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LambdaMOO, MUDs, and 'When the Internet Was Young' (undark.org)
Slashdot reader travers_r shares "a peek into the early days of internet culture and multiplayer gaming." (Apparently this MOO has been running continuously for 28 years.) "From the looks of it, squatters run it now..."
LambdaMOO was different from the earliest MUDs, which were Tolkienesque fantasies -- hack-and-slash games for Dungeons & Dragons types with computer access, mostly college students. LambdaMOO was one of the first social MUDs, where people convened largely to play-act society, and what might have been "one of the first MUDs to be run by an adult," [co-creator Pavel] Curtis believes... Everybody comes through the Coat Closet the first time they visit LambdaMOO, entering the Living Room through a curtain of clothes, like children into Narnia. In between the textual rooms and objects they explore, there's a faster-moving flow of words, the coursing real-time chatter of LambdaMOO's other users. This is a Multi-User Domain: a chatroom and a world at once, a place where telling takes the place of being...
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
I loved coding for LP muds. They weren't so much a "multiplayer notepad" as you could have true C-ish code running behind the scenes. LPC was a great language, in that you could physically interact with your objects. You could carry around a class in your inventory. Randomly call functions on it. Have other peoples' actions trigger functions. It opened up so many possibilities.
The best were "Wizard (admin) Duels", which was basically warfare between programmers. It was common for wizards to write "dests", which destructed a person's player object to (briefly) kick them out of the game. These often involved elaborate broadcast leadups describing what they were doing and what was happening to the victim. One wizard kept desting me, so I wrote an instant counterdest that I could call that would dest him first. So he sped up his dest so that I wouldn't have time. So I had mine detect that his dest was going off automatically and autodest him. So he made his instant. So I made an object that would hop into his inventory and intercept his dest command, and dest himself instead. But then I had to be paranoid about him making objects to hop into my inventory, so I made an inventory-protector that monitored my person and the room I'm in for "suspicious" objects to destruct. On and on it went.
The screwups could be glorious, too. At one point during the coding of my inventory protector, I messed up and it accidentally dested me. It then fell to the floor in the login room and dested everyone else in there. And anyone who logged in would then get insta-dested by it. I had accidentally created a killbot run amock ;) We had no access to the server to reboot it, and almost everyone had gotten kicked off by it... except for one wizard operating in a different room. But since we couldn't log in, we had no way to contact him. Until I came up with an idea. We uploaded files to the MUD via FTP, so I uploaded a file to his home directory with the title, "(HISNAME)_PLEASE_READ_ME_NOW.txt", which explained the situation and how to fix it. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, he notices the file, reads it, and destroys my inadverent-killbot so we can all log back in. ;)
You just don't get those sorts of experiences anymore.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"