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Case Study In the fast-paced world of computer games, titles spring forth and fade out in a matter of months, leaving only a handful of brilliantly designed ones behind. It doesn’t take a seasoned veteran of computer games to name some of the hit titles such as Doom, Dune, Sim City, or Starcraft. But none of these games have gone through the amazing trial of demise and resurrection — indeed, death is a final sentence for the vast majority of computer games ever (and will ever be) produced. This rule, however, does not apply to one extraordinary game called Subspace. The story of Subspace began when Virgin Interactive Entertainment’s North American branch (VIE) hired producer Rob Humble in 1995, who had “worked on the boxed version of Kesmai's arcade hit, Air Warrior. They asked him what kind of game he wanted to make. ‘Internet-only,’ was his reply and they said, ‘Sure, go ahead and here's the money.’”1 Rob Humble hired his programmer friend Jeff Peterson to create a simple prototype for testing purposes. After one month, Jeff Peterson created an asteroid clone with a 2D overhead perspective. The game engine incorporated simple Newtonian physics — most notably, the feature of inertia. Code named “Sniper”, the test program was put on a website; Rob and Jeff waited for player feedback. The plan was to gather what information they can from Sniper, and incorporate the players’ suggestions into a (to be created) game of a much larger scale. After four months of testing and modification, the experiment was declared over. But when Jeff and Rob tried to shut down the website, they were flooded by acerbic remarks from “perplexed and addicted”1 beta testers. Surprised to see how far their experiment has gone, VIE decided to keep Sniper around for further development. The little test program was renamed “Subspace”, and it was here to stay, for good.
True to its roots, Subspace’s beta testing period depended heavily on player feedback. Modifications of the game were made on a daily bases, and new patches were released on a weekly basis. After more than two years of beta testing, the game was commercially released to local retailers for sale in October 1997; its publisher, VIE, had high hopes for its newest investment. In Subspace, a player can select from eight (the eighth ship, the Shark, was added after the commercial release of the game) distinct spaceships, each with its own unique characteristics2 . For example, the Warbird is the most maneuverable ship in the game, while the Javelin is the fastest ship in the game, the Spider and the Shark can cloak, the Lancaster’s bombs can bounce off of walls, etc. Due to the highly specialized nature of each ship type, most players tend to use one type of ship exclusively. Subspace is organized into various zones a player can choose from. Each zone has its own unique style of gameplay. For example, the Speed Zone (no longer in existence) features a fast-paced game of carnage in which every player competes to get the most number of kills in a 20-minute time frame, the Dueling Zone is a place where players can engage in one-on-one combat inside an enclosed area, the Warzone is an on-going game of capture the flag, etc. In a standard zone, the player’s ship starts off with minimal capabilities, and he will have to capture power-ups (known as “greens” for their green color) to upgrade his ship to its full potential. Combat is usually engaged between teams of players (either randomly assigned or willfully formed), which makes turf wars the most common battles in Subspace. Players have at their disposal bombs (which have proximity detonation), bullets, mines, and a variety of other tools called “specials”. An example of a special would be Thor’s Hammer (known simply as Thor), which is a very powerful bomb that can go through walls. Other standard ship functions are Stealth (invisible on radar), Cloak (invisible on the game screen) X-Radar (penetrates stealth and cloak), and Anti-Warp. In addition to the basic in-game elements, Subspace features a wide range of rich multiplayer faculties. Its sophisticated in-game chatting function is a crucial part of gameplay, as it allows players to communicate with one another with great efficiency. Players can send messages to the entire zone, to his own team, to his own squad, or another team, to another squad, or to someone in another zone. Players can also choose to ignore all messages or the messages of a few particular people, they can also pre-set macros into hotkeys, which greatly facilitates coordination between team members during combat (e.g. “Help needed at %coord” is a macro that will automatically output your current position using the “%coord” variable).
Players can also form squads among themselves. A squad is headed by a captain, who controls membership in the squad with a password. Squads are usually formed to compete in player-run league (e.g. Professional League, Powerball League, 2 vs. 2 League, etc.), which are highly organized entities fully equipped with league councils, referees, and seasonal schedules. In short, the internal organization of squads and leagues is no different than that of any professional sports teams and league such as the NBA or the NFL — with the exception, of course, that the players do not get paid (although some of them should be). Gameplay in Subspace is fast and furious. Usually there are more than 20 pilots in one zone, darting back and forth, preying or being preyed upon. Bullets, bombs, mines, and Thors are everywhere. Bombs explode into a ring of menacing shrapnel, taking out any unaware bystander. Due to the simple implementation of basic Newtonian physics, Subspace is an incredibly easy game to learn, but at the same time extremely difficult to master.
A “newbie” will often go through an extended and painful period of hazing, during which he is continuously killed by more seasoned players. However, if approached with a diligent attitude, a novice pilot can gain a respectable skill level in a matter of months. A game like Subspace is bound to attract players by the thousands — and it did. By the time VIE released Subspace as a commercial product, the game already had an impressive 150,0003 player base — a feat that can only be achieved by the best of computer games. But what makes Subspace a good game? A careful examination of Wolfgang Kramer’s objective criteria in conjunction with Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus’ (for simplicity, the authors will hitherto be referred to as “Loftus”) will review that Subspace exhibits every characteristic, physical and psychological, of a truly great game. In their book, Loftus proposed the concept of variable-schedule reinforcement4 , in which a player is reinforced, or rewarded, through some type of interaction with the game at the end of variable intervals. Subspace is a perfect example of a game with variable-schedule reinforcements.
The player is reinforced whenever he defeats another player in combat, but this can happen in almost an innumerable number of ways. Victory can be achieved by actively hunting another player, have your teammate or squad mate avenge your death for you, accidentally killing someone with stray bombs and bullets, defeating someone in a duel, defeating a team in a match during the playoffs, winning one round of capture the flag or King of the Hill, etc. etc. The number of avenues towards victory is limited only by the imagination of the player and the zone designer’s creativity, thus creating a highly variable and yet reasonable waiting time5 before the next dose of reinforcement is delivered. Furthermore, Subspace offers a highly creative level of control5 , in that the player never has full control over what takes place in the game. However, the degree of control a player has over the game will increase with time and experience. In addition to being a good game, Subspace also exhibits a high resistance towards extinction6 — a term used by Loftus to denote the permanent loss of interest for the game.
Due to the fact that Subspace is a multiplayer game, its potential in surprising5 the player is near infinite; place 30 sentient pilots in the same zone and no one will be able to accurately predict their behavior within any given time span. Each combat the player engages in is always new, always original5 , for no two situations are exactly alike. Similarly, each player has, theoretically, an equal opportunity5 to achieve victory if he has dedicated the same amount of time and effort into the game as his opponent. And finally, no one can become the “king” 5 of Subspace for the simple reason that no single pilot is able to defeat every one of the 150,000 players in the game across hundreds of zones. All of these factors combine to make Subspace a highly replayable5 game, a fact that complements Loftus’ theory of alternate worlds7 . An alternate world is an imaginary place in which victory is attained. In terms of Subspace, a player can easily imagine what went wrong in his last encounter with another player which resulted in his defeat. Moreover, the blemish can be easily rectified by simply pursuing his opponent immediately after he re-spawns. The alternate world created by the defeated pilot is very close to reality, due to the fact that he can indeed recreate his most recent battles minus the mistakes. As a result, Subspace will never fail to recapture the player’s interests, and is highly unlikely to face extinction. While Subspace does indeed exhibit all the right characteristics that make a great game, it never became the financial success that VIE had hoped for. After its commercial release, Subspace attracted new players continuously through the word-of-mouth amongst gamers. Unfortunately, word-of-mouth was the only medium through which Subspace proliferated through the gaming community. Upon Subspace’s release in 1997, VIE launched what was perhaps the worst marketing campaign in history: there were no advertisements through any medium and no shelf promotions at local retailers. As sales figures trickled in, Subspace became a financial disappointment8 . Rather than changing their business strategy, VIE instead blamed low revenues on software piracy, and soon moved to implement a CD-check copyright protection. It was a costly move for VIE, for the number of players in Subspace took dropped sharply9 after the copyright protection was implemented.
Fortunately, the decline was only temporary: just months later, a crack10 was available on the Internet to counter the CD-check. VIE then released another version of Subspace, which rendered the crack impotent. But sure enough, a new version of the crack soon ensued in a matter of hours after VIE released its new patch. The cop versus robber game continued on for over a year, and finally, VIE caved in. Its North American Branch was in financial ruins by late 1998, and was acquired by Irvine Entertainment10. The acquisition, however, did not include Subspace. In this interesting twist of events, Subspace suddenly lost its owner and became, for all practical purposes, public property. Something else happened when VIE was acquired. On December 16, 1998, at 5:00 PM EST, VIE shut down all of its Subspace servers. As Kevin Jenkins put it, this meant “no more usage tracking, cross zone chatting, point tracking, or squad maintenance”11. All the old VIE zones were either immediately shut down or deserted by players. The central server that provides the IP addresses of various zones was also shut down. Though there were still a few player-run zones operational, they were excruciatingly slow and the players simply had no way of locating them without the central server. By the end of 1998, the player base had shrunk from 150,000 to a mere 16,000, a near 90% drop12. Subspace began to fade away rapidly from the gaming community in a very unremarkable way.
Subspace’s fate was certainly not caused by any design flaws in the game itself, but rather by VIE’s poor business practice. To understand what VIE could have done to save itself from financial ruin, a simple comparison can be made with another massively-multiplayer game called Everquest. Released 2 years later than Subspace, Everquest is a 3D online RPG. Not only did it charge the players $30 to purchase the game, it also included a $10/month subscription fee13. When Subspace was on sale in the stores, it was priced at merely $10, with no subscription fee. While Everquest thrived today with over 375,000 subscribers14, Subspace’s following is little over 40,000 as of today. Of course, Everquest is in a completely different genre than Subspace, but its success nevertheless proves that the subscription business model not only works, but is extremely profitable. Ultima Online is another example of a subscription-based multiplayer game that has attained quite a high degree of success. But there are successful multiplayer games that are played for free, notably, Diablo II and Starcraft. Both of these games are produced by Blizzard Entertainment, both of which are wildly successful, and both of which support multiplayer over Blizzard’s proprietary Battle.net. The difference, however, between Blizzard and VIE is that Blizzard actually staged massive marketing campaigns. For Diablo II, Blizzard used prime-time TV to reach the mass audience; for Starcraft, a game that is published in 1998, articles about the game were appearing in game magazines as early as 199515. Such persistent (and undoubtedly expensive) marketing strategies brought Blizzard’s games unparalleled publicity even before they were released. VIE, on the other hand, staged literally no marketing campaign to promote Subspace. Nor did it adopt the subscription fee model like Everquest or Ultima Online. While the executives at VIE wondered why Subspace is such a financial failure, players were sifting through piles of outdated (3-4 years old) games to find Subspace in a disgracefully unattractive white box. The cover art was so ridiculously simple and banal that a 6-year old could probably have created a more appealing design16. VIE’s inactive marketing strategy has essentially banished Subspace into commercial oblivion. But as sales were rapidly turning into an unviable source of revenue, it never occurred to VIE to start charging subscription fees to save themselves from financial ruin. Instead, they persisted with their business model. When the Subspace contract expired and the company was bought out, VIE simply pulled the plug, leaving the game to fend for its own survival. And survive it did — with the help of the Subspace community. Along with the commercial release of the game, VIE also released a public version of its billing server. A billing server is “a user database with information regarding player's usage of the game service…
Player registration information is kept in it, and the zones connecting to it share the same user and squad information.”17 The public release of the billing server was a scaled-down text-based database, as opposed to VIE’s main server, which was based on ODBC17. This simplified version of the billing server allowed individual players to set up their own Subspace server. During the years when VIE’s main servers were up, these home-brewed Subspace servers were a small fraction (less than 20%) of the overall player base12. In addition, these private servers were usually afflicted with slow connections, thus causing a high rate of packet loss and latency, two terms that are collectively known as “lag” by the online gaming community. By the end of 1998, however, VIE was a thing of the past. These small-time private servers suddenly took on the burden of being the backbone of the Subspace community. Many server administrators disconnected their zones, but a resilient few were determined to keep the game alive. Somewhere in Finland was the Subspace Sonera12 server run by two Subspace fans by the names of “BD Vine” and “Baudchaser”17. After VIE’s servers were shut down, BD Vine contacted two other major Subspace servers and convinced them to connect under the Sonera billing server. The three servers gathered together what was left of the scattered player base and worked together to write a new chapter in Subspace’s history.
During the Fall of 2000, an organization emerged from BD Vine’s coalition of servers, it was known as the Subspace Council (SSC)8 . The SSC is a loose collection of server administrators and zone operators. Servers under the SSC were not required to abide by any written standard of quality, but their connections were vastly improved from the VIE days. Old players were returning, and for the first time in years, a handful of new players were trickling in. Amongst the members of the SSC is a brilliant programmer known as “Priitk”. The Sonera billing server was originally running on the text-based database distributed with the game. As the number of player logins increased, the server began to slow down due to the inherent inefficient nature of the database. BD Vine wrote programs that would clean up unused accounts and fix user data inconsistencies in order to boost speed17, but it wasn’t enough. Priitk joined the group and rewrote the entire billing server, and integrated into it an enhanced version of BD Vine’s distributed banning system17. To understand the significance of the banning system, there is no better example than an infamous little program called Twister. Sometime after VIE and before the SSC, a high school student wrote a program called Twister that allowed players to cheat. It can give any pilot infinite energy, rapid-fire bombs, and basically render the cheater invincible. For a while, Twister proliferated throughout Subspace, making the game almost unplayable. During Twister’s reign, the player base began to waiver once again, and the newly constructed community was again threatened by a massive exodus. A banning system allowed the server administrators to effectively block out any user who is spotted cheating, and the new system written by Priitk was very efficient in placing such culprits into exile.
Even with a new billing server and banning system, Subspace as a game was still static. Without the source code, bugs inside the game cannot be fixed, and new features cannot be implemented. The SSC tried in vain to obtain the source code for Subspace, but they eventually gave up. Motivated by his determination and fueled by his brilliance, Priitk re-engineered Subspace from scratch. The new version is known as “Continuum”, undoubtedly symbolic of Subspace’s everlasting endurance. With the arrival of Continuum, the Subspace community for the first time received a breath of fresh air — the game was brought back to life once again, and its growth is now being directed by its original progenitor: player feedback. In the end, the Subspace community saved the game from its demise. What is it about the game that it should inspire such determination in the community to keep it alive? The answer can be found within the rich multiplayer features that facilitated the formation and perpetuation of a unique virtual community. The Subspace universe is governed by a fixed set of rules different from that of real life18, thus creating a separate reality. However, unlike traditional communities (e.g. a residential community), membership in the Subspace universe is determined more “by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity."19 Thus, ever since the beginning, the community that evolved around Subspace would have been more cohesive than most if not all geographically-based communities in the real world. Furthermore, players inside Subspace also enjoy the benefit of having a pre-established common ground from which they can initiate their conversation. The topic, of course, doesn’t have to be game-related, but Subspace nevertheless offers a natural and un-intimidating starting point toward friendly (or not so friendly) conversations.
To facilitate in-game communication, Subspace is equipped with tools that allow a player to engage in conversation in his team or squad’s frequency, in a special interest channel, in a private chat channel with another player or another group of players, in a private arena inside the zone, in the public chat channel of the entire zone, or even in a channel to players in other zones. In short, Subspace allows myriad levels of communication that can be used to include, exclude, and organize players into sub-categories. Best of all, a player does not even need to play the game to enjoy the benefits of the Subspace community — he can simply be parked inside a safety zone or switch on the spectator mode. Both options take the player out of the game, but at the same time, still keeping him in touch with the community. Not only is the mode of conversation different in Subspace, the atmosphere is also drastically different. Subspace as a medium of communication “dissolve[s] [the] boundaries of identity”20 in addition to space and time. Bu this mode of “depersonalized”20 interaction creates the interesting effect of “disinhibition”21. Subspace creates a world devoid of many of the normal social boundaries that delineate the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior22. Even when one has breached the laws of this new reality, a simple change of his alias will erase the past and allow him to start anew. So attractive is such unrestricted degree of freedom, players flock into the Subspace universe by the thousands everyday, which constitutes the very capital needed for the construction and maintenance of a community.
Subspace as a medium has turned the art of socialization into an accelerated, systematic and streamlined process. Consequently, such an environment fosters a unique community that can be found nowhere else. Evidence of such a closely-knit community can be seen from the very beginning of Subspace’s history. A prime example can be taken from the nature of the copyright protection VIE implemented with the commercial release of Subspace. Instead of a custom user alias, unregistered players are simply assigned the tag “~demo###” (the ### is the number of unregistered players currently logged on to VIE’s servers). Furthermore, the unregistered player will be unable to form squads, join squads, or be a member of any player-organized institutions (such as the Professional League or the Dueling Ladder). Despite the fact that an unregistered copy of Subspace is a fully functional game, this rather innovative (other games such as Starcraft or Command and Conquer simply disabled the game altogether if the original game CD was not present) copyright protection scheme worked remarkably well as an incentive for players to purchase the game23 — merely playing the game in an existential isolation is deemed unacceptable by most players. In order to enjoy the game, a player must feel that his existence is acknowledged by the rest of the Subspace community and that he can become a part of it. For those who do not have access to the community, the game loses its appeal; for those who are a part of the community, Subspace becomes the greatest game on Earth.
From its humble beginning as a digital guinea pig to Continuum, Subspace has traversed the road of death and resurrection, of fame and ruin. Endowed with an ingenious game design, Subspace has overcome all obstacles caused by VIE’s poor marketing strategies to be once again embraced by its players. As a game, Subspace is remarkable; but as a social phenomenon, it is awe-inspiring. Now at 6 years of age, Subspace is still being actively played and developed by its dedicated community of fans. Today, Subspace has a respectable 40,00012 player base. Although it is a far cry from the game’s heydays when it commanded a 150,000 player base, it is nevertheless a leap from the 16,000 after the passing of VIE. But most importantly, the player base for Subspace has been steadily growing over the past few years, and with the SSC and Continuum in place, the future of Subspace looks brighter than ever.
I thought everyone should take a look into the past again.
True to its roots, Subspace’s beta testing period depended heavily on player feedback. Modifications of the game were made on a daily bases, and new patches were released on a weekly basis. After more than two years of beta testing, the game was commercially released to local retailers for sale in October 1997; its publisher, VIE, had high hopes for its newest investment. In Subspace, a player can select from eight (the eighth ship, the Shark, was added after the commercial release of the game) distinct spaceships, each with its own unique characteristics2 . For example, the Warbird is the most maneuverable ship in the game, while the Javelin is the fastest ship in the game, the Spider and the Shark can cloak, the Lancaster’s bombs can bounce off of walls, etc. Due to the highly specialized nature of each ship type, most players tend to use one type of ship exclusively. Subspace is organized into various zones a player can choose from. Each zone has its own unique style of gameplay. For example, the Speed Zone (no longer in existence) features a fast-paced game of carnage in which every player competes to get the most number of kills in a 20-minute time frame, the Dueling Zone is a place where players can engage in one-on-one combat inside an enclosed area, the Warzone is an on-going game of capture the flag, etc. In a standard zone, the player’s ship starts off with minimal capabilities, and he will have to capture power-ups (known as “greens” for their green color) to upgrade his ship to its full potential. Combat is usually engaged between teams of players (either randomly assigned or willfully formed), which makes turf wars the most common battles in Subspace. Players have at their disposal bombs (which have proximity detonation), bullets, mines, and a variety of other tools called “specials”. An example of a special would be Thor’s Hammer (known simply as Thor), which is a very powerful bomb that can go through walls. Other standard ship functions are Stealth (invisible on radar), Cloak (invisible on the game screen) X-Radar (penetrates stealth and cloak), and Anti-Warp. In addition to the basic in-game elements, Subspace features a wide range of rich multiplayer faculties. Its sophisticated in-game chatting function is a crucial part of gameplay, as it allows players to communicate with one another with great efficiency. Players can send messages to the entire zone, to his own team, to his own squad, or another team, to another squad, or to someone in another zone. Players can also choose to ignore all messages or the messages of a few particular people, they can also pre-set macros into hotkeys, which greatly facilitates coordination between team members during combat (e.g. “Help needed at %coord” is a macro that will automatically output your current position using the “%coord” variable).
Players can also form squads among themselves. A squad is headed by a captain, who controls membership in the squad with a password. Squads are usually formed to compete in player-run league (e.g. Professional League, Powerball League, 2 vs. 2 League, etc.), which are highly organized entities fully equipped with league councils, referees, and seasonal schedules. In short, the internal organization of squads and leagues is no different than that of any professional sports teams and league such as the NBA or the NFL — with the exception, of course, that the players do not get paid (although some of them should be). Gameplay in Subspace is fast and furious. Usually there are more than 20 pilots in one zone, darting back and forth, preying or being preyed upon. Bullets, bombs, mines, and Thors are everywhere. Bombs explode into a ring of menacing shrapnel, taking out any unaware bystander. Due to the simple implementation of basic Newtonian physics, Subspace is an incredibly easy game to learn, but at the same time extremely difficult to master.
A “newbie” will often go through an extended and painful period of hazing, during which he is continuously killed by more seasoned players. However, if approached with a diligent attitude, a novice pilot can gain a respectable skill level in a matter of months. A game like Subspace is bound to attract players by the thousands — and it did. By the time VIE released Subspace as a commercial product, the game already had an impressive 150,0003 player base — a feat that can only be achieved by the best of computer games. But what makes Subspace a good game? A careful examination of Wolfgang Kramer’s objective criteria in conjunction with Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus’ (for simplicity, the authors will hitherto be referred to as “Loftus”) will review that Subspace exhibits every characteristic, physical and psychological, of a truly great game. In their book, Loftus proposed the concept of variable-schedule reinforcement4 , in which a player is reinforced, or rewarded, through some type of interaction with the game at the end of variable intervals. Subspace is a perfect example of a game with variable-schedule reinforcements.
The player is reinforced whenever he defeats another player in combat, but this can happen in almost an innumerable number of ways. Victory can be achieved by actively hunting another player, have your teammate or squad mate avenge your death for you, accidentally killing someone with stray bombs and bullets, defeating someone in a duel, defeating a team in a match during the playoffs, winning one round of capture the flag or King of the Hill, etc. etc. The number of avenues towards victory is limited only by the imagination of the player and the zone designer’s creativity, thus creating a highly variable and yet reasonable waiting time5 before the next dose of reinforcement is delivered. Furthermore, Subspace offers a highly creative level of control5 , in that the player never has full control over what takes place in the game. However, the degree of control a player has over the game will increase with time and experience. In addition to being a good game, Subspace also exhibits a high resistance towards extinction6 — a term used by Loftus to denote the permanent loss of interest for the game.
Due to the fact that Subspace is a multiplayer game, its potential in surprising5 the player is near infinite; place 30 sentient pilots in the same zone and no one will be able to accurately predict their behavior within any given time span. Each combat the player engages in is always new, always original5 , for no two situations are exactly alike. Similarly, each player has, theoretically, an equal opportunity5 to achieve victory if he has dedicated the same amount of time and effort into the game as his opponent. And finally, no one can become the “king” 5 of Subspace for the simple reason that no single pilot is able to defeat every one of the 150,000 players in the game across hundreds of zones. All of these factors combine to make Subspace a highly replayable5 game, a fact that complements Loftus’ theory of alternate worlds7 . An alternate world is an imaginary place in which victory is attained. In terms of Subspace, a player can easily imagine what went wrong in his last encounter with another player which resulted in his defeat. Moreover, the blemish can be easily rectified by simply pursuing his opponent immediately after he re-spawns. The alternate world created by the defeated pilot is very close to reality, due to the fact that he can indeed recreate his most recent battles minus the mistakes. As a result, Subspace will never fail to recapture the player’s interests, and is highly unlikely to face extinction. While Subspace does indeed exhibit all the right characteristics that make a great game, it never became the financial success that VIE had hoped for. After its commercial release, Subspace attracted new players continuously through the word-of-mouth amongst gamers. Unfortunately, word-of-mouth was the only medium through which Subspace proliferated through the gaming community. Upon Subspace’s release in 1997, VIE launched what was perhaps the worst marketing campaign in history: there were no advertisements through any medium and no shelf promotions at local retailers. As sales figures trickled in, Subspace became a financial disappointment8 . Rather than changing their business strategy, VIE instead blamed low revenues on software piracy, and soon moved to implement a CD-check copyright protection. It was a costly move for VIE, for the number of players in Subspace took dropped sharply9 after the copyright protection was implemented.
Fortunately, the decline was only temporary: just months later, a crack10 was available on the Internet to counter the CD-check. VIE then released another version of Subspace, which rendered the crack impotent. But sure enough, a new version of the crack soon ensued in a matter of hours after VIE released its new patch. The cop versus robber game continued on for over a year, and finally, VIE caved in. Its North American Branch was in financial ruins by late 1998, and was acquired by Irvine Entertainment10. The acquisition, however, did not include Subspace. In this interesting twist of events, Subspace suddenly lost its owner and became, for all practical purposes, public property. Something else happened when VIE was acquired. On December 16, 1998, at 5:00 PM EST, VIE shut down all of its Subspace servers. As Kevin Jenkins put it, this meant “no more usage tracking, cross zone chatting, point tracking, or squad maintenance”11. All the old VIE zones were either immediately shut down or deserted by players. The central server that provides the IP addresses of various zones was also shut down. Though there were still a few player-run zones operational, they were excruciatingly slow and the players simply had no way of locating them without the central server. By the end of 1998, the player base had shrunk from 150,000 to a mere 16,000, a near 90% drop12. Subspace began to fade away rapidly from the gaming community in a very unremarkable way.
Subspace’s fate was certainly not caused by any design flaws in the game itself, but rather by VIE’s poor business practice. To understand what VIE could have done to save itself from financial ruin, a simple comparison can be made with another massively-multiplayer game called Everquest. Released 2 years later than Subspace, Everquest is a 3D online RPG. Not only did it charge the players $30 to purchase the game, it also included a $10/month subscription fee13. When Subspace was on sale in the stores, it was priced at merely $10, with no subscription fee. While Everquest thrived today with over 375,000 subscribers14, Subspace’s following is little over 40,000 as of today. Of course, Everquest is in a completely different genre than Subspace, but its success nevertheless proves that the subscription business model not only works, but is extremely profitable. Ultima Online is another example of a subscription-based multiplayer game that has attained quite a high degree of success. But there are successful multiplayer games that are played for free, notably, Diablo II and Starcraft. Both of these games are produced by Blizzard Entertainment, both of which are wildly successful, and both of which support multiplayer over Blizzard’s proprietary Battle.net. The difference, however, between Blizzard and VIE is that Blizzard actually staged massive marketing campaigns. For Diablo II, Blizzard used prime-time TV to reach the mass audience; for Starcraft, a game that is published in 1998, articles about the game were appearing in game magazines as early as 199515. Such persistent (and undoubtedly expensive) marketing strategies brought Blizzard’s games unparalleled publicity even before they were released. VIE, on the other hand, staged literally no marketing campaign to promote Subspace. Nor did it adopt the subscription fee model like Everquest or Ultima Online. While the executives at VIE wondered why Subspace is such a financial failure, players were sifting through piles of outdated (3-4 years old) games to find Subspace in a disgracefully unattractive white box. The cover art was so ridiculously simple and banal that a 6-year old could probably have created a more appealing design16. VIE’s inactive marketing strategy has essentially banished Subspace into commercial oblivion. But as sales were rapidly turning into an unviable source of revenue, it never occurred to VIE to start charging subscription fees to save themselves from financial ruin. Instead, they persisted with their business model. When the Subspace contract expired and the company was bought out, VIE simply pulled the plug, leaving the game to fend for its own survival. And survive it did — with the help of the Subspace community. Along with the commercial release of the game, VIE also released a public version of its billing server. A billing server is “a user database with information regarding player's usage of the game service…
Player registration information is kept in it, and the zones connecting to it share the same user and squad information.”17 The public release of the billing server was a scaled-down text-based database, as opposed to VIE’s main server, which was based on ODBC17. This simplified version of the billing server allowed individual players to set up their own Subspace server. During the years when VIE’s main servers were up, these home-brewed Subspace servers were a small fraction (less than 20%) of the overall player base12. In addition, these private servers were usually afflicted with slow connections, thus causing a high rate of packet loss and latency, two terms that are collectively known as “lag” by the online gaming community. By the end of 1998, however, VIE was a thing of the past. These small-time private servers suddenly took on the burden of being the backbone of the Subspace community. Many server administrators disconnected their zones, but a resilient few were determined to keep the game alive. Somewhere in Finland was the Subspace Sonera12 server run by two Subspace fans by the names of “BD Vine” and “Baudchaser”17. After VIE’s servers were shut down, BD Vine contacted two other major Subspace servers and convinced them to connect under the Sonera billing server. The three servers gathered together what was left of the scattered player base and worked together to write a new chapter in Subspace’s history.
During the Fall of 2000, an organization emerged from BD Vine’s coalition of servers, it was known as the Subspace Council (SSC)8 . The SSC is a loose collection of server administrators and zone operators. Servers under the SSC were not required to abide by any written standard of quality, but their connections were vastly improved from the VIE days. Old players were returning, and for the first time in years, a handful of new players were trickling in. Amongst the members of the SSC is a brilliant programmer known as “Priitk”. The Sonera billing server was originally running on the text-based database distributed with the game. As the number of player logins increased, the server began to slow down due to the inherent inefficient nature of the database. BD Vine wrote programs that would clean up unused accounts and fix user data inconsistencies in order to boost speed17, but it wasn’t enough. Priitk joined the group and rewrote the entire billing server, and integrated into it an enhanced version of BD Vine’s distributed banning system17. To understand the significance of the banning system, there is no better example than an infamous little program called Twister. Sometime after VIE and before the SSC, a high school student wrote a program called Twister that allowed players to cheat. It can give any pilot infinite energy, rapid-fire bombs, and basically render the cheater invincible. For a while, Twister proliferated throughout Subspace, making the game almost unplayable. During Twister’s reign, the player base began to waiver once again, and the newly constructed community was again threatened by a massive exodus. A banning system allowed the server administrators to effectively block out any user who is spotted cheating, and the new system written by Priitk was very efficient in placing such culprits into exile.
Even with a new billing server and banning system, Subspace as a game was still static. Without the source code, bugs inside the game cannot be fixed, and new features cannot be implemented. The SSC tried in vain to obtain the source code for Subspace, but they eventually gave up. Motivated by his determination and fueled by his brilliance, Priitk re-engineered Subspace from scratch. The new version is known as “Continuum”, undoubtedly symbolic of Subspace’s everlasting endurance. With the arrival of Continuum, the Subspace community for the first time received a breath of fresh air — the game was brought back to life once again, and its growth is now being directed by its original progenitor: player feedback. In the end, the Subspace community saved the game from its demise. What is it about the game that it should inspire such determination in the community to keep it alive? The answer can be found within the rich multiplayer features that facilitated the formation and perpetuation of a unique virtual community. The Subspace universe is governed by a fixed set of rules different from that of real life18, thus creating a separate reality. However, unlike traditional communities (e.g. a residential community), membership in the Subspace universe is determined more “by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity."19 Thus, ever since the beginning, the community that evolved around Subspace would have been more cohesive than most if not all geographically-based communities in the real world. Furthermore, players inside Subspace also enjoy the benefit of having a pre-established common ground from which they can initiate their conversation. The topic, of course, doesn’t have to be game-related, but Subspace nevertheless offers a natural and un-intimidating starting point toward friendly (or not so friendly) conversations.
To facilitate in-game communication, Subspace is equipped with tools that allow a player to engage in conversation in his team or squad’s frequency, in a special interest channel, in a private chat channel with another player or another group of players, in a private arena inside the zone, in the public chat channel of the entire zone, or even in a channel to players in other zones. In short, Subspace allows myriad levels of communication that can be used to include, exclude, and organize players into sub-categories. Best of all, a player does not even need to play the game to enjoy the benefits of the Subspace community — he can simply be parked inside a safety zone or switch on the spectator mode. Both options take the player out of the game, but at the same time, still keeping him in touch with the community. Not only is the mode of conversation different in Subspace, the atmosphere is also drastically different. Subspace as a medium of communication “dissolve[s] [the] boundaries of identity”20 in addition to space and time. Bu this mode of “depersonalized”20 interaction creates the interesting effect of “disinhibition”21. Subspace creates a world devoid of many of the normal social boundaries that delineate the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior22. Even when one has breached the laws of this new reality, a simple change of his alias will erase the past and allow him to start anew. So attractive is such unrestricted degree of freedom, players flock into the Subspace universe by the thousands everyday, which constitutes the very capital needed for the construction and maintenance of a community.
Subspace as a medium has turned the art of socialization into an accelerated, systematic and streamlined process. Consequently, such an environment fosters a unique community that can be found nowhere else. Evidence of such a closely-knit community can be seen from the very beginning of Subspace’s history. A prime example can be taken from the nature of the copyright protection VIE implemented with the commercial release of Subspace. Instead of a custom user alias, unregistered players are simply assigned the tag “~demo###” (the ### is the number of unregistered players currently logged on to VIE’s servers). Furthermore, the unregistered player will be unable to form squads, join squads, or be a member of any player-organized institutions (such as the Professional League or the Dueling Ladder). Despite the fact that an unregistered copy of Subspace is a fully functional game, this rather innovative (other games such as Starcraft or Command and Conquer simply disabled the game altogether if the original game CD was not present) copyright protection scheme worked remarkably well as an incentive for players to purchase the game23 — merely playing the game in an existential isolation is deemed unacceptable by most players. In order to enjoy the game, a player must feel that his existence is acknowledged by the rest of the Subspace community and that he can become a part of it. For those who do not have access to the community, the game loses its appeal; for those who are a part of the community, Subspace becomes the greatest game on Earth.
From its humble beginning as a digital guinea pig to Continuum, Subspace has traversed the road of death and resurrection, of fame and ruin. Endowed with an ingenious game design, Subspace has overcome all obstacles caused by VIE’s poor marketing strategies to be once again embraced by its players. As a game, Subspace is remarkable; but as a social phenomenon, it is awe-inspiring. Now at 6 years of age, Subspace is still being actively played and developed by its dedicated community of fans. Today, Subspace has a respectable 40,00012 player base. Although it is a far cry from the game’s heydays when it commanded a 150,000 player base, it is nevertheless a leap from the 16,000 after the passing of VIE. But most importantly, the player base for Subspace has been steadily growing over the past few years, and with the SSC and Continuum in place, the future of Subspace looks brighter than ever.
I thought everyone should take a look into the past again.
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