Copyright Law

Life and death in Subspace

By Derek Slater

Matthew Butcher?s hockey teammates started a memorial fund for him last week. Some of these friends had known him for as many as twelve years. Few had ever met him in person.

These friends all played an online video game called Subspace. The game came out in 1997 — making it one of the earliest massively multiplayer online games — and it has a simple premise: fly around in 2-d spaceships shooting at each other. Even though the game was commercially abandoned shortly after its release, devoted users reverse engineered it and released an open source version so they could keep playing and add security improvements.

The game?s genius was that users could reinvent it — they can setup their own gaming servers, with a unique map and altered settings. One of these user-generated versions attempts to emulate hockey: users ?check? each other by shooting their guns, and control a fiery ball inside a rink shaped arena.

The Realistic Subspace Hockey League (RSHL), where players form teams and try to win a coveted trophy, just wrapped up its 16th season. They keep stats, and even make their own editions of Sportscenter.

More importantly, they chat. The last time I checked in on the RSHL was about 5 years ago. I found familiar names from my playing days like Matthew (or white_0men as he was known in-game), as well as many, many new players. In fact, most of the current players only picked up the game relatively recently, well after it was commercially abandoned.

But when I asked them why they still played, they all said roughly the same thing — they liked talking to each other, meeting people who were older and younger, who had different jobs, lived in different places. Some players come to the Zone just to watch others play and catch up with friends. (In fact, when I played, my dial-up connection was so bad that sometimes all I could do was chat.)

Last week I got an email that brought me back to Center Ice, the website hub where the hockey players congregate. white_0men was killed during a robbery at his business in Los Angeles, and his friends were alerting all players, past and present, about the donation fund for his family and a memorial message thread (now hundreds of messages long).

This may seem strange, although perhaps less so to the 80 million active users of Farmville or any number of other online games. Glancing through the Center Ice message board, I thought about what some of the other threads might look like to a outsider.  Forum chatter may seem silly, obnoxious, to some even profane.

Yet Center Ice is certainly a community, and not merely in a virtual sense.

If you?re interested in learning more about how this community is composed, shaped, and regulated, here is what I wrote about life in Subspace in 2005.

Full post as published by A Copyfighter’s Musings on July 10, 2010 (boomark / email).