[MUD-Dev] What in THE Hell was that?

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 13 Mar 1998 15:30:22 PST8PDT 
Ben Greear<greear at cyberhighway.net> wrote:

> My philosophy grad student friend found the panoptic piece
> interesting..although I don't have a clue as to the philosophical
> ramifications of all of it.

A point which has risen here regularly is that of necessity a MUD game
designer will be engaging in social engineering.  Some look at that
aspect as an opportunity to play with areas of human culture and
psyche not normally available.  Others shrug and ignore it with the
comment, "I'm just making 'dis game ya know?  'Tis all in fun really,
none of this touchie feelie sociology and psyche crap."

I fall at one end of that scale: I find the prospect of being able to
hand-craft a culture by creating my own ecology of social predators
and encouraged reactions to be utterly fascinating.  This has been a
driving force in some of the more extreme aspects of my project (eg
time travel, logging, body stealing, etc).  I'll have to find
them, but Pavel Curtis' comments on why he removed himself as
effective "god" of LambdaMOO and engaged on their grand MOO-democracy
experiment are relevant here (tho I recall finding his stated
reasoning s bit swiss-cheese like)

> As for the other posts...very spamy, but interesting in their own
> ways.  It does give a snapshot of the psyche of the M** environment,
> which is something you should understand if you wish to create an
> environment in which to sustain such beings.

Blame it on my over-hasty web-reading.  If you visit the source URL
the logs are kepts as seperate pages linked into the TEST sections via
graphical buttons.  I read the base doc first, thought it was
wonderfully provoking, posted it, and only then realised that the logs
were also online.  Had I more wits about me, heck more than two, I'd
have interpolated the logs into the base article, making for one very
large post instead of the 6 or so there were..

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...