I have a bunch (metric botte métrique) of game demos I’ve downloaded as part of the Steam Next Fest. I’ve already written about a couple (metric ein paar) of dungeon crawlers. I then thought I would dip into the MMO construction set world with Let’s Build a Dungeon, but in the end I found it wasn’t my sort of game.
Still wanting to keep with the MMO mood, since this blog is ostensibly about MMOs, I opted to give MMO98 a shot.
MMO98
It’s 1998 and you’re about to release your first MMO98, Insert Name of Game Here, on the world’s most advanced operating system, Windows 98. You’re seen Ultima Online and Meridian 52, but they have nothing on your magnum opus. You press the “Release” button and…
Server crash! Bugs! Crippling lag! But all you know is that your game, your brain child, the code you’ve carried and coddled from that sheaf of printer paper filled with your scribbles to the disaster unfolding before you, all you know, is that your game is a legitimate hit.
Now, let’s just push out a little patch and onboard some more servers and everything will be just peachy.
Okay, this is what the game wants you to believe it is about. It’s all a lie, and I’m a little concerned about exposing what the game is really about because it’s a delicious twist, but it is in the demo, so, here goes.
MMO98 is not about developing an MMO for the ages, one that will live forever in the memories of those lucky enough to play it before GameFAQs ruined it for everyone. You’ll find that out fairly quickly when, a little bit into the game, a new tab pops up — “Sequel”. Yes, the fans demand a follow-up to your award winning game.
I called my MMO Master of the Playground. I started development on the sequel, Sultan of the Swingset as soon as I could afford to. The game cautions you not to announce the new game before you’re ready, as your current players will instantly abandon your current MMO and wait, impatiently, for the follow-up. You can plow more and more money into the sequel, hoping there are fewer bugs and netcode issues in the next one, while also keeping your current customers logging in and spending money to fund this secret development.
Finally, the exponentially-rising development costs demand you release the sequel. Master of the Playground shuts down; Sultan of the Swingset goes live.
And now comes the twist — a new tab, “Research”. The game explains that all this time you have been gathering data on your players, and now you have to rent a datacenter to keep it. Immediately, I sold some of that data for money I then diverted into researching on how much I could charge for the game before people wouldn’t buy it anymore. Through community management, I had gathered a collection of True Believers that would buy any slop I created. There’s a lot of stuff to research, some of it even would benefit the player. And you do want happy players, as happy players become true believers, and true believers become first-day buyers, and first-day buyers fund the development for the next game.
And there it is, revealed: MMO98 is about quickly developing shovelware to feed to a gullible playerbase so that you can collect more of their personal data.
But you know, it’s kinda fun for all that. Master of the Playground, Sultan of the Swingset, Tyrant of the Tilt-a-Whirl, Arbiter of Arts-and-Crafts and Regent of the Rocking Horse, you will live forever in MMO history. Rest in power, my digital friends.
Data Center
The first time I started Data Center up, I found myself in a more-or-less featureless room that had a trash bin, some empty folding tables, and a desk with a lone computer on it. There was a quest marker to log in and buy a server rack. I logged in and bought a server rack. The next quest: head to the server room and install the server rack.
There was a quest marker and everything. I could not interact with the thing. I couldn’t open my inventory. I had no idea what to do. I ran around, opened a sliding door, found nothing there, got frustrated and quit. Later that evening, I was showing Kasul about this game that seemed broken from the start. “Did you see if there was anything on those shelves behind the sliding door?” I looked. “Nope”. Kasul pointed into the screen. “What about that box there, on the shelf?”
That box. That box was the rack, it turns out, and I went to the server room, clicked the quest marker and BOOP, it built itself. “I’ve played these kinds of games before,” he said. “It’s all physical.”
Well, I sure felt stupid. It’s not like I haven’t played these sorts of games before — heck, I just played Pacific Coast Drive a couple months ago, and it was all physical.
Now that I knew what I was doing…
In Data Center, your job is to build server racks, populate them with switches and servers of various types, rent them to customers, and activate them by setting each server a static IPv4 address within the allocated address range within a certain amount of time.
This is very labor intensive work. You do have a handcart available to help move stacks of servers and stuff around in one trip, but early on, it crashed into the floor and refused to be moved again. So it was just running from the stockroom to the server room, again and again. Wiring up the servers to the switch, and the switch to the gateway. Setting those static IPs, one by one. Running out of time.
But I was making money, my reputation and experience were growing, things were going well. That’s when I noticed that the servers and switches all have a countdown timer. In less than two hours, they were going to become scrap metal.
The presence of the dumpster outside the stock room suddenly made sense, and I realized I’d been playing Data Center all wrong.
How you’re supposed to play, I imagine, is to set up stacks of various server types, get them ready to go, then start assigning them to new customers, or using them to hot replace servers of active customers to achieve zero downtime. I could imagine a player continually busy replacing servers, spinning up new racks, renting server to new customers and so on, just keeping busy without even having to worry about air conditioning or power and…
Wow, this was starting to sound like a real job. A job I didn’t particularly find relaxing.
I didn’t check to see if you could eventually hire helpers; I think you’d have to have them in order to have any down time at all.
I’ve just logged back in and was a little distressed to find that all my servers, switches and customers had vanished. All I had left were the racks, my money, experience and reputation. (I went back in again and noticed that the racks now had cable clamps for cable management, so I guess that was patched in and made my save incompatible).
Well, if I could hire people to do some of the grunt work, I guess that would be fine, then. Not available in the demo, but it makes me more likely to play it when it goes live.
So there you go. The MMO and the servers on which it runs, you get the full experience between these two games.
