Happy Birthday, MUD

 Posted by (Visited 11405 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 202008
 

Today is the official 30th birthday of MUD. And MUDs are, for better or worse, the crucible in which today’s virtual worlds were born. There were people who played MUDs working on The Realm, on Meridian 59, on Kingdom of the Winds, on Ultima Online, on EverQuest. To this day, more virtual worlds have been made, run, and played as text muds than any other sort.

These days, the influences have gotten a bit broader — Second Life is not the product of mudders, for example. All these kids’ worlds are not made by mudders. And the cultural touchstone is World of Warcraft, a game which is also not made by mudders, but which has the conventions of the text games thoroughly ingrained.

Richard says the anniversary doesn’t matter:

So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t actually important. The mainstream isn’t interested because virtual worlds haven’t had much impact; developers aren’t interested because the paradigm is obvious; players aren’t interested because knowing doesn’t add anything to their play experience; academics might be interested in the historical facts, but anniversaries don’t figure in their analyses.

I disagree, if only because otherwise we wouldn’t get to geek out on printouts of the original source code and photos of the original maps.

In the end, it may be that this is only a historical curiosity. But the stories we tell about our origins make a difference to how we evolve. I think it matters desperately to the future of this medium that we know how it was born, and the spirit in which it was created: whimsical, wry, imaginative, and immersed in the hacker ethic; pushing at preconceptions and fundamentally intelligent.

We all have our favorite stories from muds. Today is the right day to share them.

Your invite to Metaplace Beta

 Posted by (Visited 9925 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Oct 152008
 

Today is an exciting day for me.

It was in mid-2006 that I was sitting in my spare bedroom working on a prototype client for what would become Metaplace. My wife was running the server on her desktop Mac in another room. We managed to get some tags hardcoded into a text mud’s room description, and pretty soon we were two blue circles running around on a field – all streamed off the Internet. And even back then, I really wanted to show it to you guys here on the blog, because even though it didn’t look like much, it was really cool.

Well, today I do get to share it with you! Or rather, what it became. We’re a little ways past the blue circle thing at this point.

It’s an early look – we are most definitely still in testing, and closed testing at that. But it felt like it was time to let some more folks at it.

If you go to http://www.metaplace.com and enter the code EARLYLOOK in the text field where it says “Redeem invite key,” you’ll be given access to the testing. But you better hurry, because there are only 200 key uses available. If you don’t make it into the first 200, sign up for the waiting list – we’re letting in cohorts every week now.

Once you’re in, send me a friend request, send me a message, come visit the forums, and let me know what you think!

Fun in class, in sex?

 Posted by (Visited 11732 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 132008
 

When a game designer (or student) first starts trying to define why games are “fun” they have trouble even conceptualizing it beyond “I know it when I see it.” Then they encounter Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and/or Koster’s Theory of Fun and have this huge epiphany: Eureka, all fun comes from learning a new skill! Then after awhile, they enter another stage of questioning this: wait a minute, if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material? Why is sex fun (by some standards), and yet doesn’t involve mastery (ahem, again by some standards)? At any rate, you could think of this as three stages of evolution of a game designer, and different designers are going to be in different stages, and when they encounter one another there will be chaos when they start discussing the nature of “fun.”

Teaching Game Design: Lessons learned from SIEGE.

Some interesting questions there.

  • “if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material?”

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