I had chosen WoW for as my topic for three reasons.  One, it was among the suggested topics Professor Rao offered for the assignment, two, I love sci-fi and I played Magic in high school,  and three, my sister has played some WoW and she’s cool.

After spending a few hours working on that paper I realized that I should really have a crack at the actual gameplay for the good of scholarship.  Not because I have a lot of serious work to do that I’m trying to avoid.  Not that at all.

With a 10 day free trial, I couldn’t go wrong, so I started the download of the game and it was 3.6 gigs of data streaming over some type of resumabale http stream.  Oh well, I thought, I’ll let it go over night and try it out in the morning.

Little did I know that the application was going to require a half dozen patch updates.  Each update requires hard drive space for the patch itself and the uncompressed installation of the the patch’s data.  Most of the updates were less than a hundred megs, but I have had at least three downloads of a gig or more each requiring an additional 1-7 gigabytes of free space for the installation.  I’m sure that the requirements to download and install the game are greater than 20 gigs at this point, which is out of control.

So far, I’ve used two days of my free trial just trying to get the game installed on my D630 here and I’ll be honest the service experience has been something of a let down so far.

Suggestions for improvement:

1. Blizzard should offer the fully patched W0W version 3.2 available for direct download in the first place.  Rebuild, repackage and release that to your new customers.  Don’t give them the runaround with all these silly patch releases.
2. If you can’t do that, offer a real estimation of the amount of disk space involved.  This has been a really cleansing exercise as I’ve purged a ton of non-required data from my 150 gig laptop internal, but I would have much rather known what I was getting into from the get go.
3. Offer your patch releases as torrents.  I like that Blizzard’s direct download allows you to resume, but the speed overall is too slow.  Blizzard should host a bunch of seeds and suggest that we torrent via an official tracker rather than serve the data in a direct pipe.  It is just too slow.

I think the most troublesome issue is that I assumed that since I was installing via the web that the original download would reflect the current state of the game.  Instead, I had to go through the complete patching process from 2.x to 3.2 just as I would if I had bought a DVD from a game store.  What is the use, Blizzard, if you’re going to offer an ancient build as your foundational game download?

Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”

Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?

Know Your Mario History

A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.

The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs.

Post-modern archeology? …Really?

In 2004 Henry Lowood, the Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University presented an argument for the preservation of videogames to the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works that included the following passage:

Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at M.I.T., has written that video games may be the “art form for the digital age.” Some of you will find this thought difficult to reconcile with Pong, Pac-Man or Pokemon. Jenkins answers by suggesting that such reactions “tell us more about our contemporary notion of art—as arid and stuffy, as the property of an educated and economic elite, as cut off from everyday experience—than they tell us about games.”

Debating the ultimate status of games as an art form strikes me as less important than the potential impact of computer games on artistic expression, more a matter of the interplay between computer games and artistic practice.

It is nice to know that the academic community has been on board to preserve video game history for some time. But it appears that the forefront of research is being taken care of through crowd-sourcing on the web; the release of 15 year old corporate documents draws a buzz a little nerdier and a little less consipracy-laden than the release of new evidence from the JFK assassination.

I suppose it makes sense that if there is a large community that wants insight into the development of today’s work and play software such as the Android OS or next Street Fighter, would also want insight into the games they played when they were young. I wonder how long it will be that the theft of historical source code will make as realistic movie plot as that of Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas.

Update: While exploring a compelling new suite of web applications from Aviary, I came across an interesting related note in their work blog that reads:  “There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.”  A bit off the topic of historical software development, but a nod nonetheless towards important lessons that can be learned from video games.  Read the full entry: 3 lessons learned from Half-Life.