What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

theatlantic.com

146 pointssizzle40 comments

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development.

I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life.

MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understanding the mechanics and becoming a coder. I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days. CodeCombat and others are trying to bring that link between gaming and programming back - good for them.

This triggers a memory- I was watching a documentary about the internal combustion engine, and how everybody who drove a car in the early days needed to understand how it worked, because they'd inevitably have to troubleshoot it. Same for old TVs that had to get their tubes replaced from time to time. It's all really interesting.

When I was young, my dad would take the back off the TV, which was a bit dangerous due to the serious capacitance, and take out several tubes. We'd take the tubes to the store, where they had a test machine. It looked a bit like a video game console. Dad would plug in the various tubes, the machine would indicate which was bad, we'd buy a new one, take them all home, dad would plug them all back in, and, et voilà, working TV again.

KoBra?

Heh, yep. Good times.

It's surreal to realize that I played KoBra 20 years ago. I still log in at times and keep in touch with a friend who I knew then.

I wish MUDs would have done better because interactive text games would provide much needed variety for brains that the currently graphics dominated games.

> I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days.

Sometimes that wall isn't as high as it seems and as long as people know that, they can still break in.

For example, Minecraft (which is mentioned in another comment) has a pretty good ecosystem of mods and plugins that you can look at the raw code for, twiddle with, change, etc. I could easily see kids learning from that the same way I learned from screwing with ROM.

Same with Garry's Mod. It even has it's own Lua editor included and the things you can do with the Wire MOD are just crazy.

'Unix hippies' - indeed! I just had a flashback to the late eighties - the first MUD I became addicted to was in fact run by a long haired chap with very few teeth. Eventually met up with him at a computer fair that myself and a schoolfriend trekked into London for. I remember being accused ingame of using Macros to run straight to juicy loot after a reset, but no it was just my geeky 14yr old self remembering 40 or so N/S/E/W directions and typing ahead of the 75 baud connection. As if my C64 had macros! Happy Days

Sodaplay. Nostalgia level: sbemails.

I'm sometimes surprised that this model of userbase generated code and content hasn't caught on more with modern MMORPGs. An MMO where the players could graduate to creating their own areas with player voting for the best creations could potentially be killer.

It seems like the big developers are willing to a degree (HUD coding, add-ons, interface wrappers) but not direct creation of content. Admittedly, its a lot of modularity and tools you'd need to both build into the main game, and find a way to make intuitively accessible to your players. But, that would probably drive some neat language development as well, since you'd either need to require they learn something like Lua or Python, or develop a very smooth way to write valid in-game code.

I don't think you can have players voting. At least, not being the final arbiters of what gets included.

If you open up everything for players to code with, you need the devs to vet it, else you open up people creating exploits, opening up, say, tier 9 equipment for defeating a tier 1 level boss, or similar, and players may vote to allow such things even though it would lessen their enjoyment, and break the longevity of the game (thereby also reducing subscription profits).

Now, create a sandbox server, allow limited betas of content (so as to avoid everyone already being familiar with it if you adopt it), give the players a place to give feedback, but leave it to the devs to ensure it's balanced, the lore is consistent, etc, and you're onto something; that would be really cool.

The video game community I met my wife in 15 years ago... still exists. Pieces of it died over the years (there was a time when basically nobody could get the game to run and the competitive sites all disappeared) but there have always been a handful of core sites that stuck around, and a handful of developers managed to revamp the game for modern play. One of the major groups has been running since 1996, though it had a few years of extremely low activity.

About a year ago, an old friend contacted us and let us know he was playing again. We contacted friends, and they contacted friends, and now we've got a bunch of us back together -- playing every day, even going to a LAN party this week.

Part of what's interesting is that some of the major sites that didn't survive have sort-of but not entirely lived on in new incarnations. The new competitive ladder is based around some of the same principles as the old one, but with some influences from newer games as well (like a Starcraft2-style tier system that ranks players as gold, silver, or bronze.)

If you remember Descent fondly, come join us: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php (includes links to many of the still-active sites and groups.)

I spent far more time in the computer lab playing muds than actually working on homework. Funny that so much of my sophomore year was spent in a particular mud, but I can't even remember its name now (to be fair, this was 20 years ago). I still remember the general location of my guild, and the stupid forest you had to go through to get to it.

At that time (shortly before the internet became known and the eternal September started), muds were this magical place where the NPCs I'd imagined in all the text adventures I played suddenly became real people, connected from some other computer lab somewhere. That was the point that I had no doubt the internet was going to be huge.

My experience with Second Life was very different. I worked for a company providing software for libraries. When libraries were build SL versions, something felt wrong about it. Why would somebody want to escape the real world to find...the real world?

Because in SL, they can be the person that they really want to be in the real world.

Would that MUD be Nightfall? http://www.nightfall.org/

The MUD that I played on in middle school and high school, Viking MUD, is still around. http://www.vikingmud.org

I think the directions to the main areas will be burned into my memory forever. On this MUD, when you reached level 20 (which took around a week) you had a choice to make your character "eternal" and continue adventuring or you could choose to make your character a "wizard" who could create new areas yourself and write scripted actions for your area. However, you could no longer take part in the actual game itself. Scripting the areas I had created was some of the first programming experience I ever had.

A big difference between most of the games today that I play and some of those old MUDs was that there were very serious consequences to dying. You lost a level and all your gear if you died and it was extremely easy to die in the game, both from NPCs or other players in certain zones. Dropping from say, level 28 to 27 represented a solid week of hard leveling effort that was lost. I remember I died 3 times in one evening and almost wanting to cry I was so upset. It did make the game that much more intense though because the stakes were so high.

I still login occasionally but it is rare to see more than a few players who aren't idle. I remember that the quality of the community was very high. I don't know if it was because there was a relatively high bar to join and interact with the game that self-selected those kinds of people or what. You had to have the technical chops to connect to the internet, download and install a MUD client and then connect to the appropriate server. Then to be successful at the game itself you had to have a lot of patience, have a good memory and be able to read and react quickly.

The MUD featured in this article, Achaea, I used to play as well way back in the day. I moved on to its sister game, Lusternia, where I met quite a few friends which I still remain in contact with to this day.

It's a shame how modern games don't even come close to the amount of immersion simple text-based games offer. Even popular MMOs don't even scratch the surface on the amount of connection I felt towards these universes. It's a she that they're not as popular.

I feel like Minecraft came close. Interestingly enough, Minecraft has similar features to a lot of MUDs (focus on player-defined and player-modified environments, lack of focus on graphics, fantasy tropes, some programmability, a game centered around navigation).

I just started playing one of its sister games again this week, Aetolia. http://www.aetolia.com

The science-fiction mud I met my ex (and my ex-with-benefits) on is long gone. There are fragments here and there - logs on my hard drive, other people's logs on their own drives, files with room descriptions from when people were building stuff - but the place itself is gone.

There might be an archive of the database. I don't know. There's been some talk of an unofficial panel at an upcoming convention, where a few key players/admins would share stories with younger folks in our community for whom this place is a bit of a legend. Feels weird to think about it.

One of my own characters from there is now the mascot of my publishing company. These things stay with you as your personal mythologies.

There was a Wheel of Time MUD (The Weave) that I and a lot of friends played on and met on for nearly half a decade. It eventually disappeared and nobody's been able to find the source or area files to bring it back.

MUDs are generally so low-maintenance that we kind of wanted to bring it back as a preserve or a museum -- somewhere we could go when we were feeling nostalgic.

I used to play a different Wheel of Time based MUD (WoTMUD), that apparently is still at least partially active: https://twitter.com/WoTMUD and https://www.facebook.com/groups/657945314285131/ (I guess they're having server issues and are trying to raise funds to get it going again?)

Weird reading the Twitter account and recognizing the names of people who were active when I played a decade ago.

Reading the article, for an instant I had a vision of people growing up and moving on from the great digital communities, leaving the glow of desktop or device and spending that time, in the present, with friends and neighbors and loved ones, and I was happy at that. Not in the tragedy that everything decays, but that life and good memories can carry on from it.

I joined SL late in 2008, the author should have been there in 2009-2010, that’s when you could have seen the empty Sims of IBM, Best Buy (Geek squad headquarters was in a volcano)and others. Most of those have been closed or reclaimed for other purposes.

The indications of abandonment is usually its grandeur and emptiness along with the signs advertising events long past.

I love how the Nintendo Animal Crossing series handles this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/04/23/re...

The MUD I played back in high school (Frontier, found on frontier.mudservices.com:7680) has evidently been dead for some years now. When I first played it ~2004 it was already on its second wind, having died and been revived once previously by new management.

I vaguely wonder what happened to it.

I got my first computer because of a MUD. It was a a group of kids in middle school talking about the MUD they were playing that completely lit my imagination and led to me wheedling my parents for months until they agreed to get one. Of course, I wasn't cool enough and those kids never would tell me what MUD they played on. But I found my own and spent way too much time in it, contributing to my first almost-failing grade in high school.

MUDs were also how I got into IRC.

It's too bad almost none of the old VRML communities still exist. I wonder if there are backups of CyberTown worlds floating around somewhere...

Active worlds!

Apparently it got overrun with terrible people before it went away. It used to be so fun just building things. :(

I think AW is still online, although I imagine it's pretty empty by now. It became free in 2013.

https://www.activeworlds.com

I learned a lot from Cybertown back in the day. Hiring staff, advertising my block. I learned HTML and CSS so that I could style my block's message board and that eventually led to what I'm doing now, 14 years later.

Nobody knows you're twelve years old in a virtual world. I think at one point I was head of the city's night club.

CT was one of my biggest inspirations, as well.

There are still copies of Blaxxun Community Server out there[1], so it would be great if someone could get their hands on the original world files somehow. I also tracked down the source code for an early version of the Blaxxun Contact browser plugin and uploaded it to GitHub[2]. Unfortunately, it's old enough that it doesn't include any of the community features.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/multi-user-worlds/downloads/detail...

[2]: https://github.com/docbrown/blaxxun-cc3d

I honestly think that the up and coming VR 'revolution' with Oculus Rift, etc is kind of the wrong way to look at immersion. We already have a way to provide total immersion to a player - in the form of text. It speaks directly to the brain - with none of the motion tracking / headsets nonsense.

Words FTW :)

Could SL world data be used in other FPS games such as TF2, Destiny, and Unreal tournament? Just place the characters in this space for random battles in an ever changing VR space. This would allow for endless reply value and use interesting use of old creations.

I've always preferred to look upon the death of a virtual world with this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWiRetxeviw

Why nobody mentioned BatMUD? https://www.bat.org/ Good old times.

Making a window into the past of MUDs could be fun but quite hard, I think (unlike olduse.net for example)

I think the primary challenge would be getting people to let you access their codebases/area files, which are/were very fiercely guarded.

"enthused"

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