On 2/26/2019 3:34 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:
Do you happen to know which MUD platform Nomic World was based on? Some - LambdaMOO comes to mind - are far more amenable to this sort of use case than, say, Diku or River would have been.
I don't remember - this was a time where there was an active MUD/MOO development community and many forks (I was involved in a project porting one to VAX/VMS, of all things)- I know we called the Nomic World platform a MUD not a MOO. The hosts were very restrictive on permissions - there were only a couple of people with mod/wizard powers, so most of us never worked with the code at all. This caused many gameplay issues, as Steve notes in eir Final Verdict here, with the opinion that email play is better than MUD play: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/nomicworld/norrish/ Though I think the problems e mentions are surmountable with Rules that better account for the "physical reality" of the MUD environment.
It regularly saddens me that modern internet social spaces are so viscerally non-programmable in the way things like IRC and MUDs once were. Not everyone is at ease expressing themselves in code, but excluding people from doing so entirely both limits expressiveness and sharply limits communities’ ability to reshape their spaces to suit their needs.
Worth noting then a little more-lost history then! In 2004-2005 (I think) one of the players - I forget whom - set up a LambdaMOO flavor as an Agoran MOO. This was the other end of the permissions spectrum - all players were wizards. We started it as a Discussion forum only. Then (about 5-6 of us) started to build. and learn lambdamoo code. and program. and debug. and build some more. We had an Agoran town square (complete with Fountain), groves, a marketplace, and pleasant avenues, and the de rigueur mysterious cave system. And lots of Agora-themed programmed objects to play with. But basically we spent so much time programming and showing off our toys to each other in sandbox mode that we never got around to making Rules changes to allow actual Agoran play to go on over there. Eventually it just went like IRC, people stopped hanging out there. The presence of all the unused buildings, when almost no one was there, made it feel even *more* abandoned than IRC. Eventually the host lost interest and took it down. Though it *was* great fun for the builders while we were doing it! So between Steve's experience and that later MOO, there's definitely some balance to be struck! -G.
