vw history

  • Database “sharding” came from UO?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 14 Comments

    Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term. What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?

    So I started reading a bit about it. It basically means running a bunch of parallel databases and looking into the right one, rather than trying to cram everything into one.

    Near as I can tell, a quick Google seems to say that the term came about because of a guy who worked at Friendster and Flickr, and seems to . Wikipedia has only had an article for a little while. In the comment thread at Lessons Learned, there’s mention of the term being used in 2006.

    Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending. In fact, I was quoted in Ludicorp’s business plan, and Stewart Butterfield had asked if I could be an advisor, but I couldn’t do it at the time because of my contract with Sony. Sigh. Anyway, I would be shocked if the term “shard” hadn’t been thrown around those offices… because in MMOs, of course, “shards” has a very specific meaning and history.

    Read More “Database “sharding” came from UO?”

  • Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc
    Comments 31 Comments

    Edit: slightly updated with one more “what have I learned” and a few more links. But I could add links to this for hours. 😛

    So at this point, the whole kerfuffle over the MUD articles on Wikipedia has reached a fever pitch, and I am a bit exhausted by it all. Of course, not so exhausted that I can’t write 2500 more words about it.

    But it has been an interesting education for me in how Wikipedia works, and I’d especially like to thank Adam Hyland for his patience explaining it all. I am a bit dismayed that both Richard & I were tagged by some in the debate as biased or “canvassed” or whatever the term is, when I think we both acted in good faith… but there are plenty of folks on the AfD discussion who have pointed this out.

    Me being who I am, it of course led me to dig deeper into citations there in Wikipedia (hey look, ma, I’m a reliable source! No, wait, I’m not!). I think at this point that in theory, I’m a valid source. This may seem like an odd thing to wonder about or worry about, but hey, how can I help issues like this if not? I mean, this is right at the top of the whole MUD category:

    MUDs and Notability — It Ain’t Gonna Work

    Alright, I’ve been pondering this for several days, and I gotta tell you, I’ve got next to nothing. I’ve been in the Mudding community for over eight years at this point, and I’ve been a Mud administrator/coder/builder for over four years. I’d like to think I know the community pretty well. Here’s the dilemma: wikipedia guidelines require that articles on subjects maintain a certain level of notability. That is there are sources not directly related to the subject of the article. In the case of Muds this means we need to find some sort of third party source (be it a review, a listing, etc…) for each and every MUD listed on wikipedia that wasn’t written by players or staff of the MUD in question.

    Well, that’s bloody near impossible.

    — from the Talk page for the entire MUD category

    So I decided to take a look at sourcing. I picked LegendMUD and my name, because though I may not be able to edit those articles, I do know the topics! In fact, I am an expert on me, though biased. 🙂 Read More “Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are”

  • The borders of user created content

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 16 Comments

    SusanC has a comment on a Terra Nova thread in which she observes,

    So the main criterion for being considered is that there is some kind of creative expression involved. I’m OK with that, although it opens the door for arguments about exactly how much creative input is needed to qualify. Text chat, instant messages, and blog postings (like this one) clearly can be used for creative expression: so maybe these are within the paper’s scope, provided that they are sufficiently creative.

    — comment on Terra Nova: New Paper on UGC.

    It is an interesting problem, actually. There is hardly a site these days of any sort on the Net that does not support some form of user-generated content. But by unspoken convention, we seem to not consider chat and other basic synchronous social interaction to be the same sort of user created content that uploaded models and textures are.

    I think the reason is interesting and subtle, and marks out a distinction between “extending the possibility space” and, well, “not.” So here go 1700 words… Read More “The borders of user created content”

  • Losing MUD history

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 99 Comments

    QBlog writes on the controversy going on over the possible deletion of the article on Threshold MUD. I’ve run into the fact that Wikipedia isn’t a great resource for research into the history of virtual worlds many times before; the articles are of wildly uneven quality, and a recent crappy game can have pages and pages worth of content, whereas historically interesting stuff doesn’t.

    LegendMUD’s entry was deleted without even a debate a while ago, despite there being other articles that reference it and point to it, including a whole page on the Karyn affair. Worlds of Carnage has no page at all, despite it serving as the incubation place for scripting in DikuMUDs and for many developers who went on to work on the first wave of MMOs in the US. At least there’s a good DartMUD page.

    Curiously, I am used as a reference or citation many times in Wikipedia, yet I suspect my writings would not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines. The challenge here is creating material that does — with so much existing only as oral history or as community-driven sites, little will qualify to be in Wikipedia, with the result that the history is often lost.

    This is also the gripe I have about my own entry… very cool that I have one at all (though it came up for deletion once too! Morgan saved it) but it makes no real mention of why I should have one, which makes it read just like a resume. There’s no mention of game grammar, theory of fun, “worldy” MMORPGs, online game design patterns, the timeline, avatar rights, or community management — though it managed to find time to mention that I played MUME for a bit — even though I played dozens of muds as long as I played MUME.

    This isn’t just me being whiny about my entry… Bartle’s entry spends more time on whether he is controversial when discussing WoW, than on the core philosophical statement in his writings, which include the ideas that virtual worlds are means of self-discovery, and that they are artistic statements by designers.

    Now, I love Wikipedia, and use it all the time. But I am at a loss as to how to help out the Threshold entry, or in general help the cause of VW history there. This sort of thing is why people (ahem) end up setting up their own timelines instead. 🙂