
What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? - sizzle
http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-digital-cities-are-abandoned/373941/
======
tkiley
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.

~~~
sdrothrock
> 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.

~~~
jarxg
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.

------
lotharbot
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](http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php)
(includes links to many of the still-active sites and groups.)

------
SoftwareMaven
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?

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

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

------
zcdziura
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.

~~~
dkhar
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).

------
egypturnash
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.

~~~
sdrothrock
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.

~~~
azylman
I used to play a different Wheel of Time based MUD (WoTMUD), that apparently
is still at least partially active:
[https://twitter.com/WoTMUD](https://twitter.com/WoTMUD) and
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/657945314285131/](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.

------
tfigueroa
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.

------
LarryMade2
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.

------
astrostl
I love how the Nintendo Animal Crossing series handles this:
[http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/04/23/re...](http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/04/23/returning-
to-my-animal-crossing-new-leaf-ghost-town.aspx)

------
gwillen
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.

------
cdr
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.

------
cypher543
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...

~~~
drpancake
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.

~~~
cypher543
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...](https://code.google.com/p/multi-user-
worlds/downloads/detail?name=cs-7-0-win-full.exe)

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

------
CodeGlitch
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 :)

------
leanthonyrn
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.

------
saraid216
I've always preferred to look upon the death of a virtual world with this
video:

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

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Why nobody mentioned BatMUD? [https://www.bat.org/](https://www.bat.org/) Good
old times.

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

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

------
hawleyal
"enthused"

