As a software developer (Destiny)

by kidtsunami , Atlanta, GA, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 12:13 (3444 days ago) @ car15

...in the not-too-distant future, the servers for the last Destiny game will shut off, and you will never be able to play this game again. Your legend, your guardian, all of the exotics you worked so hard to earn, and all of the DLC you paid hundreds of dollars for, will be lost to you. Forever.

How do you feel about that?

This is not a troll thread. I'm interested to have a discussion about ephemerality in media and how people respond to it.

I have my own views (complete with nuance and ambiguity!) but I don't want to influence the direction of the conversation, so I will keep those to myself for now.

I'm loving the experience of Destiny. I still can remember vividly my blood pumping each and every time as I made it to the lighthouse. I have memories of team doubles CTF in Halo 3, landing on Halo for the first time, watching the Halo 2 E3 demo first hand, and doing my first backflip in Rift. These are all experience. They are not just code running on a machine. They are moments in time that involved other people back before I knew about certain things. I'll NEVER ever have those again.

When I write software, a lot of the time it's with every intention of it lasting as long as possible. But it's always done knowing full well that in a few years (hopefully) it's going to get replaced by faster code using better frameworks. I've even written a ton of code to support purely an experience, coding a robot that was controlled by a website so people could play a skilltester/claw game over the internet to support charity. When we broke everything down and packed it up at the end of the day, I felt a lot of relief/pride. I didn't have the expectation that I should be able to hold on to this experience forever.

I believe strongly in game preservation and making sure we save as much as we can about every game. But that doesn't mean I think spinning up Destiny on some empty servers down the line is "preserving the game", that's not Destiny as we know it and it's reductive to say it is. We should be cataloging videos of every version, of each blind raid. I love what Cody has done to save the Dinklebot lines. I think that's really important in capturing what Destiny ACTUALLY is. I do hope that companies like Bungie end up sharing their code so we can learn more about how the games of today were made. I just don't need that to happen any time soon. The only danger is over time, people forget, code is lost, sitting on servers that are taken offline.

As for my guardian? When the lights go off the final time I'm going to raise a pint, cheers to the good times and look forward to what my next adventure will be.