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!"

Comments

Reminds me of the best Star Trek episode ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Some alien beings have partially downloaded the Enterprise's computer files. The files contain a history of a made up 'world' from a game that Wesley Crusher had been playing. The aliens believe this to be the true history of humans.

Of course the aliens believe that Wesley is the captain. Captain Crusher saves the day by traveling through time and re-writing the history file to show that he is actually the Alien's God and they should be friendly to the Enterprise. The aliens go on there merry way. Worf then kills, slaughters and eats Wesley.

Re:Reminds me of the best Star Trek episode ever

[Bieeanda]

Worf then kills, slaughters and eats Wesley.

I'm sorry, but that sounds like the finale of the best Trek episode ever.

Re:Reminds me of the best Star Trek episode ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Worf then kills, slaughters and eats

I think you mean "kills, butchers and eats" - slaughter implies a particular meaning of killing. Rather than butcher, you can also use "dress" which doesn't have the "kill" connotation associated with it.

I used to be a butcher assistant. Sorry.

Members of the Congregations

[Anonymous Coward]

Please open your BlizzardBook to the Gospel of Warcraft.

Authorship

[VorpalRodent]

It is said that history is written by the victor. In a completely virtual world, where no one is ever truly destroyed, how is history impacted?

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?

An accurate and concise history

[Qzukk]

Jan 3, 2007 12:42:35 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:37 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:52 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:53 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:55 A rat killed Qzukk!
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:23 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:24 Qzukk killed a rat!
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:24 Qzukk is now level 2!
Jan 3, 2007 12:45:38 Qzukk killed a spider!
Jan 3, 2007 12:45:52 Qzukk killed a spider!

Re:An accurate and concise history

[pak9rabid]

Or if we're talking about Ultima Online:

Jan 3, 2007 12:42:35 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:37 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:52 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:53 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:42:55 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:23 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:24 Qzukk builds a box
Jan 3, 2007 12:44:24 Qzukk gains more box-building experience
Jan 3, 2007 12:45:38 Qzukk builds a bigger box

Eve Soverignty Maps

[zerocool^]

In EvE, if you add this:
http://www.eve-iss.com/external/maps/territoryanimated.gif (1.7MB animated gif)
with this:
http://eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/ (map jpegs have dates)

You can get a relatively accurate look at what's happened in player controlled territory since 2003 in New Eden.

For the un-initiated, eve has it's NPC-controlled sandbox, it's all the space in the middle of these maps. In this space, you can do your mining, crafting, running NPC missions / quests, invention, market trading, etc etc. Space in EvE is given a security rating 0.0 ~ 1.0, with 1.0 being tightly controlled by NPCs and 0.0 being lawless. For the adventurous, 0.0 space has different rules. There's no penalty for shooting someone else's ship, there are stations that can be captured, sovereignty to be gained, bountiful assets to take advantage of, and all the PVP you can shake a stick at - from the small 5 man roaming gangs to the laggy 300v300 fleet battles (these are usually over territorial control).

Anyway, in a nutshell, there's the history of eve. At odds with each other for years in EvE are the Band of Brothers alliance (mostly UK, Euro, and US), and the Red Alliance (Russian speaking players, mostly).

~Wx

Re:Eve Soverignty Maps

[zerocool^]

i've heard that in Eve one spends most of their time gathering and flying through empty space with bugger all to do.

In a way, that's true; in a way it's not. Usually you end up calling a certain part of eve "home". I.e. a few systems, or part of a region. It does take a good bit of time in eve to move assets, but this is one of the realism aspects of the game. Unlike other games where you can check something into a "Vault" or "bank", and pull it out halfway across the world, in eve, assets are *some place*, and to get them from A to B, they have to be moved. So, then it becomes "Do I want to spend more money and buy X item here, or do I want to fly 10 solar systems over and buy it for X-30%?". Lots of people make money buying things low, moving them to the fringes, and selling them high.

When you've built your bad ass ship that took you weeks, someone can destroy it in a matter of minutes. Is that the case?

Yes. Death in eve has meaning. Don't fly it unless you can afford to lose it. There's a trade off between expensive items and their added benefit, and the cost of replacing them if they are lost.

Case in point: Estamel's Modified Invulnerability Field - most expensive and rarest module in the game. Adds a 50% resistance bonus to all damage types for shields. The last one that sold I think sold for 11 billion isk. You can almost buy a Mothership for that. So the question is how much will this increase your survivability versus the 6 million isk Tech 2 invulnerability field, or even the 300,000 isk tech 1 invulnerability field (30% and 25% resistance, respectively). Cost vs. Benefit.

i've mostly heard about it from people who disliked it. Can't recall talking to anyone who did like it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I like it. I've been playing for 2.5 years now, and have 2 characters. It's not for everyone, but it's really got some heart-pounding PVP if you go look for it. There's anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 people logged in (to the same world, eve is not sharded) at any given time.

~Wx

Are we running out of stuff to do?

[philspear]

There aren't enough real events to chronicle, so we're moving on to virtual worlds? We've perfected news reporting with CNN and FOX so now we're going to start working on current events in WOW?

What is wrong with us?

Re:Are we running out of stuff to do?

[elrous0]

The day the National Archives agrees to preserve an oral history interview with Leroy Jenkins is the day Armageddon will begin.

Re:Are we running out of stuff to do?

[Lewisham]

I know this is Slashdot, and actually RTFA is rare, but had you actually done so, you'd have read this:

'"When you are trying to preserve anything you are trying to preserve the most important things about that artefact," she said. "With video games we do not yet know what is important."'

CNN and Fox are being archived very well already. But we have large gaps, and it's important to keep as much as we can, just in case.

We've been very good thus far at preserving our culture for studies by future generations, but that was because everything we made was stored in a physical entity. It didn't matter whether the creators thought it important or not, we at least could come back to it in later generations if we needed to.

The Digital Age has meant we're losing huge swathes of information because we can't keep up. Archive.org is going to be amazingly important, but it'll take later generations to figure out why.

I'm very pleased that someone has realized that the beginnings of virtual worlds will also be important. We can't possibly contemplate where they're going to go in just 50 years. We're going to want to know how they started when we get there.

A Brief History of Grief Play

[Bieeanda]

People talk about the death of Lord British, and the Corrupted Blood plague, and the antics of Fansy the Famous Bard not because they're turning points in MMO history, but because they're fucking funny. Who really gives a shit about official lore like Morpheus getting cacked, when there are records of Bael'zharon flirting with female PCs and eating emoted twinkies during his plodding reign of destruction? Or how about the early days of WWII On-Line, when Lum the Mad Taxiied to victory-- or even better, the tanks whose code was lifted from planes, flight mechanics and all, bringing forth the unholy reign (rain?) of flying flakpanzers?

Seriously. Nobody really gives a shit about the official stuff. It's the impromptu weirdness (including Rainz' murder of Lord British) that they remember and celebrate.

Hardly an exhaustive list...

[Skye16]

Well, for starters, my shoulders hurt like hell first thing I wake up in the morning. I can't find a position that doesn't cause them to hurt so much.

Another pressing matter: I just rubbed my eye after eating a banana pepper about 2 hours ago, without having washed my hand. I look like somebody shot my dog right before my eyes.

I've got a lot of weight to lose, I'm starting to get a bald spot, and I have a yeast infection on the end of my trouser trout that I'm seeing a doctor about on Wednesday 'cos the Cloromotrinasdlkjasdf;ljasdf;lj stuff isn't working.

And that's just for starters.

Was doing this in 1996

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Talk about a traumatic episode

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time I saw Cause and Effect, which is the episode you're referring to, I was three years old and watching with my parents. Needless to say, I started bawling because everyone was DEAD! My parents frantically tried to calm me down, and had pretty much succeeded by the end of the commercial, when they were able to say "Look, there they all are!" And then the ship exploded again, with exactly the same results. And again. And again. By the end, my parents were cracking up, but I wasn't allowed to watch Star Trek again until Voyager started.

Re:Talk about a traumatic episode

[lukas84]

I wasn't allowed to watch Star Trek again until Voyager started.

Your parents must have hated you.

Time-Travel Research?

[bmajik]

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)

Achieving the History of Virtual Worlds

[RingDev]

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