Earth Fires Destabilize Virtual Governments

Sony announces: "All Sony Online Entertainment customer service support is closed due to the wild fires raging throughout San Diego and the proximity of those fires to the SOE offices. Normal operations will resume once this local emergency is over." SOE games include the behemoths EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies.

In other words, a firestorm has knocked out the government that rules over 750,000 accounts. There will be no police officers on the streets tonight. If you're in the mood to do some random looting and griefing, now's the time.

We tend to think of synthetic worlds as decentralized because the users are spread over the globe. They are still highly centralized on the production side, however, a state of affairs with clear implications for the relationship of synthetic worlds not only to Earth's weather, but to its politics as well. This time it was a fire; next time, it might be an injunction.

Comments

[ren]

1.

"Earth Fires Destabilize Virtual Governments"

aka

Leviathan sleeps tonight

ren

[Sara Jensen]

2.

Would you propose redundant customer service departments just in case there may be a weather emergency or natural disaster in one part of the world?

Data storage is a much more serious business, as those file systems represent a player's identity and belongings. Most companies put great effort into keeping redundant backups in different locations. Unfortunately, there's no convenient real world analogue -- I haven't been cloned, and I don't keep two identical copies of my house on opposite sides of the country just in case I should lose one. But if Sony's hosting facility burns down, I can take comfort in the fact my character and all of her things still exist on another hard drive, probably in another state, and can be put back in place in short order.

To me and most other players, that's much more important than a few days' worth of CS presence. And at least to me, my character's continued existence still pales in comparison to the lost and threatened lives in south California.