Virtual Space Desync

Anyone who’s ventured into a virtual world will be all too familiar with lag. Lag occurs where the volume of communication requests to the world’s servers is essentially too great for those servers to accommodate. This results in a noticeably increased time taken to render the graphic display on your computer, obviously critical to successful engagement with the world. In essence, as Tom Boellstorff writes, events do not occur in real time anymore.

Massively draw attention to another form of dislocation, in the huge sci-fi world of Eve Online – ‘desync’. Their developer blog describes desync as ‘the situation when the server and your client disagree on the position of an object in space at a given time.’ This has obvious implications for expectations of smooth and predictable gameplay – battlecruisers disappearing in front of your eyes, or rematerialising on top of you, are hardly conducive to fostering credible experiences of presence. Unlike lag, which is a function of how traffic is routed around the internet, desync occurs because the game servers and the client on your computer calculate the position of an object differently. The problem’s in the code, not the network.

Although CCP, EVE Online‘s owners, say they’ve largely sorted out the problem, it does raise interesting questions about the virtual experience as mediated by code. It sounds like this is just a temporary glitch in the evolution of EVE Online, but similar situations could well arise in other spaces, given the plain weirdness of complex code environments.

What does it mean for the personal space of avatars if strange and unpredictable superposition events occur during gameplay? Do these constitute invasions of personal space, or should we just accept them as by-products of the virtual experience? How would it affect personal communications when the person with which you are conversing is no longer there, or a stranger suddenly is?

Paul Virilio defines this type of disjuncture as picnolepsy, a subject on which James Hook has also written a decent little paper. In Pure War, Virilio says,

What is living, present, conscious, here, is only so because there’s an infinity of little deaths, little accidents, little breaks, little cuts in … the soundtrack and the visual track of what’s lived … I think that’s very interesting for the analysis of the social, the city, politics. Our vision is that of a montage, a montage of temporalities which are the product not only of the powers that be, but of the technologies that organise time. It’s obvious that interruption plays more on temporality than on space. (p.48, my emphasis)

I’m not going to rehearse Virilio’s whole thesis here but he’s basically saying, if we recontextualise his words with respect to desync, is that the errors in time calculation are structuring our experience of space – the ‘outer space’ of EVE Online - much as they do with many other technologically-mediated facets of human experience. This is Boellstorff’s point also.

I’m not yet sure how this affects my thinking on the nature of virtual space, but as Leonard Cohen sang, in Anthem,

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.