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Comment by tkiley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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