Software as a Serf: The WoW and Flash Case Studies
Software as a Serf, in Review
The first part of this series covered how I will conduct my analysis of software-as-a-service, or SaaS. I will focus on a framework I have developed called "ownership as a set of rights." In particular, I posit that owning a SaaS subscription, as opposed to owning a software-as-a-product, or SaaP, the traditional software-ownership model, bars the owner from the right to maintenance, that is, the ability to maintain the tool in a certain state regardless of changes that the software provider would like to make to the software.
This right to maintenance expresses itself in two scenarios: when the SaaS provider elects to update the tool and make changes, and the (literally) ultimate change, when the SaaS provider elects to discontinue the product. Software developers, and software users, like SaaS in part because it keeps the code base on servers easily accessible to the developers rather than on the multitude of machines that users own. This makes the code base easier to modify, and as such, SaaS is synonymous with routine changes. But changes, even ones that benefit the majority of the user base, will often present controversy to some subset of users. These users, because they lack the right to maintenance, rarely can remain on a version that they preferred. Furthermore, since the SaaS's code base resides on remote servers rather than on user machines, it makes using the software a more fragile affair. If the SaaS provider were to go bankrupt, or merely decide to discontinue the product, they would take all servers off line and thus yank the software entirely from users.
This article will focus on the cultural ramifications of losing the right to maintenance, since preservation, maintenance, and culture have a long tradition of being intertwined. We have museums, UNESCO designated sites, because we care about maintaining culture, and deem certain qualifying cultural artifacts of worthy of preservation as an uncontested good.
Here, we will look at two cultural pieces of software, World of Warcraft (or, WoW) and Adobe Flash. This article will use World of Warcraft, the popular gaming-as-a-service massively multiplayer online RPG (GaaS MMORPG), to illustrate what we lose when we cannot maintain a version of the software that was meaningful and useful to us. With Adobe Flash, it will explore how a discontinuation can have great ramifications for online culture.
The WoW Case Study
Preservation and Art
Considering preservation and heritage, I briefly alluded to the fact that we believe certain cultural works are deserving of enshrinement and preservation. We don't think it right for someone to be able to permanently change the Parthenon, the Coliseum, Machu Pichu. And though these are certainly more high-brow than World of Warcraft, a fun and silly game about war between orcs and mankind, we value preservation even in our popular culture.
Let's consider something more familiar: Star Wars. And we should consider Star Wars because I think it will help us identify instincts we have with respect to popular culture that are relevant for our discussion of World of Warcraft.
When it comes to current popular culture, there is another set of rights we must consider, that is, the copyright. I bring this up because when we talk about a right to maintenance, we're really discussing the copyright holder's right to modify a piece of software. And while this copyright generally does provider the holder with the right to modification, I think we generally don't think that copyright holders should exercise this right if the modification removes the unmodified work from circulation. Copyright also allows the copyright holder to withdraw the work entirely, but again, if it is a seminal work with cultural importance, this may be something we legally must allow but which, from a cultural angle, we would find saddening, impoverishing.
With Star Wars, Geroge Lucas has effectively withdrawn the original cut, as shown in theaters, of the original Star Wars trilogy. In 1997, George Lucas made a number of revisions to the original trilogy for its VHS release. These changes are nontrivial, and they fundamentally alter the meaning of the film, its characterizations, the aesthetic impact of the work on viewers. Lucas added extended musical numbers which bog down the run time, changed the order of shots to reduce ambiguity as to whether bounty hunter Han Solo shot an alien in cold blood or in self-defense. The alterations represent a real material difference.
On top of making these alterations, LucasFilms, and subsequent copyright holders Disney, have done their best to make the theatrical cut of Star Wars unavailable. The special edition versions from 1997 are the ones available on Blu-Ray and on streaming services. The last release of the theatrical cut of Star Wars was in 2006. To quote Wikipedia: "As of 2021, the original theatrical releases are not commercially available, and have never been released in high definition." And while there are original prints available for true Star Wars junkies, likely the easiest method to watch this original cut is to view it in person at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, which preserved original prints of Star Wars's theatrical release and makes them available to viewers by appointment.
This lack of access to the original feels morally dubious. Our society values both preservation and access to art. We believe that people should have access to art and that art should not be destroyed. In the case of Star Wars, it feels wrong that a film critic looking to study the influence of the original cut of Star Wars on film history, or a fan looking to see the work as so many did in the 1970s, has no easy way to accomplish this.
Or, because I love arguing by analogy: we don't think someone should be able to throw bleach onto the Mona Lisa, not even Leonardo Da Vinci.
In World of Warcraft, we will see a similar scene play out. World or Warcraft, being a game-as-a-service (GaaS, the gaming analogue to SaaS), has seen many changes over its 17 year lifespan. These changes are analogous to the changes Lucas made to Star Wars. A number of gameplay mechanics have been altered and removed, speeding up certain parts of the game and slowing down others, not too dissimilar from a lengthy musical number. And, in its most dramatic change, a number of locations and characters were cut or altered. Having similar cultural impact, and having a comparable change log to the Star Wars original trilogy, I hope it will show why these changes have been so controversial to WoW's fanbase, and why our general inability to preserve SaaS games disadvantages our culture.
Cataclysm
World of Warcraft, like most games of this century, combines cinematic, literary, and gameplay elements to craft an aesthetic and narrative experience. It has characters as meaningful to players as Han Solo, locales with as much grandeur and impact as Cloud City.
Cataclysm is then analogous to Lucas's special editions, making major changes to characterizations and locations.
Cataclysm was a complete rewrite of WoW's code base in 2010. Since its release in 2004, WoW's main map, characters, cutscenes, and basic gameplay elements had gone largely unchanged.
The idea behind Cataclysm was to change WoW's status quo, as one would any long-running serialized piece of entertainment. Like Pam and Jim getting together on The Office, like Michael killing Fredo in The Godfather Part II, like Luke learning the real identity of his father, Cataclysm should be viewed as a status-quo altering sequel to the original World of Warcraft's storyline. In Cataclysm, a major crisis visits the Eastern Kingdoms, WoW's principal location, and this crisis leads to the destruction and rebuilding of major cities, to dynastic succession and power struggles to decide the fate of human and orckind. It is meant to be a major world-changing event. People die. Characters struggle with the trauma of a lifetime. It has real weight.
Yet, and here is where Cataclysm differs from The Empire Strikes Back or The Godfather Part II, upon the release of Cataclysm, all content available prior to Cataclysm was scrubbed from the game. For narrative purposes, Cataclysm was a sequel, but the reason Cataclysm came about was technological: WoW was running on code built in 2004, and by 2010, a new decade had brought great technological progress. To take advantage of this progress, Blizzard Entertainment needed to essentially do a complete rewrite of the code, completely overhauling the game.
It does remind one of George Lucas and Star Wars: technology had advanced, and Lucas always said that his new cuts of the film reflected his original vision augmented with the computational capabilities of the nineties. But, there is one complication here, a complication that necessarily follows from the nature of software-as-a-service: unlike with Star Wars, whose prints exist in the real world and which requires no active maintenance on Lucas's part, Blizzard had to choose between actively maintaining its old code base, dedicating servers to the pre-Cataclysm version of WoW, or killing it off. And so, they elected to do the latter.
And the practical consequences of this is that Blizzard Entertainment, through Cataclysm, had effectively written and designed a sequel to pre-Cataclysm WoW, and yet, because their new code base was incompatible with the old one, and because maintaining the old one would be so costly, they had pulled from existence the thing they were writing a sequel for. It's not just the Star Wars special editions here: it would be like if George Lucas had decided to release The Empire Strikes Back and send every print of A New Hope to a landfill, even the one in the Library of Congress.
Cataclysm was a change that players could not forgo. And it remained controversial. Some players preferred the original play experience. New players lived in a world post-Cataclysm, but having never experienced the pre-Cataclysm map, a number of character decisions didn't make sense, or didn't have the same emotional impact as they had for players of the original WoW (again, imagine your confusion if you had watched The Empire Strikes Back first). And the original WoW was seminal. For years, every MMORPG billed itself as a WoW-killer, as something that could end WoW's grip on gamers everywhere. If you are not just a player but a scholar of interactive media, understanding MMORPGs in the early aughts is impossible without access to early WoW.
Then, for new fans, for old fans, for scholars, Cataclysm represented a major loss. Yes, the updates were necessary to modernize the code base, to take advantage of new technology, and Cataclysm as a whole was well received by players and critics. These changes were inevitable. But the disservice they represented to certain segments of the fanbase lead to a long campaign to reinstate the original WoW, a campaign that mirrors well attempts by Star Wars fans to see the theatrical cuts rereleased.
This campaign came to a head in 2017 with the release of WoW Classic, a recreation of WoW as it stood in 2006, prior to Cataclysm. For 7 years, pre-Cataclysm WoW was unavailable to the public, but unlike with Star Wars, here, fans and cultural preservationists won.
But even this is a tentative solution. We only have access to WoW Classic, a seminal and influential piece of art, at Blizzard's discretion. They may elect to discontinue the servers of Classic the moment they deem it unprofitable. Unlike the copies of Star Wars preserved in the Library of Congress, no fans or preservationists have access to the source code behind WoW Classic. While Star Wars fans have been able to recreate the theatrical cut of Star Wars and distribute it through legally dubious methods, WoW fans can't even try to illegally steal back the right to maintenance.
Some further reading and viewing: I am not a WoW player, personally, and much of my analysis depends upon Folding Ideas' video on the subject of WoW Classic. He does an excellent job delineating the aesthetic merits of pre-Cataclysm WoW and post-Cataclysm WoW, identifying exactly what was lost with this switch. And as for the idea of maintaining something as complicated as an MMORPG after discontinuation, it has been done before. It certainly is not as easy as maintaining a film, and requires a dedicated team of preservationists willing to purchase server capacity to run the product, but fans of City of Heroes, a superhero-themed MMORPG, revived the work on private servers in 2019. Maintenance then is possible. Were Blizzard committed solely to social good and the preservation of art, they would have released the WoW Classic code base for maintenance by private servers in the immediate aftermath of Cataclysm's release. From a profit-oriented perspective, Blizzard certainly found the release of WoW Classic, which sells ample subscriptions, profitable, and so withholding the source code was the right business decision. But the private maintenance of software, even software with large code bases that produce large amounts of data, is viable if preservationists can martial the requisite computational resources to do so. Thus, discontinuation is always a threat for fans of GaaS, if only because it is rare for preservationists to obtain source code and band together to maintain private instances of the work. Such discontinuation bars players from revisiting locations meaningful to them, and ends communities that have sprung up organically within MMORPGs. For an excellent article discussing the emotional impact of discontinuation on players, look to this article in The Atlantic.
The Adobe Flash Case Study
Flash, a Technology and a Cultural Phenomenon
Adobe Flash is not the worst case scenario for cultural preservation in a world without a right to maintenance, but it is not hard to imagine how the sunsetting of Flash could have had a most apocalyptic impact on Internet preservation. This is due, in part, to the fact that it is not a software-as-a-service per say, though its sunsetting reminds me of what SaaS providers do when they discontinue their products. As such, it's a revelation as to how fragile a cultural ecosystem we have built where basic infrastructure of cultural production and consumption rely on software-as-a-service tools which will at some point be inevitably sunset.
To understand the impact of discontinuing the Flash player, allow me to chronicle the outsized impact it hard on early Internet culture, to bring you up to speed on what exactly Flash was.
Flash was two products: a light-weight multimedia scripting tool allowing for the creation of files small enough to be hosted on websites, and the Flash player which would interpret and run these files. It was a way to create simple animations and games that could be played online. It was revolutionary both because Flash made files small enough to be transmitted over the notoriously slow Internet of the early aughts, and because Flash's scripting tool was easy to learn, empowering hobbyist animators and game developers to create to their heart's content. This technological revolution then revolutionized culture on the web. Flash powered nearly all of Neopets, a popular virtual pet for young millennials, boomer-favorite Farmville, indie-game darling Frog Fractions, the highly memetic Interactive Buddy, a popular political cartoon excoriating the Church of Scientology, and satirical video game Cookie Clicker. I point this out to show the scope of the service. These games were influential, and similar to WoW Classic, I don't think it is possible to understand early 2000s Internet culture without understanding Flash.
Off Into The Sunset
Flash is, in some ways, a unique case, since it does not fit the traditional mold of a software-as-a-service. As noted above, what Flash consisted of was two services, a platform for creating SWF files, the lightweight files that could be embedded into web browsers, and the Flash Player which interpreted SWF files for the consuming user. Unlike WoW, no remote servers were involved with this process.
Yet, in sunsetting the tool, Adobe Flash elected to emulate the sunsetting of other major SaaS services by rendering the tool unusable after its sunsetting date. Flash worked with all major web browsers like Chrome and Edge to ship an update to the Flash Player which would remove it from the browser and install a kill code that would make all Flash Players refuse to work after January 8th, 2021. Well, this is not entirely true: Adobe still maintains a version of Flash exclusive to the Chinese internet, which still runs and which is region locked. Yet region-locking strengthens the analogy to SaaS. MapleStory 2, an MMORPG and GaaS, just like WoW, had its service discontinued for the West and Japan, but maintains service in Korea and China. Flash as it stood was not wholly ours. Though I don't think that we recognized it at the time, we were just renters, subscribers to its services, and we could at any point be evicted.
I do not want to make Adobe out to be the bad guy here. Flash was irremediably broken. SWF files could be loaded with code that, when run by the player, would install viruses onto a user's computer. These security concerns lead Apple to block the software on iOS products like iPhone. Additionally, there now exist non-proprietary alternatives to Flash, like HTML5, which provide all of the interactive multimedia of Flash without the dangers to consumers.
Adobe also worked to ensure that some form of preservation was available, and so the death of Flash was not likewise a burial for the Internet's most important early works. Adobe released the source code of the Flash player in 2006, a development that has made it much easier to preserve the tool. They partnered with Google to make the (now-deprecated) Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool Swiffy. They also have not taken any legal action against hobbyist preservationists like Flashpoint, an archive of Flash games and animations with 70,000 preserved artifacts, or Ruffle, a recreation of the Flash-player with tight memory management protocols that prevent SWF files from transmitting viruses onto user's machines. These are all partial solutions: Swiffy is, as mentioned, deprecated, and Ruffle cannot faithfully reproduce SWF files produced using later versions of Flash. No preservation effort can ever be 100%, but given the sizable risks of maintaining the Flash Player, and the number of works we have been able to maintain, I think that Adobe made the right decision in pursuing deprecation, and made the right decisions in its efforts to preserve Flash artifacts.
Are You Honest When No One's Looking?
The reason that we have this relative wealth of solutions is because Adobe did the right thing. They released open-source versions of their player, they worked with Google for the now-deprecated Swiffy, and they announced their sunsetting of the tool nearly 4 years in advance. Additionally, the scope of the Flash Player, being a piece of software from the mid-90s, was small enough to allow for recreation on a single machine. This prevented some of the logistical issues with maintaining old software, making the right to maintenance purely a legal matter rather than a technical one. Adobe may have taken our right to maintain the Flash Player in our browsers, but they allowed us the right to maintain the general ability to emulate SWF files through alternative players and SWF-to-HTML5 conversion tools. This is why, at the top of the case study, I noted that this was an apocalypse averted.
In the end, we were able to preserve 70,000 flash games and counting because Adobe decided to be a good actor. They were honest, in part because everyone was looking to them to ensure their honesty. Adobe didn't have to do this. Well, in some ways it did. It being a major player in the industry and the owner of an era-defining piece of software means it had to be on its best behavior with respect to ending Flash, if only to maintain its reputation.
Smaller actors without the reputation don't have to do this. And actors that go bankrupt, who either lack the monetary resources to do well by their customers or who, now being bankrupt, no longer have the incentive to preserve a reputation, are less likely to do the right thing here.
The FiveSprockets Micro Case Study
There are many minor SaaS products left entirely unpreserved. FiveSprockets was a suite of film planning and screenwriting tools with an attached social media service. It shut down without ceremony in November of 2012, likely due to bankruptcy, with all content hosted on the platform made instantly unavailable to its user base. Here, the service FiveSprockets had provided wasn't just a platform to share and develop ideas, but actual hosting of scripts and shot lists. A few scripts I wrote in high school are now gone forever. Being much smaller than Adobe, certainly it does not represent a major cultural loss. In fact, I can't find a single trusted source announcing its closure: only the uncited claims on its Wikipedia page remain. Unless I become famous one day and note that some juvenilia of mine was liquidated upon its discontinuation, I don't think anyone will call it a great loss. Its complete vanishing from the Internet, whose culture rides on nostalgia and preservation, should show its minimal impact on the culture.
Were Flash a little bit different, if its player was not hosted on individual machines but rather stored in the cloud, or if Adobe stored individual SWF files rather than having them hosted on separate web pages, or if Adobe simply decided it wasn't in its monetary interest to promote preservation of the player, then its fruits might have too vanished like FiveSprockets. If the Internet were built on FiveSprockets rather than Flash, then the end of Flash would have been an apocalypse full stop.
Culture can certainly live without a right to maintenance, but it is truly a weaker and more fragile culture.