It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.
The end of the world came, and humans fought hard. Especially as server lags grew, and GMs ran NPCs. The article describes the last days of Tabula Rasa, a massively multiplayer game which was closed down, due to low subscription numbers. The account starts with humor, then shades into melancholy.
back-and-forth exchanges followed, with the GMs even breaking out that most classic of old internet chestnuts. "ADMIN MESSAGE: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US," declared the server, followed a few moments later by, "ADMIN MESSAGE: ALL YOUR BASE," presumably to make clear the quantity of base in question.
Soon after, the final countdown began, ticking down from ten to zero in 45 seconds and capped off with, "Good night, and good luck!" Then, a freeze frame, a dialogue box reading, "You have been disconnected from the server," and an unceremonious dump back to the title screen.
And, like that, a world ended.
Soon after, the final countdown began, ticking down from ten to zero in 45 seconds and capped off with, "Good night, and good luck!" Then, a freeze frame, a dialogue box reading, "You have been disconnected from the server," and an unceremonious dump back to the title screen.
And, like that, a world ended.
(hat tip to Collision Detection; image from Tabula Rasa Memorial)
Not with a bang, but with a whimpered internet meme...
Posted by: Ed Webb | March 29, 2009 at 18:14
I'm not sure "shades into melancholy" quite covered it. I should've had The Cure on the stereo, I think, to match the ambiance of that article. Still, though, thanks for linking it. I'll have to ponder more, I think, on the philosophical implications of it. What karma does one carry for destroying a virtual world?
I'm left wondering though, regarding some of the final moments like crowding everyone into one instance and then splitting it into many, if NCSoft did a fair amount of experimentation in Tabula Rasa's last moments, pushing to see how far their servers could go or testing out this or that hairbrained idea that couldn't have been tested on a viable game. Would love to see the results, if they did.
Posted by: Ian | March 30, 2009 at 03:46
It's definitely a meme by now, @Ed Webb. I've been tracking end-of-the-digital-world stories for a decade.
Nice comment, @Ian. You remind me of the terrible loss suffered in a culture based on oral tradition, when a storyteller dies. Or the destruction when a theater of memory practitioner dies.
Local instances... that's a very different concept. A kind of local afterlife, a gift into the future.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | April 01, 2009 at 07:57