If I could undertake a research project
and get my hands on an artifact to take a very close look, I think I would want
to see… the complete code and version control for all the builds of Guild Wars
2 up until now.
Guild Wars 2 is a Massively Multiplayer
Online Role-Playing Game [MMORPG], which combines fantasy story quest elements,
player-versus-player combat, and guild warfare, all in a persistent virtual
world. Games like these present a challenge for researchers and even players,
as they are based on a single proprietary code controlled by the game developer,
which can make access difficult or even impossible in the case of games no
longer online. These games are characterized by highly proprietary code, only
accessible through means of questionable legality.
Through a project undertaken to find a way
to use descriptive bibliography as a method of partial preservation, I’ve
become interested in how these locked games might function as artifacts and the
different ways they speak about themselves; considering the visual, but also moving
beyond the “screen essentialism” mentioned in class.
My guiding research question would be: In
what ways does the code of an MMORPG change over time, and how can these
changes inform the way preservation efforts approach modern persistent world
video games? Just as analytical bibliography goes searching for the human
element of error, I am interested in what the code might tell us about the
humans involved in making it, and how we can capture this element in a stable
and preserved form.
Which is precisely why I want the version
history as well.
In an AMA with the developers on reddit,
they admitted to this commit message being part of one build [in the wake of
the Double Rainbow meme]:
"Whoa, that’s a full fog all the way. Double fog, oh my god. It’s a double fog, all the way. Whoa that’s so intense. Whoa man! Wow! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa ho ho oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Woo! Oh wow! Woo! Yeah! Oh ho ho! Oh my god! Oh my god look at that! It’s starting even to look like a triple fog! Oh my god it’s full on! Double fog all the way across the sky! Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh god. What does this mean? Oh. Oh my god. Oh. Oh. God. It’s so bright, oh my god it’s so bright and vivid! Oh. Ah! Ah! It’s so beautiful! Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god! Oh my god, it’s a double complete fog! Oh right in my map. Oh my god. Oh my god, what does it mean? Tell me. Too much. I don’t know what it means. Oh my god it’s so intense. Oh. Oh. Oh my god."
- Change 533404 by jim on 2010/07/19 18:07:00
Anyone interested in a close reading of a
few commit messages?
Further
reading:
For a look at the death of a virtual
world: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/when-a-video-game-world-ends/423360/
For the Reddit AMA which included the
commit message:
https://www.reddit.com/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa
https://www.reddit.com/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa
I found an article that would be really useful for this type of project, though not necessarily from a bibliographic perspective, "Do You Want to Save Your Progress?": The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds" looks at how virtual communities of players are preserving aspects of virtual worlds (including MMORPGs). While they too don't have access to proprietary code, they are using sites such as wikis to document as much as they can about the virtual world, including changes. While I haven't read the article fully, it does talk about the challenges of access to code, the affects this inaccessibility has for issues of obsolescence, and methods of preserving codes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the GAMER Group is still around and would be worth looking at in terms of getting a metadata perspective.
http://gamer.ischool.uw.edu/
Kari Kraus and Rachel Donahue (2012). Do You Want to Save Your Progress?": The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds." Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no. 2.
Thank you for sharing the GAMER group here! I was looking for them over the past few weeks, but all traces of them seemed to have vanished from the search engines. The ongoing metadata efforts are fascinating to me and their process for determining what to include and how to format it are incredibly informative for looking at video games in general.
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