[MUD-Dev] Re: META: List combat character and racial memory (was Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...))

[kamikaze at kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu]

  Hi, I'm one of the new guys.  I'm Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes, game
designer and Java programmer.  See
<URL:http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/> for more info about me and
my interests than you ever wanted to know.

  Somewhere back in the '80s, I started playing door games, PBEM and
chat-room RPGs, and a few multiplayer games on Compuserve, Delphi, and
Genie.  By '89, I'd played a few Internet MUDs, but the ones I'd found
were quite lacking, socially, system-wise, and in original world design,
so I stared designing my own online environments...  but designing a
full MUD proved to be a bit much for me then, and I ended up writing a
couple of door-game type environments.  I'll do a post-mortem on one of
them at some point, since it's an interesting case.

  After that, I drifted into writing interactive fiction (most of it
mercifully unpublished) and a lot of 3-D graphics (which I now reject as
mostly useless - if you want 3-D immersion, *GO OUTSIDE*), and just
generally getting an education the hard way.

  Over the last three years, I've been designing and then scrapping and
redesigning what I hope will be a rather unique MUD-like system of my
own, and recently spent some time contracting with another GMUD
designer, though little action is currently going on that front - if we
get a publisher, we go forward and I get paid to do some more work.

J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> spake:
>> On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
>>> The period when the list /was/ invitation only (remember, that
>>> hasn't been true for several months now) was significant however.
>>> It allowed the list culture to evolve, consolidate, and to become
>>> deeply accepted by the membership.

  There is a down side to something like this - I only just became aware
of this list, and I'm now facing something like 30MB of archives, after
doing a bit of filtering and merging so I could page through them easier
(I don't suppose a plain-text archive would be possible?  Or I could
pass you back the filtered versions I've kluged together...)

  I write multi-player social games, and have been plugging away at
designs for that cliche' of cliche's, the good graphical MUD (even more
cliche', in Java - if I say "and in 3-D!" (which my designs are not,
thankfully) I'll spontaneously combust!), for several years now, and yet
because I didn't come to anyone's attention (I don't post to
rec.games.mud.*, instead I use rec.games.programmer and occasionally
rec.games.design when I have MU game design issues to discuss, and I
lurk a lot all over the place), I wasn't able to comment and
participate.  Sure, being invitation-only can filter out the fools, but
it can also filter out many worthwhile participants (assuming a lot
about myself, but hey, I've got the ego for it).

  Since all of the MUD design & development mailing lists I'd been able
to find were focused on one specific system or another, I didn't expend
a lot of effort looking for one that wasn't...

  So in short, I'm glad you've started advertising and accepting just
anyone off the street, but I wish I'd known about it 2 years ago.

>Just how often and how deeply do y'all use the archives?  What impact
>are they having on your and your projects?

  I'll let you know when I'm done reading them, sometime in the next
millenium.  (Okay, I won't actually read the WHOLE THING, I'll just skip
subjects I'm not interested in...  but it sounds more dramatic).

-- <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>