[DGD] Mudlibs

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, James J. Bennett wrote:
> While I can't argue with your points here, an out of the box mudlib does
> encourage new coders.  I know I am not quite up to being able to code a mud
> from scratch and I am sure most of you who are up to that level probably
> started out with an out of the box mud package of some kind.

Actually, back in the Elder Days most people started out by
becoming a wizard on someone else's mud. The senior wizards
on those muds trained the next generation.

It worked because there weren't any mud-in-a-box mudlibs, and
also in those days it was hard to get a site (this was before
the Internet was commercialized, so you couldn't just go buy
one, you usually had to find a friendly sysadmin at a university,
and those were hard to come by). Therefore you couldn't just
go open your own mud; you had to work one someone else's.
Now that anyone can open a mud, they don't go through the
apprentice stage and so they don't pick up the skills to
create something. Instead we get a lot of sites with two
users, both wizards, both farting around until they get
bored and they shut the mud down. A couple attempts to
provide the apprentice stage training in a public fashion
failed, for complex reasons.

As you can tell, I mostly agree with George on this matter.
I do, however, have two points:

1) DGD has so few people using it, at least using it in the
traditional ways, that I don't think we have a big risk of
this;

2) Since mud-in-a-box already exists for other drivers, anyone
who wants it can get it by using a different driver. The DGD
community is not gaining anything by not having one, and it's
losing people who might otherwise try DGD, most of whom would
not have much to contribute, but a few of whom would produce
some useful things.

Steve


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