speaking of #webrings, don't forget about #OurFavoriteVoid! If you love black cats, #smallweb, and #blogging... this is the webring for you!
Travis F W
boosted
so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.
back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.
snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home
Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.
both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.
we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.
what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?
so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.
back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.
snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home
Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.
both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.
we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.
what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?
one project that comes to mind is @raphkoster's criminally underappreciated Metaplace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
it was a little like being able to build your own 2d graphical MOO/MUD, but strongly bent towards the web. it had a scripting language and a flash-based graphical editor. i wish there was more info out there about it.
so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.
back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.
snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home
Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.
both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.
we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.
what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?
Stefano Marinelli
boosted
Some songs hit that nostalgic feeling of a better world we used to live in. Yesterday one particular song hit me at my work desk. It made me get out of my depression and write a blog post.
Remembering we are still human and music makes us feel emotions. It gives us hope when we think there isn't any.
womble
and 1 other
boosted
am overcome with gratitude. after hours of searching usenet, ftp indexers, ftp sites, archive.org, discmaster and every archival tool i know of and coming up with zilch, i jusssst found the MacMOOSE software buried in a professor's apache open dir! he worked in the same research group as MacMOOSE (Epistemology & Learning Group @ MIT) and had the foresight to make a tarball of the lab's FTP server before it died years ago
this is the kind of archival once in a million thing - that someone self-archived an incredibly important and obscure piece of software by accident, and left a copy on the web. thank you prof fred g. martin 🙏
this archive of the MIT ELG ftp server is going straight to archive.org.
just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.
MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996
"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.
Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."
(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)
while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.
i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity
this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/
Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/
#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres
Some songs hit that nostalgic feeling of a better world we used to live in. Yesterday one particular song hit me at my work desk. It made me get out of my depression and write a blog post.
Remembering we are still human and music makes us feel emotions. It gives us hope when we think there isn't any.
am overcome with gratitude. after hours of searching usenet, ftp indexers, ftp sites, archive.org, discmaster and every archival tool i know of and coming up with zilch, i jusssst found the MacMOOSE software buried in a professor's apache open dir! he worked in the same research group as MacMOOSE (Epistemology & Learning Group @ MIT) and had the foresight to make a tarball of the lab's FTP server before it died years ago
this is the kind of archival once in a million thing - that someone self-archived an incredibly important and obscure piece of software by accident, and left a copy on the web. thank you prof fred g. martin 🙏
this archive of the MIT ELG ftp server is going straight to archive.org.
just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.
MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996
"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.
Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."
(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)
while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.
i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity
this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/
Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/
#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres