[MUD-Dev] Amy Jo Kim's "Community Building on the Web"

[F. Randall Farmer]

> On April 21, Richard Woolcock wrote:
>
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Amy Jo Kim's "Community Building on the Web"
>
> I ordered a copy and it arrived in the post today.  I've only had the
> chance to skim through it so far, but I thought I'd share my opinions.
...
> So in summary, I'd say it's a pretty good book, although I was personally
> very disappointed that the mudding community didn't even get a mention.
> It seems that we always get overlooked - despite the existance of several
> thousand muds - and I'd hoped that someone who had put as much
> research as Kim obvious has would take the effort to include us like
> she appears to have included everyone else (even Quake and StarCraft
> get a mention).

A slighlty altered quote from Commander Spock:

    "She knows, Doctor. She knows."

I visited Amy Jo Kim at a signing party recently, and shared with her that
this thought had appeared on Mud-Dev (a list that she is familiar with.)
She asked me to tell y'all that she's sorry. She indicated that she
originally had a section on MUDs, but was forced by publishing constraints
to remove it in an earlier draft. "Sorry, just not enough room" is pretty
close to a direct quote.

>From the number of people in this book's Acknowledgements section who are
active posters on this list, I would say that she knows quite well how much
MUDs have contributed to the formation of online communities. The lack of
mention was not an oversite.

[If you ever meet her, ask her about the Original article she wrote for
Wired about UO. They utterly eviscerated her work when they published it.
The original was worthy of becoming a classic Mud-Dev reference work. ]

There's not a lot of history in this book. It's mostly prescriptive,
explaining how to build a good _web_ based community. I, for one,
didn't really miss MUDs at all. Neither did I miss VRML or lots
of other less-mainstream stuff (including my own work).

Randy




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