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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you mean by the "classic" meaning of "server". Typically that list of servers in online games was actually a list of different physical locations you could connect to. Each one was a different server, a different physical computer. Some were hosted by the company that made the game, and some were hosted by the community.

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The "gaming classic" meaning of "server" is a dedicated hosted instance of a software. It's from late-90s/early-2000s era LAN party lingo, stuff like, "let's get a game of Quake going, start up a server" or similar.

A single "server" (one physical computing machine) could have hundreds of "servers" (instances of the server-side of the game software) running on it. One physical tower PC could have "10 Quake Servers", "2 HL2-DM servers", "a Team Fortress 2 server", "a Unreal Tournament server" and such on it.

Discord originally seemed to be using that era of lan-party style language for it's naming conventions. A Discord "server" is just an instanced section of the server-side of the Discord software, and not specifically related to any real-world physical machine.

The thing about game servers though is that you could run them yourself and typically choose where to do so. On your PC during a LAN party? Sure. On an always-on VPS? Sure. But wherever it was, you were always able to run it yourself, even if you ultimately might have paid someone else to run it. You're just running a server program.

By contrast, only Discord-the-company can run Discord servers.

Sure but that hasn't been true since, like, 2003. Many games these days (especially popular console games) have no such option (despite the existence of a PC port). Only the company can "run" "servers" that the built-in (aka GameSpy is dead) matchmaking will see. Gone are the days that you can feed an IP address and port into a game and connect to a friend's instance. There are exceptions that prove the rule (Hi Factorio!) but they're rarer and rarer, especially if you want a dedicated (no graphics) server running. Still, technology has advanced to the point that we can run Quake2 in-browser via JavaScript+wasm (and I don't mean via a plug-in!), so the old ways aren't totally dead.

Sure, but in recent games you also wouldn't talk about having "your own server" or joining "a server" - you're joining a match or a world or similar. You might refer to "the game's servers" if they happen to be down or overloaded or something, but it's less common these days to talk about a specific server.

The exception, of course, being games for which it is actually still possible to run your own servers. Minecraft comes to mind.

> or joining "a server"

> recent games

You absolutely would. Just because maybe you're playing overwatch or league or something, doesn't mean this isn't still a hugely popular paradigm.

In my 10+ years playing league and 2 years playing overwatch I never heard someone refer to the current game as "server". People still have a vague image of what a server looks like and know that company hosted games typically don't respond to that image.

...and that's why I said you would say otherwise if you were playing league and overwatch.

There are "private servers" made by people other than the developers for games that don't release server executables or source code. So the remote side being named a "server" is independent of whether it is available to run(for gamers).

Yes, but those are typically for games like MMOs where the servers are responsible for a large number of players. Those are never presented to the user as "your server," they're "the game's servers."

Contrast with Discord where there's something of an illusion of ownership; people will refer to them as "my Discord server."

EDIT: Incidentally, if you're actually running a private server for an MMO, I would indeed call that "your server."

But it also implies (1) that the server programs are independent, and (2) that I could run my own server independent of the developer. A Discord "server" is an unknown number of programs/services that interact with each other while presenting a unified interface. It is also entirely in the control of the developer, and I cannot run a private server.

The general meaning of "server" as it relates to the world of gaming is; an instance of the application that more than one person can exist within at the same time.

It doesn't matter how temporally limited it is, it doesn't matter if it's on dedicated hardware or not, or how many "servers" are sharing that hardware. It doesn't even have to be on a different machine.

> Typically that list of servers in online games was actually a list of different physical locations you could connect to.

And? If you saw me hosting two cs lobbies from the same box, would you stop calling them servers?

The key was that it didn't matter which hardware was hosting the game. You connect to that server, which may be from similar locations, or may be hosted by the community. Calling it as a "server" had the implication that it wasn't necessarily the game publisher that was running the server.

Yes but did we stop calling them servers when publishers stopped letting us run our own; accessible outside of their matchmaking process?

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