
A Mansion Filled with Hidden Worlds: When the Internet Was Young - anarbadalov
https://undark.org/article/wilo-evans-broad-band/
======
NelsonMinar
I used to log in to LambdaMOO about once a year just to keep my account
active. But it started feeling not just like a museum, but a mausoleum, and I
let my account lapse.

Many of the virtual environment ideas from LambdaMOO exist now in modern
games. But one big idea was mostly lost, the idea that players of the game
could also program the game. Not just decorate their own house but write code
to give the objects in that house functionality. Roblox has this in it, as
does Minecraft in a limited way, but mostly it is a lost idea.

~~~
mbostleman
A big part of Secondlife is object and scripting development.

~~~
derefr
I’ve only heard of Second Life, not tried it, so can I ask: is that scripting
capability “online”? I.e. is this more like a multiuser Smalltalk environment
(or an SQL server with stored procedures), where the IDE and the REPL and the
compiler are all “within” the shared space; or is the toolchain offline, and
you just push compiled modules to the server?

LambdaMOO was the former: you were using existing objects to code new objects,
by sending the existing objects messages on a live server. (A bit like writing
bash scripts on a multitenant Unix server where everyone can drop things into
/usr/local/bin, really.)

I feel like there’s a wide-open space in the market right now for a game like
Minecraft or Mario Maker where everything is built out of “blocks” with
behaviours—but where these block-type behaviours are scripted within the
envrionment itself, so you can create and share new “block types” without the
need for any meta-VR commands. Like a Steam Workshop service, but one that is
intended for players, rather than for game developers. A game with an
scientific invention economy.

~~~
amiga-workbench
The Second Life world is made from prims (primitive shapes), these prims can
be textured, adjusted and grouped together to build objects, buildings, pretty
much anything.

Each prim can have event driven, procedural scripts attached to them. There is
basic RPC functionality available in LSL and objects can communicate with each
other via chat channels, email (if I remember rightly every prim has a UUID
and email address) or via a XML HTTP request.

Prims can be programatically moved or altered, there is a system for drawing
particles, rendering dynamic textures on surfaces and much later I believe
surfaces became capable of rendering web documents on them.

There is scope for a ridiculous amount of stuff. One of my favourite little
projects was the Stargates you found on the grid, they all have unique
addresses and work accurately just like in the show, they're pretty neat for
getting around.

------
acconrad
When I was young I played a game like this called Modus Operandi by
Simutronics and it was some of the most fun I'd ever had. Apparently there is
a resurgence[1] of this type of gaming and a community behind it. I think
there is still room for MUDs in the age of hyper-realistic, COD-style games.
It just requires a different set of user experiences, much like how books are
still engaging in spite of TV and movies.

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/4d2qid/anyone_remember...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/4d2qid/anyone_remember_simutronics_modus_operandi_its/)

~~~
benbreen
I played that too, back when it was on AOL! But my favorite was another
Simutronics game, Gemstone III (which later became Gemstone IV). To this day,
it was the most interesting online community I've ever been a part of, in part
because the majority of the 2,000-odd people who played it at any given time
were legitimately trying to be in character, and in part because the
experience of an emergent virtual world was still so new back in 95/96\. I
wrote an essay about it here, if anyone is interested:

[http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me-
elanth...](http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me-elanthia-an-
archaeology-of-gemstone-iii)

~~~
kydel
Gemstone III was my after school haven for the latter half of the 90s. I'd get
off of the school bus and rush to log in. I would curse family members when
they had to use the phone and I had to log off. I taught myself to touch type
to keep up with what was going on. I took hours to roll new characters, and
leveling up in that game was the single biggest video game high I've ever
experienced (Dark Souls boss victories coming in second). I remember so much,
so vividly: the virtual selflessness of healers taking on my wounds, fighting
rats in the sewers, taking on jobs in the city to earn money, memorizing
strings of map directions to move between hunting grounds, running to the
safety of guards around city gates, and especially, especially, the
friendliness of the people.

~~~
kian
What an amazing game. I played for almost a decade as Ascious Alturas and
Lyleris Bowstorm. I still remember shooting a friend who was statistically
inclined hundreds of times to figure out the damage factors for bows when they
were finally introduced. There has never been a game since with such an
amazingly interesting player-base.

------
Fordrus
Man, so many memories. I was involved in a MUD called Dragonstone and had so
much freaking fun, when I first entered college I had to stop cold turkey
because every time I tried to announce that I had to quit to get my homework
done, saying goodbye to treasured online associates made me so sad I couldn't
follow through on leaving.

I also started one of my own, which gave me my first brush with people doxxing
me (not as serious back then - I was more worried that one of them would
figure out how to hack my computer - I was not a terribly sophisticated user
of the internet back then - probably still am not today. XD)

I learned a bit about algorithms from our head coder, and we put our heads
together to make an herbalism system that he should still be quite proud of, I
think. Listing each room as a terrain type, a list of herbs that could grow in
that terrain, and a random chance that the herbs would grow in any given room.

Man, what a strange time and exciting time that was! :)

------
jrauser
If you're interested in more about LambdaMOO, Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life is
a good read: [https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion-
Virtual/dp/08050...](https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion-
Virtual/dp/0805036261)

~~~
Miktor
PDF version of "My Tiny Life" is available for zero dollars on lulu dot com:
[http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-dibbell/my-tiny-life-
crime-a...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-dibbell/my-tiny-life-crime-and-
passion-in-a-virtual-world/ebook/product-17492539.html)

------
floren
I spent many many hours on a MUD called Magrathea back in middle school. I
pretty much picked it off a list of MUDs because I was a fan of Hitchhiker's
Guide. I loved it and was pretty sad when it went offline. I poked around
later and realized a lot of Magrathea was pretty stock ROM mud code, although
there were some pretty neat custom areas and a cyborg class that I really
enjoyed. I actually got in contact with one of the original developers and got
the game database (minus users, of course), but the Internet just doesn't need
another Diku MUD, especially one whose userbase dissipated almost 20 years
ago.

Lambda is interesting but poorly documented in a lot of places. I think bit
rot and time means that a lot of the knowledge on how to actually code / use
Lambda has gone away. I spent some time circa 2009 playing and hacking in
Lambda, built a few things, but the on-line coding system is extremely
frustrating. HellMOO built off LambdaCore and is the only truly successful
Lambda-based MOO that I know of, excepting of course LambdaMOO itself.

------
rootforce
What I’ve always enjoyed is that in MUD’s content is a first class citizen.
Much of the effort that would be put into graphical assets was instead put
into story, mechanics and balance. As a result, some MUD’s have fantastically
complex political and economic systems.

------
throwvondannen
I'd recommend to anyone not familiar with the genre, to grab a modern client
(Mudlet¹ is cross platform and actively in development) and give it a go.

Especially those who vaguely miss _the spirit of the old internet_ might
(re)discover a lot of it in these often tight knit, yet welcoming,
communities.

Tip: Stay away from strongly RP focused communities until you're not
preoccupied with just thinking about navigation and the various systems
anymore. Although, a lot of what makes MUDs tick should resonate strongly with
anyone who wrote a program before, so it shouldn't take long to adapt.

¹[https://www.mudlet.org/](https://www.mudlet.org/)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> these often tight knit, yet welcoming, communities.

Are they really welcoming? Over the last few years I have occasionally
revisited some 1990s-era communities (Usenet groups, forums on a dedicated
website, mailing lists...) in search of a sense of tight-knit connectedness
lost with modern huge networks like Facebook or Reddit. Yet I almost always
found that those 1990s communities that had survived, had eroded down to a
handful of posters who were mostly angry and cantankerous, or outright
mentally ill. Thus, it was hard for any newcomer to feel comfortable among
them. So, I am now very wary about going back to any kind of old-school
community, and it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that it was
worthwhile to even try.

~~~
throwvondannen
Yeah, some are bogged down in politics and dominated by a few Methuselah with
ego problems, but I've played plenty and those are in the minority and stick
out like sore thumbs. Keep away from MUDs that take themselves too serious and
you're good. Or look out for freshly established ones. Aardwolf would be one
example with a very friendly population. Gamewise it's a hodgepodge of
creative writing and doesn't follow any strong guidelines.

------
peckrob
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. Some were even at my wedding!

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around.
I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light
RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since
the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels
like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.

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.

Towards the end of 2005, one of the MUDs I had played on quite a bit from the
mid 90s on decided it was time to call it a game. I had been with the game
through multiple server moves over the years, but the player base just wasn't
there anymore.

So on the last night, a handful of us gathered one last time. I thought it was
going to be a bit like a funeral, but it ended up being a whole lot of fun. We
spent hours that night reminiscing about old plots, talking about old
characters, remembering all the good times we had spent together, and swapping
contact information. Some of us had been playing together for years; it almost
felt like we were saying goodbye to a dear friend in the best way we knew how.

Most of us were there until the final minutes. We all raised our [virtual]
glasses in a toast. Then, the lights went out, the server shut down and the
game was no more. In retrospect, it reminded me of the final minutes of
Babylon 5 [1].

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s 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.

Games like these are by definition social constructs. They take on a life of
their own. And like all things, the end will eventually come. But rather than
mourn its passing, I prefer to remember all the good times and treasure all
the friendships that I made (many of whom I still keep up with to this day).
The game may be gone, but the memories will always be with us.

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY)

------
aalleavitch
I want to say that a lot of these kind of gems still hide in the corners of
the internet. There are both awesome and horrible things going on in VR chat,
for instance.

------
kirillsimin
I used to play Ishar MUD back in the 90s. I think it still exists, run on a
flash player.

------
egypturnash
Holy shit, I can’t believe I just read a story about LambdaMoo that didn’t
mention the Mr. Bungle incident. Is that legal?

[http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-r%61pe-in-
cyberspace...](http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-r%61pe-in-cyberspace/)
\- content warning: rape, or rape-like things, it’s complicated

——

MU*s were pretty important to me. I fell into them, I left them, I came back,
I met the person who’s now my significant other and creative partner on a
high-concept SF furry muck he ran. Some of my circles still hang out on them;
I find I just can’t go back. I only have so much creative energy and I’d
rather spend it on comics than on late-night role playing.

------
agumonkey
Felt the same the night I tried tor web. Nothing interesting came out of it,
but the surprise factor is so strong.

