[MUD-Dev] Clay Shirky's "Playfulness in 3-D Spaces"

[Raph & Kristen Koster]

----- Original Message -----
From: J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2000 9:56 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Clay Shirky's "Playfulness in 3-D Spaces"


>
> http://www.shirky.com/writings/quake.html
>
> --<cut>--
> Playfulness in 3-D Spaces
> I have now found what I was looking for, and found it, to my
> chagrin, years late. A networked 3-D engine with excellent shared
> space capabilities, open source code, a well-published
> world-building specification, an active development community, and a
> project showing the kind of rapid improvement year after year that
> comes from the best massively parallel design efforts, such as the
> Web.
>
> It is called Quake.

Oh, good God. :P Somebody go show him EverQuest.

To me, this realization betrays the fundamental blindness of the academic VR
community. The real problems with shared VR spaces aren't even
technological, they're social--but they can't see the forest for the trees.
In most ways, text muds are a more sophisticated VR than their (largely
theoretical) endeavors can encompass. The fact that they are still hung up
on the issue of display, of all things, indicates how much thinking they
actually have to do about the problem.

Clients are the least of your concerns in virtual space design. :P

-Raph




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