Microsoft Internet Games

» see zone.msn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Open the Start menu on a Windows XP machine, walk down into Games, and half of what was listed there needed a working connection. Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers, Internet Spades, Internet Hearts, Internet Reversi. They had shipped in the box since Windows ME in 2000, they were served quietly off Microsoft's MSN Games infrastructure, and they were installed on a number of machines that nobody at Microsoft ever had to justify, because the install was the operating system.

Turkey is a backgammon country. Tavla gets played on the street and in tea houses, across a board that belongs to the shop, between two people who have known each other for thirty years. What Microsoft put in the Start menu was that same board under the opposite social contract. No opponent you knew, no conversation, no way of learning which country the other side was sitting in. It arrived preinstalled in a place that did not need to be taught the rules, which is a strange kind of distribution win.

Clicking the icon opened a dialog asking for a skill level, and then you waited while the server found somebody else who had clicked the same thing. Fifteen seconds, usually. The match started with no names worth remembering and no scoreboard that followed you anywhere. When it ended you clicked again and got somebody else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the phrasebook ~

There was no free text box. Microsoft supplied a fixed list of things you were permitted to say, a set of questions paired with the answers to them plus a few remarks about the state of the board. You picked one and it appeared on the other person's screen, translated into whatever language their copy of Windows was running.

The reason was moderation. A chat field inside a game bundled with a consumer operating system is an abuse problem in forty languages and a support cost forever, and Microsoft was never going to staff that. The effect, though, was a specific and unusual thing to play: a stranger you could not insult and could not befriend, on the other end of a game that needed neither. It made the games oddly durable. Nothing in them could go stale, because nothing in them was ever personal.

~ two dates, eight days apart ~

Microsoft announced the closure on 2 July 2019. The Windows XP and Windows ME games went dark on 31 July 2019, which drew a short round of coverage and then nothing, since anybody still running Windows ME in 2019 was not reading the news about it. Windows 7 kept Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers, Internet Spades and MSN Go a while longer, and those went off on 22 January 2020. Windows 7's own extended support had ended on 14 January. The games outlived the operating system by eight days.

The public explanation was a line about investing resources in more recent technologies. The private arithmetic was simpler than that. These were servers matching players for five games that had shipped free with a product Microsoft stopped selling in 2009, for people who had not been asked to pay for anything in two decades.

~ what went with it ~

The games themselves still launch on an old machine and still open the dialog box. They just never find anybody, because there is nothing on the other end to find. That is the usual shape of a dead multiplayer service, and it is worth saying what makes this one different: no account was lost, because there were no accounts, and nothing got deleted, because nothing had ever been stored. The whole service was a matchmaker with no memory, and when it stopped, what vanished was only the possibility of the next stranger.

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