW trying to detect and defeat cheats with client solutions. This will never work. But, given enough server side data you can easily see that some players are way outside the statistical norms for certain actions. Distributions show a typical curve from the worst to the best players, and then a separate, clearly identifiable peak of weird data bound to about 5% of players. My reckoning is that these are the cheats.
For example, one of the oldest cheats is a wall hack that allows you to see other players that should not be visible. What is the chance of a player being able to regularly track another within a few degrees of their location without this knowledge? When you run the sums on enough old games the cheats stick out a mile.
If this proposed archive does contain information about individual players, it could turn into an interesting little case study on privacy and modern technology. Many of the newer threats to privacy are about technology that can retain and search little details of your life online: the details individually may be public, but when they're all available at once they may start to feel like a breach of privacy. An MMO is a microcosm where the technology is already sufficiently advanced for this.
This can happen with the WoW Armory, where anyone with Web access can pull up game data on any World of Warcraft character. From this, others can infer things like how much time you've spent playing lately. A player might wind up embarrassed over a WoW addiction ("Level 70 already?!"), or be bugged to play more by less casual-playing friends who want a high-level buddy to go raiding with. (I have experienced the latter and I believe there was a "Penny Arcade" strip about it once.) What's interesting is that your character level is not secret information—it's publicly visible every time you log on—but the dynamics of privacy do shift when it's a "matter of record" for anyone to look up on a website, rather than observed only by others on the same server when you're actually logged in and playing.
Suppose that events in a virtual world were transactional and were logged to a change log, ala a DBMS system. Suppose further that you could rollback the state of the virtual world to a known point in time, apply a different transaction, and then replay the remainder of the transaction log. Obviously collisions would happen.
A popular topic in science fiction is "what would happen to the future if you went back in time and messed with the past?"
Why speculate? Why not simulate it using virtual world technology?
Obviously this is more interesting in some VWs than others (2L comes to mind as an interesting place to try something like this). And obviously, the meat of the discussion is deciding how to apply conflicting transactions..
I think it would make a fascinating research project for grad students. For a collision policy X, what is the total measured discontinuity between world W and W' based on a given historical modification. Have a few differing conflict resolution policies and see what the ramifications of each are.
Infact, there's probalby some sort of innovative gameplay dynamic that could be built around history modification. Assuming that time travel is atrociously expensive (in terms of in-game cost) and there's only a limited window of opportunity or impact while you're "in the past", how can players maximize their future outcome by manipulating world history?
(Yes, I'm aware of the Microsoft game that had a token "time travel" component in it. Obviously I'm talking about something more grandiose)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The title of the story is wrong. The problem isn't Archiving history, the problem is Achieving history.
Shadowbane is one of the few games that really had an opportunity in this arena. I was in the beta for it long long ago, and if it hadn't had such a huge glut of bugs and horrendous launch, it really would have had a chance.
There can not be a history in WoW because nothing ever changes. Sure, there are occasionally 1-time events. The opening of AQ 40, or the Scourge invasion, but honestly, these 1 time events aren't a history, they are just a 1-time thing that you either got to see or didn't. For the vast majority of players, there is no imapact they can have on the world at all. They've killed hundreds of thousands of radiated gnomes, but Gnomerangan will always be inhabited by more of them. They've slaughtered Illidan over and over and over, yet he'll pop right back up again after the next weekly reset.
That's one of the big reasons why Warhammer online has a nice draw to it, there is a story that can be told, a battle between rivals where the map changes. An on going fight where every player is making a difference as to where the battle is being fought.
The down side though, is that it is a PvP game, which is a turn off to a lot of people. If it were possible to design a PvE MMO such that there was a progression over time in driving the borders of your empire forward (or retreating!) was possible, the effects could be huge. As players level they delve deeper into the un-civilized lands to find more challenging enemies, but as they slaughter more enemies, the enemies they face retreat, increasing the land mass of the empire, and pushing the battle lines out. Imagine riding through a farmers field on your steed and saying to a newer player, "When I was your age, this place was goblin country, we spent weeks clearing them out and months more patrolling before these farmers took hold here."
Just a thought.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs