vw history

  • Wikipedia and MUDs hits Wired

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    Funny how this sort of thing happens… two years after the big kerfuffle over ThresholdMUD’s Wikipedia article being deleted (see here and here and here), we get a Wired UK article on Wikipedia and MUD history.

    Eventually, the community decided to move on, and founded MUD Wiki, a Wikia dedicated to the genre. Wikia was introduced in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, and allowed free web hosting for third party Wikis. It made it easier than ever to make niche Wikis on the most obscure or insular topic possible, and let Wikipedia get on with talking about things that are truly notable.

    And maybe, in the grand scheme of documenting gaming history, a dedicated Wikia makes sense. Individual MUDs might be better suited to a Wikia, and its also promising to see Wikipedia’s own page on the genre in general is large, comprehensive and bibliographically diverse.

    “Wikipedia is not a directory of everything that exists or has existed”, the site explains in a manifesto detailing its scope. And It would be near impossible for Wikipedia to be a complete and thorough repository of gaming history, with Deus Ex or The Legend of Zelda sharing the same word count as something obscure like Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket.

  • How UO rares were born

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 36 Comments

    A no-draw tile

    Amaranthar in the comment thread on the last post referred to “rares” in Ultima Online as a feature. They weren’t really, though. They were a bug.

    First, a definition of rares. These were simply items that were incredibly uncommon. Often they were near unique. They couldn’t be found via loot  — they were only spawned once, really, when the server came up. As a result, they were immediately collectible. Most of them had no use whatsoever — they were simply uniquely colored objects, like a red vase that a crafter couldn’t replicate, or an object that was outright not craftable at all. A few were obvious bugs, like “water tiles” — a literal patch of water that you could pick up and stuff in your backpack, which because of how the simulation layer behind UO worked, actually functioned as water. You could fish in it, or pull a jug of water for cooking from it.

    Needless to say, collectibility alone was sufficient to drive these to have immense value in UO’s economy, which was largely player-driven. Rares began to show up on eBay going for substantial dollar amounts, sometimes in the hundreds.

    Read More “How UO rares were born”

  • There.com is closing

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 25 Comments

    Sad news. There.com has some of the best social interaction design of any virtual world. Be sure to check it out while you can so that its many design innovations are not forgotten.

    But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

    We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

    via There – There.

  • Devs argue the term MMO on Massively

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 25 Comments

    Massively asked a bunch of us in the industry our opinion of the term “MMO”, and the result is a rather nifty article. Here was my answer, but go read everyone else’s!

    Raph Koster, President and Founder, Metaplace:

    “I think now, at this point, now that we’ve chopped the ‘RPG’ part off of it and just say ‘MMO,’ which by itself is a meaningless acronym. Massively multiplayer online… The problem is the very word massive is not particularly useful. Sorry Massively website! But the problem is that “massive” is kind of relative. New York is a massive city, until you go to Shanghai. It’s completely relative. …

    “I was never that crazy about [the term ‘MMO’]. We’ve been here before. There was a huge turf battle over the term ‘MUD’… There were people coming up with MUVE, multiple user virtual environment… random acronyms people were coming up with to describe the field. Several of us kept saying, ‘These are just virtual worlds, damnit!’ Part of the reason why that was working okay was it was fairly easy to say, and MUDs do have a very specific kind of family tree that we can point at, and they all fall under virtual worlds.

    “That was great until people started calling things — without any games in them — ‘virtual worlds,’ excluding MMO-anythings. This is where you get people saying, ‘Well, [World of Warcraft] is a MMORPG, it’s not a virtual world.’ And it’s like…errrr. Because the battle has started all over again with people trying to appropriate the term ‘virtual world’ to mean Second Life or to mean Habbo Hotel. So now you have things like social virtual worlds and generic virtual worlds, and people think it means just Second Life, and that’s… wrong. I’ll say it bluntly, that’s just wrong, because WoW is a virtual world and so is Second Life, and so is YoVille. A lot of people don’t want to claim YoVille as being in the family, but it is. I much prefer to define these things by what they are rather than how many people they hold.

    “I do still say MMO, because at this point it usually has the connotation of game. If you say ‘MMO’ people assume you mean a game. … Even us design types, we still need to know what we’re actually doing. The terms, right? We need to agree on a language so we can talk about it. Disclaiming something that is a massively multiplayer, comma, online, comma, first-person, comma, shooter, and saying, ‘Well, it’s not actually massively multiplayer online’… whatever. That’s clearly marketing talking.

    “There are people that call them MWOs, people that called them MOGs, and people that call them POGs. There’s PSWs which is an art term for a specific sub-set of virtual world so that one gets misused all the time because it means ‘persistent state world.’ … There are some others… PIG, I’ve seen PIG, ‘persistent interactive game.’

    Massively: I don’t think a game maker would like to call their game a “PIG.”

    “Probably not.”

  • CompuServe Classic is shutting down

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 6 Comments

    The whimper at the end of an era.

    CompuServe, the corporate entity, dates to 1969 but the CompuServe Classic online service for consumers debuted in 1979. In 1987 it was the flagship of online services with 380,000 users. A 1991 TV commercial trumpets CompuServe as the only online service with more than a half-million members.
    Unfortunately time, and its acquisition by AOL, has not been kind to CompuServe. In recent years it has barely been marketed. Its Web site looks like a throwback to the (gasp!) 20th century. The “build” date on version 4.0.2 of CompuServe for Windows NT, the latest version of the access software for CompuServe Classic, is January 11, 1999.

    — The Paper PC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend.

    I was never one of the hordes of truly hardcore gamers who hovered around the CompuServe and GEnie games — no money, you see. I was in high school at the time. Every once in a while I could sneak on for ten minute snatches — my dad was always horrified at the bill. He used TheSource too, because it was “more useful and had less games and distractions” I seem to recall.

    CompuServe 2000 will still be around, but I am not sure anyone cares. 🙂