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Discworld was where I started. Ah, the memories.

Discworld

Lots of flexibility, plenty of social interaction and a great sense of humour.

I started playing the discworld mud after watching hearing stories from workmates about their exploits. It's just a text mud but its so hilarious and so fun but takes a bit of effort to get into if you don't know someone who can show you stuff.

I would love this game to be rebuilt with a graphics engine with the cartoony look of World of Warcraft just cause I would love to see it, but but without the text descriptions it wouldn't be as funny. You can simply put more expression and detail in a text description than with graphics, you just need a good writer. Text can describe look, sounds, smell, taste and touch and feeling. The last time I checked the best non-text games out there could do was look and sound.

I reada great article a couple years ago about a _very_ early attempt by Lucasfilm at making a MMORPG.

The client machine was a Commodore 64 (!), and the game never got past beta, but it seems like they learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like they were a lot more adventerous (athough usually peacful, the game included weapons) and actively creative (planned events and adventures).

Anyways, here's the article - although the site is slow it's an interesting read for those interested in virtual communities and such. It includes quite a bit of both technical detail and virtual social theory.

Be sure to check out the amusing "dungeon of death" story, the mixup that followed, and the good and bad solutions they used. Great history stuff that the Sims Online folks most certainly could have benefitted from.

Cheers

I reada great article a couple years ago about a _very_ early attempt by Lucasfilm at making a MMORPG.

The client machine was a Commodore 64 (!), and the game never got past beta, but it seems like they learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like they were a lot more adventerous (athough usually peacful, the game included weapons) and actively creative (planned events and adventures).

Anyways, here's the article - although the site is slow it's an interesting read for those interested in virtual communities and such. It includes quite a bit of both technical detail and virtual social theory.

Be sure to check out the amusing "dungeon of death" story, the mixup that followed, and the good and bad solutions they used. Great history stuff that the Sims Online folks most certainly could have benefitted from.

Cheers

Long before internet gaming, serious RPG addicts were paying real cash for things that didn't exist even on hard drive somewhere in Texas. Giant gaming cons would see people offering cash under the table for other members of their gaming group to have their character/s give them weapons, etc. Since you could also leave a sort of will in many cases, there was often deals of the "buy me lunch and I'll leave my mace of +4 against zombies to you when I die."

This came of age with the net, of course. Ebay finally had to ban (or just regulate?) the sale of virtual property after several Ultima-related fiascoes caused bad publicity. Katz wrote about before that here: 'Ebay launches virtual property' and there was quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this.

While looking for that coverage I found this essay on Gaming Culture that mentions Ebay. Also a mention on USA Today. Apparently the selling violated the games' terms of use.

Saludos, Mig
(Karma for sale)

I'm not entirely certain I know how to respond to this, but the thinly veiled sarcasm and factual inaccuracies beg a response so I'll give it a try.

...you also have houses composed of zillions of individual 'brick' objects...

This isn't really true. You seem to be taking concepts from *one* game, taking them to absurd lengths, and applying them to the whole of the project.

Therefore, to clarify, we are talking about Mason, a game which is primarilly a proof of concept game. I suggest the interested look at the overview, located here.

Since this game is centered around *construction* there is a high degree of user involvement in the construction of new things. This does not imply that *all* games will focus so tightly on this one aspect, but rather that future games will be built upon the discoveries and developments made through implementing Mason.

...peasants make their houses brick by brick

This is highly deceptive. Peasants *can* make buildings brick by brick if they so choose, and in a large game you can be certain several will want to (see the "I want to bake bread" article). However there are higher level methods for building objects. You could contract to get your house built, paying an NPC to build it from a blueprint that you provide, or that you select from the ones the builder might provide. Or, if you don't really want the immersive feel, just have the builders point and click and *bamf* insta house. These options are *game* specific, not specific to the underlying software.

Who knows what you can do in a game where you can dynamically create wholly new types of objects due to the great flexibility of the underlying software! I'll tell you- you can sit there holding half a brick.

First of all, half a brick isn't a new type of object, it's just a different sized brick. As to the *point* of what you are trying to say, yes, you can dynamically create things in Mason which were not initially in the game. That is the *point* of the game. The natural question that follows is: "Is this useful? Will it make the game more interesting?"

to this I can only respond with an opinion:

This is this same flexibility that will allow truly innovative solutions to game problems. The ability to create new, unexpected things (traps, weapons, mazes with sliding walls), to alter the game world (avalanche/mudslide, dams, earthworks, canals) and to integrate those things into the world will add to the richness of the world. An interesting, changing world will captivate the imagination of the gamer, something sorely lacking in most computer games today.

...there is a (laudable) pacifist streak...

I have no idea where this notion came from.

Though pacifism may be laudable, it is not overly present in the hallowed halls of worldforge. Combat is not central to our current development. When we have more foundation, combat systems will be implemented. If you look around the web site you can probably find references to how such things will be designed. However, there are more fundamental things to develop before any usable system could be implemented. If you can't wait I suggest you go play quake.

-SpeedBump the even more verbose

not really true.
pike actually goes back to the late 80ties when lars pensjö first wrote lpc.

check the history of pike here.

if you are interrsted in the history of a language and want to enter the world of lpc read some paragraphs about lpc and lpmuds: history, what is lpc
what is an lpmud, lpc servers (the lpmud servers listed there are essentially lpc dialects)
(Profezzorn, mentioned here, is the author of pike)

another interresting introduction to lpc.
(what is said here in 2.1 and 2.2 is essentially true for pike and roxen: just replace "lpc objects" with "roxen modules" and lpmud with roxen and most other occurances of lpc with pike :-)

here the history to one of the lpc dialects.

go back even further and find out how lpc was started in the first place.

as you can see, pike has a very lively history and a lot of background.

greetings, eMBee.
--

not really true.
pike actually goes back to the late 80ties when lars pensjö first wrote lpc.

check the history of pike here.

if you are interrsted in the history of a language and want to enter the world of lpc read some paragraphs about lpc and lpmuds: history, what is lpc
what is an lpmud, lpc servers (the lpmud servers listed there are essentially lpc dialects)
(Profezzorn, mentioned here, is the author of pike)

another interresting introduction to lpc.
(what is said here in 2.1 and 2.2 is essentially true for pike and roxen: just replace "lpc objects" with "roxen modules" and lpmud with roxen and most other occurances of lpc with pike :-)

here the history to one of the lpc dialects.

go back even further and find out how lpc was started in the first place.

as you can see, pike has a very lively history and a lot of background.

greetings, eMBee.
--

not really true.
pike actually goes back to the late 80ties when lars pensjö first wrote lpc.

check the history of pike here.

if you are interrsted in the history of a language and want to enter the world of lpc read some paragraphs about lpc and lpmuds: history, what is lpc
what is an lpmud, lpc servers (the lpmud servers listed there are essentially lpc dialects)
(Profezzorn, mentioned here, is the author of pike)

another interresting introduction to lpc.
(what is said here in 2.1 and 2.2 is essentially true for pike and roxen: just replace "lpc objects" with "roxen modules" and lpmud with roxen and most other occurances of lpc with pike :-)

here the history to one of the lpc dialects.

go back even further and find out how lpc was started in the first place.

as you can see, pike has a very lively history and a lot of background.

greetings, eMBee.
--

not really true.
pike actually goes back to the late 80ties when lars pensjö first wrote lpc.

check the history of pike here.

if you are interrsted in the history of a language and want to enter the world of lpc read some paragraphs about lpc and lpmuds: history, what is lpc
what is an lpmud, lpc servers (the lpmud servers listed there are essentially lpc dialects)
(Profezzorn, mentioned here, is the author of pike)

another interresting introduction to lpc.
(what is said here in 2.1 and 2.2 is essentially true for pike and roxen: just replace "lpc objects" with "roxen modules" and lpmud with roxen and most other occurances of lpc with pike :-)

here the history to one of the lpc dialects.

go back even further and find out how lpc was started in the first place.

as you can see, pike has a very lively history and a lot of background.

greetings, eMBee.
--

not really true.
pike actually goes back to the late 80ties when lars pensjö first wrote lpc.

check the history of pike here.

if you are interrsted in the history of a language and want to enter the world of lpc read some paragraphs about lpc and lpmuds: history, what is lpc
what is an lpmud, lpc servers (the lpmud servers listed there are essentially lpc dialects)
(Profezzorn, mentioned here, is the author of pike)

another interresting introduction to lpc.
(what is said here in 2.1 and 2.2 is essentially true for pike and roxen: just replace "lpc objects" with "roxen modules" and lpmud with roxen and most other occurances of lpc with pike :-)

here the history to one of the lpc dialects.

go back even further and find out how lpc was started in the first place.

as you can see, pike has a very lively history and a lot of background.

greetings, eMBee.
--

link

companies are downsizing, governments are downsizing and the corporate work environment is getting desperate.

It's because they have to compete with me, and you. Hackers are the new source of wealth. New software and electronic products as well as the huge number of newly "software enhanced" products are generating a larger and larger percentage of the energy in the world economy.

And we can produce software in a living room for sale world-wide. I can set up a shop on Geocities with a credit card merchant account at Wells Fargo for a less than a $500.00. I can then translate my page into 5 languages at bablefish and sell world wide with no added transaction cost. If I weren't so lazy that is. The only thing that can stop us now is our own remotes. I could do all those things, but I sit here at work making somebody else's next million so I can be assured of a paycheck on the 15th and a convenient co-pay at the doctor's. All because making the money for myself would necessarily cut into my discworld time.

Speaking of which, I just mastered Pragi's Fiery Gaze and Endorphin's Floating Friend and became a 4th Level Wizard! Not to mention finding a way to use the soul commands to cast what appear to be free illusions!

Zircephate
Sages of the Unbroken Circle
Wizard's Guild
Ankh-Morpork