[game_preservation] Open Sourcing MMO's that have "died"

[Henry Lowood]

Well, there are at least two books out that cover the hacking of WoW 
servers.  Indeed, there are many private WoW servers -- you can find 
YouTube movies with all sorts of stunts, mods, and movies made in 
them. Yes, it can be done, but my understanding is that requires some 
reverse engineering of server code, which would be hard to do if 
there were no server.  But I guess if the hacks were archived ...

Blizzard has shut down servers via legal means -- both for Diablo 
(battle.net) and WoW.

However, I feel about a hacked server pretty much like I do about a 
cracked game -- what is the archival value other than for the hacked 
version?  Yes, you can convey valuable information about how a game 
was played, but the evidentiary value is nil, since anything could 
have been changed.

Henry


At 03:18 PM 7/23/2008, Andrew Armstrong wrote:

>People have setup fake servers without the source code before. Or 

>they've got a leaked old version and still got it to work, who 

>knows? Some servers got shut down (EQ ones?) by someone I recall.

>

>For a competent coder it'd probably not take too much effort to sort 

>it into a workable state, and the developers would also, obviously, 

>have copies of the game or code which can access the world sans 

>players, sans server, for debugging and testing (or at least, a 

>version which requires no big authentication server, etc.)

>

>The technical problems are therefore nil. I'd say it is more a 

>philosophical one - if they want to release it totally open (as the 

>article I posted suggests) there are reasons why Id do that for 

>their games and others don't - as the article says. But the other 

>option like I mentioned is to dark archive or private archive it, so 

>select archivists and historians can access the game but the source 

>code is kept under wraps.

>

>Hell, even just the game server files and no source code, most 

>companies would balk at. The effort, the time and the money 

>involved, even before the possible need to keep it for IP rights or 

>if they want to reuse it in the future or fear people will use it 

>for bad things, are what put them off.

>

>But then again I've not talked to anyone at these companies about 

>this! Henry is obviously doing that front, it'll be nice to see what 

>comes out of the virtual worlds project, especially if some better 

>way of getting the assets archived is achieved.

>

>Andrew

>

>Captain Commando wrote:

>>Regarding getting the server to run, you could probably just set up 

>>a fake server and run the whole thing off of there. This would 

>>require getting inside the black box of the game, though, and I 

>>doubt there would be many companies willing to take that risk, even 

>>if the program is good and dead (what's to stop them from worrying 

>>about whether or not somebody will steal everything and set up a 

>>rogue server?). I know that these things can be faked, considering 

>>how Warp Pipe managed to get the Gamecube running over LAN for 

>>things like Mario Kart. I should think working with a virtual world 

>>would be somewhat more complex, but still analogous.

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Henry Lowood, Ph.D.
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
  Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood 
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