servers | Platypus

The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds

 Evan Conaway  December 10, 2019

“It’s amazing to think those little circuits that we can carry around were an entire world to us.” –Diana*, interviewee “We might say that this capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is, in fact, exemplified by the souvenir.” –Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (1984) In 2011, just seven years after the birth of World of Warcraft (WoW), the game’s development company decided to implement some major changes to their server architecture. Rather than disposing of the decommissioned server hardware that had helped run the game world since the beginning, they auctioned it off for charity. For long-time players of WoW, these pieces of server hardware hold value because they are pieces of the virtual game world that hold spatial memory. WoW players have historically viewed servers as persistent and discrete places, places where players played together, formed relationships, and faced challenges. In this short post, I will outline how owners of commemorative WoW server hardware treat these objects as mementos of their time in the world of WoW.** (read more...)

The Nubecene: Toward an Ecology of the Cloud

 Steven Gonzalez  February 14, 2018

Imprints of computing are etched into the surface of the earth. Fugitive traces remain captive in its lithic tissues, its waters, and the very air we breathe. Roiling in the most abyssal depths of the seas, coursing through fiber optic cables thinner than human hairs, the amorphous Cloud and its digital ganglia enshroud our planet. By way of its sheer magnitude and complexity, the Cloud eludes human imagination. It is what Bruno Latour might call a “black box” (1987) – a market fantasy of infinite storage capacity, immateriality, and feel-good “green” slogans like “go paperless.” While envisioned by many to be ether, suspended above matter, the Cloud remains a material ensemble of cables and microchips, computer servers and data centers, electrons and water molecules, cell towers and cell phones, spindly fiber coils undersea and underground that firmly tether communities and consumers to the ground, not the sky. (read more...)

Privacy and Piracy: Investigating Unauthorized Online Gaming

 Evan Conaway  February 8, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the third post in our Law in Computation series. When we play an online game like World of Warcraft, where are we? This is not just a metaphysical question—are we in the fantasy world of Azeroth or in front of our computers—but a legal one as well. And there are multiple answers to that legal question. We might take a look at the space of intellectual property at the level of code and creation, whether corporate or by the players. There is also the space of law within the game, of the rules and norms guiding play (De Zwart and Humphreys 2014). What I’m concerned with here, though, are the servers, located in physical places, that connect players through infrastructures of connection whose worlds are sometimes disconnected by proprietary and computational decisions of game world owners. Servers keep online games alive. When online gamers talk about a game world being disconnected, they often point to the server as being “unplugged” or “turned off.” While official game servers are typically owned by game developers and corporations, players are now harnessing this power themselves, using privately-owned servers (“private servers”) as a viable solution for restoring and sustaining older versions of online games previously consigned to oblivion. But why? (read more...)

Locating Servers, Locating Politics

 Evan Conaway  October 17, 2017

When we think of servers, like web servers and Amazon servers, we don’t usually think of them as occupying physical space. We might think of a remote data center, thanks in large part to images that have been circulated by companies like Facebook and Google. But still, these only visualize unmarked buildings and warehouse rooms, showcasing a particular tech aesthetic of colored wires and tubes, and neatly assembled rows of blinking machines (Holt and Vondereau 2015). Such imagery is hardly meant to provide the public with a sense of where servers are actually located. For most day-to-day computer users, it often doesn’t matter at all whether servers are in the U.S. or China or Russia, so long as they work. But server location matters, and many groups of people value certain material benefits and effects of the placement of servers and their own proximity to servers. It matters for online (read more...)