J A N U A R Y 6, 2 0 0 0
THE OPEN SOURCE movement got a Christmas present at the end of 1999, some assembly required. John Carmack of id software, arguably the greatest games programmer ever, released the source code for Quake, the wildly popular shoot-em-up. Quake, already several years old, has maintained popularity because it allows players to battle one another over the internet, with hundreds of servers hosting round-the-clock battles. It jives with the Open Source ethos because it has already benefitted enormously from player-created 'mods' (or modifications) to the game's surface appearance. By opening up the source code to the game's legion of fanatical players, id is hoping to spur a new round of innovation by allowing anyone interested in creating these modifications to be able to alter any aspect of the program, not just its surface. Within minutes of id's announcement, gamers and hackers the world over were downloading the source code. Within hours they were compiling new versions of the game. Within days people began using their new knowledge of the games inner workings to cheat. A problem new to the Open Source movement began to surface: what to do when access to the source code opens it up to abuse.
Quake works as a multi-player game where each player has a version of Quake running on his or her own PC, and it is this local copy of the game that reports on the player's behavior -- running, shooting, hiding -- to a central Quake server. This server then collates all the players' behaviors and works out who's killed whom. With access to the Quake source code, a tech-savvy player can put themselves on electronic steroids by altering their local version of the game to give themselves superhuman speed, accuracy, or force, simply by over-reporting their skill to the server. This would be like playing tennis against someone with an invisible racket a yard wide.
All of this matters much more than you would expect a game to matter. With Open Source now associated with truth, justice, and the Internet Way, and with Carmack revered as a genius and a hero, the idea that the combination of these two things could breed anything so mundane as cheating caught people by surprise. One school of thought has been simply to deny that there is a problem by noting that if Quake had been Open Source to begin with, this situation would never have arisen. This is true, as far as it goes, but a theory which doesn't cover real world cases isn't much use. id's attempt to open the source for some of its products while keeping others closed is exactly the strategy players like Apple, IBM, and Sun are all testing out, and if the release of Quake fails to generate innovation, mere ideological purity will be cold comfort.
As so often in the digital world, what happens to the gaming industry has ramifications for the computing industry as a whole. Players in a game are simultaneously competing and co-operating, and all agree to abide by rules that sort winners from losers, a process with ramifications for online economics, education, even auctions. If Quake, with its enormous audience of tech-savvy players and its history of benefitting from user modifications, can't make the transition from closed source to open source easily, then companies with a less loyal user base might think twice about opening their products, so id's example is going to be watched very closely. The Quake release marks a watershed -- if the people currently hard at work on the Quake cheating problem find a solution, it will be another Open Source triumph, but if they fail, the Quake release might be remembered as the moment that cheating robbed the Open Source movement of its aura of continuous progress.
Clay Shirky is a contributing editor at FEED and Professor of Media Studies at Hunter College.