Garrett (#17086)

[bryant]

I don't think more than five people who read this will have any damned idea what I'm talking about.

Raph Koster says Richard Bartle, Randy Farmer, and Pavel Curtis represent the three biggest inflection points in the history of virtual worlds. I won't quibble with the first two, but Pavel Curtis? LambdaMOO again? If you want to talk about user-modifiable virtual worlds, you've got to give James Aspnes credit over Pavel, and if you think that adding a programming language was the big important point, you've got to prioritize Steven White (TinyMUCK) and Larry Foard (TinyMUSH). Pavel's MOO codebase was based on Steven White's TinyMOO, in fact.

I'll try not to bitch about this more than once a decade or so. It's also why Julian Dibbell pisses me off. Well, that and he can't write about MMORPGs without mentioning that he used to be a gold farmer.

Comments

[allegedly.livejournal.com]

I miss text-based gaming!!!!!!

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

I know what you're talking about!

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

I know what you're talking about!

[bryant]

... six. Six people. Hm, seven. Eight?

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Nine! :)

I've recently started MUSHing again, it's still as vital as ever.

[carneggy.livejournal.com]

Ten.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Well, I know what you're talking about, even if I don't have a dog in the fight and my text-based gaming experience is pretty light -- some lp and diku muds.

[adamdray.livejournal.com]

I was never a fan of LambdaMOO (the place or the server), but it made the news a lot and they did Serious Research on it (whatever).

Lambda gets the credit for doing self-governance (a mostly failed experiment on Lambda, right?) first. I don't know if they really did it first, but they get the credit most of the time.

I don't understand why Raph puts Curtis up there as an inflection point, next to Bartle and Farmer, though. I'm as baffled as you.

Edited: I can spell Lambda. I just can't type it, apparently.

[glaciation.livejournal.com]

LambdaMOO was my first experience with coding on a MU* during high school, and even now I'm not clear why I was supposed to feel elite for being on it. I found it to be basically empty of people, but littered with partially-completed projects. PernMUSH was much more of a revolutionary encounter, because it represented a planned shared world.

(Does this make me eleven?)

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

I personally feel Raph Koster generally chock full of shit on...whatever topic he's talking about at the moment.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Koster is, rather

[rfrancis]

Pavel is probably the best self-promoter, you know, EVER in mudding.

I went to a talk he gave on virtual blah blah whatever at a USENIX or LISA once and during Q&A tried to get him to give some credit to the people who'd worked on those darned muds before him, naming White by name, of course. No dice. I guess we're not going to be pals.

Random

It *was* and academic conference...

[frandallfarmer.livejournal.com]

Hopefully the video of the panel will be out soon. For the record, he was self-deprecating on the panel and gave full credit to those who went before him, especially Sean White, who I know he mentioned at least twice.

Watch the talk when it comes out, I think you'll feel a little better. :-)

Randy Farmer

Re: It *was* and academic conference...

[bryant]

That's impressive Net scanning!

I don't have anything against Pavel -- me, I've had a couple of interactions with him and he seemed gracious enough. My impression is Dibbell's book had a lot more to do with the publicity than anything else.

I do think Raph should know better. :)

[totient]

I count nine or ten people on your flist (myself included, obviously) who I'd expect to know what you were talking about. So I don't know whether to increment the count or not.

(#20650)

[flit.livejournal.com]

Pavel Curtis. Shameless self promotion. Yeah.