Coding is a Text Adventure

Wired News is running a story about a new approach to crossover working and gaming turning your coding into a MUD-style adventure. Playsh is a "narrative-driven 'object navigation' client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys." Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life.

Comments

Re:Sounds familiar

[Rei]

I agree; this is just so perfect. Some of my most fond coding memories were coding for an lp mud. The ability to "see" every object that you have, and at the same time to be able to, say, call functions on the body of the person that you're talking to, was just so much fun. I loved to patch myself to impersonate a message board or hide inside other objects. And don't get me started on "coding wars", when someone creates an object to dest you, you create a counter for the dester, they work around the counter, you come up with a convoluted counter-counter, etc.

From a practical standpoint, it makes a lot of coding intuitive and makes "plugins" nearly automatic. For example, objects can look at what is in their "environment" (i.e., what is holding them). If you have an object that calls "insert_foobar()" on every object sitting inside a message board object when someone tries to foobar the board, if you were to take it out of the message board and stick it in a player's inventory, it would try and foobar their inventory when someone foobars the player.

The fact that you can simply pick up and move objects around makes visualizing your tasks so simple. You can even have fun with how people interact with your objects; if you want an object that will perform some actions on someone's player object, for example, you could make it be a bread that they eat. You could have an object that displays information be a firework that you light and launch into the sky. The possibilities are endless.

A Cow Says "MOO!"

[TexVex]

MOOs were like chat rooms, except the members of the community could create new objects by programming them into the virtual world in a dedicated programming language, shaping the game as it went along.

MOO is interesting for a lot of reasons. It merges the concept of an object in the programming sense with the concept of an object in the game world sense, and it merges the concept of a method call with a game action.

For example, you might instantiate a class, and the object created then becomes an in-game object that you can manipulate like any other. It inherits its data and behaviors from its parent. But, that object is also a class that you can extend, and others can be instantiated from it.

In MOO, when you type a command, the game engine matches your command against "verbs" (methods ) found on the object representing you in the game world. The first word of the line you typed becomes the command to match, with the rest of the words being parameters. (You can also specify that verbs not be matchable, only allowing them to be called from within code). It's possible to have verbs that work either as commands or are callable from within other verbs.

If you want to add a new command to yourself, you just add the verb and program it. If it's something to be shared, you copy it to an appropriate ancestor, then delete your own copy; you and everyone else inheriting from that ancestor gains the command. (There's security in place; if you're an administrator you can do anything but if not then you need the cooperation of the owner of that ancestor object or an administrator.)

Ultimately, a MOO is just a scripting language and virtual machine, with a network interface and some security features to allow collaboration without granting all programmers full read or write access to each others' code and data. Implementation of the player / room / carryable object paradigm is done in the scripting language, not the engine itself. It's flexible enough to write Web servers in, and pretty damn fast for a language where everything is late-bound and weakly typed.

Interestingly, while most MOOs used internal mail and public forums, and would send email for various purposes (coded right in the scripting language), and many of them listened for HTTP connections and translated part (or all) of the game world into HTML, none of the efforts to create large MOO networks (a la IRC) ever got very far.