|
Downtime & The Online Game Designerby Shannon Appelcline Tuesday morning at approximately 10:15am the T1 line leading to Skotos went deathly silent. What followed was a two-day nightmare made worse by the bureaucracy and lack of communication that today practically defines the United State’s telecommunication industry. I’ve had a tough week as a result, and so I’m not going to write too much about this issue, but I would like to hit the main points. The main point is one that I’ve made before: running a game company involves a lot more than just writing games. Having to manage a multiday downtime--to constantly make hard decisions that might ultimately decide the long-term fate of your company--shouldn’t be the norm. We’ve had telecommunication problems in the past, but this is the first one that’s been this grave, and which has potentially put the company itself at risk. However, you’re going to constantly have to deal with something outside the norm, and if you’re a designer who just wants to make games, you’re going to have to find someone to help you out with all these other issues. My second point is: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. At one point we had two T1s and one DSL line running into Skotos. We had to give that up in the face of economic necessity, but an extended downtime was exactly the situation that such a redundant setup was intended to avoid. Now it happens that this time around the problem was that our local phone company had an entire 1200-pair cable burn out. In the past all of out networks might or might not have been on that one cable, depending on how far away from our location it was, and how many cables they’re running in the area. For the phone lines to the same location, two went out and one stayed up, so it’s clearly hit or miss. However if we’d been able to maintain our earlier redundancy, we’d at least have had some chance of staying up. Though we could no longer maintain cable redudancy, we had recently implemented a different type of redundancy for this sort of issue. We created a news page, with an RSS feed at http://status.skotos.net. Rather than being at the same location as the rest of our Skotos machines, it’s instead at the hosting facility where we keep RPGnet. As a result whenever we have a network issue, we can pop over to status and update things there, and people soon see it on their feeds and aggregators. During this particular crisis, our top engineer also installed a simple chat room on status, and it was a great place for our players to chat with each other and remain members of the community, even though the community largely isn’t available. That’s all I got this week: multitasking and redundancy. And downtimes suck. [ <— #187: Social Software & Gaming: Dunbar's Number | #189: Art Imitates Life, in All Truthiness —> ] |
