Federation II
I think Fed was probably the longest continuously running online game. It wasn’t the first online game. That honour belongs to Richard Bartle’s original MUD, and I freely admit that it was partly through my experience of playing that MUD that I decided to write my own game. It went live on the Commodore64 Compunet network in 1988, and somehow, as the original consumer networks went bust, we managed to find somewhere else to keep it going. In those days, ordinary people didn’t have access to the internet. We didn’t actually finally go onto the net until AOL started its long decline, and kicked off all its content providers, including Fed. We’ve been on the internet ever since. I think 30 years is a good innings for what is essentially a text based game. I was nearly 40 when I wrote Fed. Those of you who can do sums will figure out that I’m nearly 70 now, and starting to feel the strain of being ‘shackled’ to maintaining the game for so long. However, now it’s gone it feels really weird – not just the relief, but wondering what to do to keep myself busy for the next however many years I have left. We had an online ‘going away’ party for the players last week and lots of former players dropped in to say goodbye to Federation. Others dropped me a line to say how much they enjoyed it and what an influence it had on them. What really surprised me, though, was the number of couples who told me that they met their future spouse on Fed. Maybe I did succeed in what I originally set out to do: to write a game that structurally set out to get players to cooperate rather than kill one another. For the record, since I know that especially in the early days a number of people thought Fed was just a souped up chat line, Fed is/was an economic simulation in which players need to cooperate to move up the game. Significantly Fed was the first MPG (Multi-Player Game) to have in-game insurance, so you didn’t lose your rank and character if you died in the game. Of course, insurance cost in game terms. There were other aspects, which I may well write up properly in the future. A number of players, well ex-players, I guess, have asked if the source code will become open source. The answer is yes. In fact the source is already on Bitbucket, but it’s not yet open to the masses, because I don’t have the support material up there yet, and because I need to provide documentation for how the use it and how the code is structured. I’d note in passing that no one else has managed to duplicate the economics of Fed, though several have tried, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else that that works as well with 10 simultaneous players as it does with 1,000. And one which provides basic derivatives (futures) as well! Fed was a world of its own. Fed players over the years included all sorts of people. All of them were something special, and they included ships’ captains, radio station owners and employees (we must be the only MPG to have had a regular morning local radio quiz show), generals, admirals, senior members of the English aristocracy, at least one secret agent, rock stars, boat builders, bankers, company directors, other game designers and programmers, traders, academics, nursery nurses, housewives (who also held regular Fed coffee clatches), and school kids – who were surprised to find out that their teachers also played! And that is only a small sample of our players. Oh, and at one stage we had a number of multi-generation families playing – grandparents, parents and children. Over the years the game I wrote has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. I hope, and believe, it was for the better. While I may have designed and coded the game, there were others involved in managing the game. We soon discovered that once you got over a few dozen or so simultaneous players you need staff whose speciality was people management – geeks need not apply! So my thanks go to Hazed and Freya, and to all the volunteers who helped out over the years. I’ll include those from other games who were sent in to learn how we did it! Also, special thanks to Carl and Toby, who for many years handled our system administration after we moved to the net. Thank you one and all! Keeping Fed going has been a lot of fun, and a lot of aggro! Was it worth while? I’d like to think so!
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