The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds | Hacker News Reader

The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

killscreendaily.com

82 pointspepys40 comments

Does anyone remember something about a minecraft server which is never reset.. and turned into a desolate stripmined wasteland around the spawn point, where you have to hope to luck into a food cache just to survive..

Edit: it appears the server is called "2b2t" .. searching for it brings up a ton of interesting stuff:

https://imgur.com/a/bt3zi

Don't you have to spawn at the coordinates 0,0, or at the so called "spawn point". How did you start at 5000+?

I'm assuming you used an offline version.

In the first few years, people always spawned at 0 0. This was a large box, sometimes full of withers, which was difficult to escape. I believe that after some people completely covered 0 0 in cobblestone, rendering escape de facto impossible, the random spawn point system was introduced, in order to make it more difficult to cover all spawn points.

It's a shame they didn't show the inside of the spawn "cube".

Last time I went on there, you spawned atop an uneven cobble floor, those huge cobble walls surrounding you.

Exiting the cube is hazardous. It's dark, twisty, and full of deep pits that open up just around corners as you try to escape.

As a 2b2t player, I would say that whilst it initially appears to be rather difficult to exit said 'cube', it is in fact rather easy to escape. One must simply be willing to try a few times and meet new people. Why go near people who are potentially hostile? There is no loss: one simply restarts with the same amount as before (0), but one could make a friend which will provide one with food etc. in order to facilitate easier arrival at 2b2t Immigration. 2b2t Immigration's officers are rather ... variable. Some will kill on sight (KoS), whilst others will give render assistance. However, the main factor which has lead to 2b2t spawn becoming easier is the road system. There are roads every multiple of 400 blocks up until the 1200 orbital, for the most part, thanks to the efforts of several players. The roads lead to portals, which in theory allow you to get to over 100k overworld by walking along nether paths. Within the 1200 radius there are a multitude of farms, and within the latter radius there are far more indeed. After about 1k the landscape appears to be vaguely naturally generated, and after 5k all destruction of spawn like intensity ceases to be.

This server reminds me of when I first tried dayZ (arma2 mod). You spawn with nothing, have no idea what to do and there are zombies and bandits everywhere that wants to kill you.

It took me a few tries before I managed to sneak out of the "spawn zone" without getting killed or starving to death. Then I traveled for hours until I finally found and area where no-one had built. And made a nice base there.

Yes, there are these two completely fascinating posts from a guy wandering around on one of these servers. The original posts are on imgur but there's good context in the reddit comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/xcpit/exploring_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/xodzv/exploring_...

http://mcgs.crummy.com/

The ultimate Minecraft "abandoned virtual world" is the Minecraft Geologic Survey, by Leonard Richardson of the New York Public Library (assisted by the wonderful Joe Hills). The survey archived over 170,000 Minecraft maps (2TB!) from various public fileservers.

A[1] map called "The Reef" (which is available at the link above) was created from those maps, by using the Python libraries from MCEdit to select a heuristically "interesting" chunk[2] from each map and grouping them (approximately) by ground height and other features into a single map. Each chunk has a chest added with a single book inside it, containing the bibliographic reference.

Joe Hills introduces the map with Richardson in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpkdtv68DYU

If you found the Reef interesting, you may also like the "Sign Dungeon" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPNysdgIbQY ), which was created from all of the written signs from the same MCGS archive, again filtered by a heuristic which is discussed in the video.

[1] Actually several maps of various sizes.

[2] Minecraft stores the world data in 16x16 block wide, 256 block tall "chunks" ( http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Chunks )

In the late 90's there was also Active Worlds[1][2]. It was one of the first online communities I frequented.

It seemed to follow exactly the path second life went, except with the diminished number of people that were on the internet at the time: very high initial interested (the "wow - 3d internet factor") and very little engagement after that.

I really thought 3d web would be a thing. :)

[1] http://activeworlds.com

[2] https://osantana.me/vintage/borolandia/artigo03/index.html (article in portuguese, pics of a brazilian AW server back from 2000)

I had joined Active Worlds back when it was called AlphaWorlds[1] and before that I enjoyed Worlds Chat[2]. It was an interesting universe to explore. I didn't build much since their library of pre-made objects didn't have enough variety and you saw the same objects everywhere. You could model your own objects but I had trouble finding free software I could use for that. I hadn't logged in to Active/AlphaWorlds for a while and when I came back to see how things had changed they started charging for accounts. I had forgotten my login info and I wasn't willing to pay for a new account, so that was the end of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_chat

Active Worlds was the coolest thing I ever goofed around in, at least at the time. The COFMeta (metaverse) and Mars worlds were my favorite.

It was basically the 3D equivalent of Geocities. You could wander for hours, looking at the cool little houses and weird displays people had built. You could even do simple scripting with keyframes for animating objects by toggling their visibility. :)

It was so cool, and I even ended up buying a little AWLD stock. The market imploded of course, and the people running it apparently did some scummy things (see Shamus Young's accounting here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720 ).

The only thing really missing was modeling; to solve this, you'd run across giant prefab yards, and then write down model names. Mars had a sort of boneyard for this purpose.

They also did kinda-cool tie-ins with other media, like a world for The 13th Floor and the X-Files movie. I miss that sense of "Oh man, this is the future!".

The moment I read this article, I thought about ActiveWorlds again. I was never a paying citizen, but I used to visit a fair bit, a long time ago. They had so many different worlds and projects people did through it, I was surprised nobody mainstream ever gave it attention.

Perhaps once VR goes fully retail we'll see world creators like this become popular.

I thought the article was a bit brief. A better one that was recently posted on HN [1] describes exploring university campuses that were built in Second Life and subsequently abandoned.

Some thoughts:

Looking at the pictures in [1], I was reminded that people designed and built all this stuff. Spent months of their lives and used their creativity. I wonder how they feel? Maybe like the designers of the Athens [2] and Sochi [3] Olympic sites.

Also, back in 2003 Cyan Worlds (the developers of Myst) created an online world called Uru Live [4]. They closed it due to lack of demand and (IIRC) scaling problems, but at some point it seems to have been brought back to life by a community effort [5]. So, abandoned worlds don't have to stay that way and the work of their designers doesn't have to be wasted.

The first time I recall encountering the concept of virtual world architecture was in Greg Egan's book Permutation City [6]. Anyone know of anything earlier?

Finally, it would be cool if virtual worlds could be linked by gateways, with some way for player metadata to migrate across the gateways.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abandon...

[3] http://weburbanist.com/2014/09/09/post-olympic-abandonment-s...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_Online:_Uru_Live

[5] http://mystonline.com/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

> people designed and built all this stuff. Spent months of their lives and used their creativity. I wonder how they feel? Maybe like the designers of the Athens [2] and Sochi [3] Olympic sites.

i think it depends on what was actually spent - time of the lives and creativity or corporate/government money. Don't know about universities or Athens, while the recipients of $50B spent on Sochi do seem to feel very good.

Sure, William Gibson's Neuromancer was written a decade earlier and popularized the term "cyberspace". His trilogies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy have descriptions of virtual spaces designed for various reasons.

Snow Crash was published in 1992 and popularized the term "avatar". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash Its virtual spaces were pretty elaborate.

I wasn't being very clear, but by "virtual architecture" I meant something like a design practice that extends conventional built architecture to exploit the novel properties of virtual spaces. Like physically or topologically impossible buildings.

Gibson's cyberspace (at least in Neuromancer) is just a 3D grid containing basic shapes. His later works do describe more elaborate worlds, but as far as I remember they are copies of the real world (eg. Chia's virtual copy of Venice in Idoru or the world inside the Aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive).

The Street in Snow Crash is nearer to what I was thinking of.

Edid: The Virtual Venice belonged to Chia in Idoru [1], not Marly in Count Zero as I originally said.

[1] http://www.procolharum.com/awsop_novel3.htm

There is a beach at the end of Neromancer that seems to have a city in the distance, but if you walk toward it, you just end up where you started. It's a bit sparse though, I see your point.

It's difficult to pinpoint the earliest description of virtual architecture. Maybe in Stanley G. Weinbaum's wonderfully foresighted Pygmalion's Spectacles (1935). Then there's also The Trouble with Bubbles (1953) by Philip K. Dick.

http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4543

Thank you! I wasn't familiar with either work. Have saved Pygmalion's Spectacles for holiday reading.

An abandoned virtual Myst world is rather poetic, don't you think?

In the original story http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-abandon... there are people defending Second Life and its educational usage. I didn't see any students offering their perspective, though. I wonder if students who take these courses actually find them useful.

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games.

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still have characters on a couple of them that I connect to every so often, like maybe once a year or so.

The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s/early 2000s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In that time, Warcraft and Second Life sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text that MUDs provided.

Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A

Can you recommend any for a newcomer to look at?

It's really a question of what you're into. MUDs run the gamut from purely social with little combat (a bit like IRC with more functionality) to traditional medieval fantasy hack-and-slash to sci-fi space combat.

Some have specialized clients they recommend; I'm a big fan of just using TinyFugue [0] in a shell window, but that's just me. :)

MUD Connector [1] is a great place to start, as it has a few thousand listed with average sizes, themes, reviews, etc. All searchable, so you can find what appeals to you.

As a very general rule, start with the bigger more active ones. The smaller ones can be very fun and you can make great, close friendships with other players, but they also can tend to get kind of insular and hard for a new player to penetrate.

[0] http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/ (it's also in most package managers and in homebrew for Mac)

[1] http://www.mudconnect.com/index.html

Thanks very much :)

Indeed. I still play MUME (http://www.mume.org/) from time to time. Not nearly as much activity as the 'good old days', but it's definitely possible to fall victim to an orc/troll raid if you wander in the Misty Mountains. (:

I signed up for Second Life, and jogged around it for an hour or two. An Oculus Rift version would be intriguing. I found my original experience to be aimless. I wandered off and found a sort of castle or something, and enjoyed rambling around it, but ultimately felt there was nothing to do.

An Oculus Rift version would be more exciting, but I have no doubts that the only thing that would be left after a while would be the video-game like stuff (flying, diving, roller coasters, etc), and since you would have that as standalone games elsewhere, probably better executed, I see the same fate as regular Second Life.

As an SL user, that's the norm with regard to the platform. It just seems LL hasn't a clue or just doesn't care if users stick around. I'm not sure how they make money when the vast majority of the users are now bots and the remainder aren't as cash rich as they use to be (Anshe Chung comes to mind).

If there's anything that future VR platform developers can learn from SL is this: engage your users, own up to mistakes, and be willing to break things that depended on kludges to fix things. If you do that you'll be light years ahead of the competition.

You can see lots more if you're willing to go text-based. Like LambdaMOO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO (telnet: lambda.moo.mud.org 8888) - not the oldest but one of the oldest that's substantially community-built (it doesn't take much to get permission to make things) and still running.

MUDs and the like were my first thought as well. I guess they don't have the immediate visual effect of the later graphical worlds but over the years I occasionally log back on to some of the old MUDs I used to frequent if they're still up and running. Always weird to see a place that used to be filled with at least 20-40 people now only populated by maybe the sysop's character idling for months in the public channel.

Interestingly MUDs still have some niche to fill. Granted, a lot of them withered roughly a decade ago when MMORPGs became mainstream, but there are some that are fully alive and kicking. For example, Aardwolf MUD [1] seems to have about 300 players online most of the time, with peaks of 400 players [2].

[1] telnet: aardmud.org 23 [2] http://www.aardwolf.com/stats.html

I was never into Second Life, but it would be really cool if this sort of thing were to be maintained (perhaps read-only) by an archive.org-alike organisation... Especially with decreasing digital storage costs this should be feasible, and it would be really cool if a generation from now people could poke around in these way dated spaces, a bit like someone today dusting of an Apple II lying in a cupboard... :)

Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434760

You can get that any time a game starts dying or there's just no compelling reason to go to places because something so much better has been released since then.

The biggest thing with WoW, is they push end game content so heavily, and part of the way they do that is accelerating leveling through old content.

So while you used to have to grind through most of these regions, players now end up leveling much faster and only seeing a few of them.

Reminds me of this http://www.avclub.com/article/theres-hidden-beauty-abandoned...

I remember another similar article, which wasn't specific to a particular service. I probably found the link on HN, but I can't find anything.

There's this, which I don't think is what I was thinking of:

The abandoned college campuses of Second Life

http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-abandon...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400

Most of the no-longer-updated stuff in Second Life eventually vanishes completely, because it costs money to own land (rent it). A small parcel isn't super-expensive though, so some people forget about it.

And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "real estate" owned by schools and corporations is tied to some long-forgotten expense account, so it may keep on getting paid for a very long time if nobody's paying attention. Either that, or Linden Labs may even be giving free service for some schools as a promotional deal.

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