Linux Key to 24/7 Gaming Systems

By Alex Handy

May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 4)
Right now, as you read this, there are at least 100,000 people in Sony’s fantasy worlds. They’re pretending to be elves, or trolls, or ninjas, or pirates, or cheese makers, or any of a thousand other fantastic things; and they’re all paying a monthly fee for the privilege. So when massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing games go online, they need proper change management, good network architects and customized remotely deployable Linux installs to do it.

That’s where Mark Rizzo, vice president of technology operations at Sony Online Entertainment, comes in. Rizzo has been running the back ends of massively multiplayer games since one of the first such games, Ultima Online, which he worked on at Electronic Arts in the late 1990s. As the first major massively multiplayer online role playing game, Rizzo said that the Ultima Online team was learning and building everything from scratch, resulting in numerous lessons learned by both the creators and players of the game.

A lot has changed in systems management since then. For Rizzo, this parallels the advances in Linux, which has matured to address many of the problems he said faced the Ultima Online team last millennium.

While today most of the problems faced by Rizzo’s team are technical or development related, back in the Ultima Online days, these were compounded by the unpredictable player base. In its day, no one had ever seen the psychological and sociological reactions of players in a massive online world before. Much of the control over societal movements in the game world was given to the players, something very few games have tried to do since. As a result, the player base became phenomenally violent to newcomers, and even the game’s patron saint and lead creator, Richard Garriott, found his in-game avatar constantly assassinated early on in the game’s life. Since Ultima Online, however, a lot has changed.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the religious nature of Linux administrators. While customized network installable disk images have made deployment easier, the administrators behind those systems can still get caught up in holy wars around platform choices, said Rizzo. But he has a solution: “An architect who is over all those larger tech decisions. It helps resolve the issues where you may have some individuals who are talented, but maybe not as mature.”

Related Search Term(s): Change management, Linux, networks

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