
The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds - pepys
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/weird-abandoned-spaces-virtual-worlds/
======
minikomi
Does anyone remember something about a minecraft server which is never reset..
and turned into a desolate stripmined wasteland around the spawn point, where
you have to hope to luck into a food cache just to survive..

Edit: it appears the server is called "2b2t" .. searching for it brings up a
ton of interesting stuff:

[https://imgur.com/a/bt3zi](https://imgur.com/a/bt3zi)

~~~
tehbeard
It's a shame they didn't show the inside of the spawn "cube".

Last time I went on there, you spawned atop an uneven cobble floor, those huge
cobble walls surrounding you.

Exiting the cube is hazardous. It's dark, twisty, and full of deep pits that
open up just around corners as you try to escape.

~~~
joshYarnspinner
As a 2b2t player, I would say that whilst it initially appears to be rather
difficult to exit said 'cube', it is in fact rather easy to escape. One must
simply be willing to try a few times and meet new people. Why go near people
who are potentially hostile? There is no loss: one simply restarts with the
same amount as before (0), but one could make a friend which will provide one
with food etc. in order to facilitate easier arrival at 2b2t Immigration. 2b2t
Immigration's officers are rather ... variable. Some will kill on sight (KoS),
whilst others will give render assistance. However, the main factor which has
lead to 2b2t spawn becoming easier is the road system. There are roads every
multiple of 400 blocks up until the 1200 orbital, for the most part, thanks to
the efforts of several players. The roads lead to portals, which in theory
allow you to get to over 100k overworld by walking along nether paths. Within
the 1200 radius there are a multitude of farms, and within the latter radius
there are far more indeed. After about 1k the landscape appears to be vaguely
naturally generated, and after 5k all destruction of spawn like intensity
ceases to be.

------
matheusd
In the late 90's there was also Active Worlds[1][2]. It was one of the first
online communities I frequented.

It seemed to follow exactly the path second life went, except with the
diminished number of people that were on the internet at the time: very high
initial interested (the "wow - 3d internet factor") and very little engagement
after that.

I _really_ thought 3d web would be a thing. :)

[1] [http://activeworlds.com](http://activeworlds.com)

[2]
[https://osantana.me/vintage/borolandia/artigo03/index.html](https://osantana.me/vintage/borolandia/artigo03/index.html)
(article in portuguese, pics of a brazilian AW server back from 2000)

~~~
angersock
Active Worlds was the coolest thing I ever goofed around in, at least at the
time. The COFMeta (metaverse) and Mars worlds were my favorite.

It was basically the 3D equivalent of Geocities. You could wander for hours,
looking at the cool little houses and weird displays people had built. You
could even do simple scripting with keyframes for animating objects by
toggling their visibility. :)

It was so cool, and I even ended up buying a little AWLD stock. The market
imploded of course, and the people running it apparently did some scummy
things (see Shamus Young's accounting here:
[http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720](http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720)
).

The only thing really missing was modeling; to solve this, you'd run across
giant prefab yards, and then write down model names. Mars had a sort of
boneyard for this purpose.

They also did kinda-cool tie-ins with other media, like a world for _The 13th
Floor_ and the X-Files movie. I miss that sense of "Oh man, this is the
future!".

------
andyjohnson0
I thought the article was a bit brief. A better one that was recently posted
on HN [1] describes exploring university campuses that were built in Second
Life and subsequently abandoned.

Some thoughts:

Looking at the pictures in [1], I was reminded that _people designed and built
all this stuff_. Spent months of their lives and used their creativity. I
wonder how they feel? Maybe like the designers of the Athens [2] and Sochi [3]
Olympic sites.

Also, back in 2003 Cyan Worlds (the developers of Myst) created an online
world called Uru Live [4]. They closed it due to lack of demand and (IIRC)
scaling problems, but at some point it seems to have been brought back to life
by a community effort [5]. So, abandoned worlds don't have to stay that way
and the work of their designers doesn't have to be wasted.

The first time I recall encountering the concept of virtual world architecture
was in Greg Egan's book Permutation City [6]. Anyone know of anything earlier?

Finally, it would be cool if virtual worlds could be linked by gateways, with
some way for player metadata to migrate across the gateways.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400)

[2]
[http://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abandon...](http://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abandoned-
athens-olympic-2004-venues-10-years-on-in-pictures)

[3] [http://weburbanist.com/2014/09/09/post-olympic-
abandonment-s...](http://weburbanist.com/2014/09/09/post-olympic-abandonment-
sochi-already-on-the-road-to-ruin/)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_Online:_Uru_Live](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_Online:_Uru_Live)

[5] [http://mystonline.com/](http://mystonline.com/)

[6]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City)

~~~
sp332
Sure, William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ was written a decade earlier and
popularized the term "cyberspace". His trilogies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy)
have descriptions of virtual spaces designed for various reasons.

Snow Crash was published in 1992 and popularized the term "avatar".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash)
Its virtual spaces were pretty elaborate.

~~~
andyjohnson0
I wasn't being very clear, but by "virtual architecture" I meant something
like a design practice that extends conventional built architecture to exploit
the novel properties of virtual spaces. Like physically or topologically
impossible buildings.

Gibson's cyberspace (at least in Neuromancer) is just a 3D grid containing
basic shapes. His later works do describe more elaborate worlds, but as far as
I remember they are copies of the real world (eg. Chia's virtual copy of
Venice in Idoru or the world inside the Aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive).

The Street in Snow Crash is nearer to what I was thinking of.

Edid: The Virtual Venice belonged to Chia in Idoru [1], not Marly in Count
Zero as I originally said.

[1]
[http://www.procolharum.com/awsop_novel3.htm](http://www.procolharum.com/awsop_novel3.htm)

~~~
sp332
There is a beach at the end of Neromancer that seems to have a city in the
distance, but if you walk toward it, you just end up where you started. It's a
bit sparse though, I see your point.

------
jccalhoun
In the original story [http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-
abandon...](http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-abandoned-
college-campuses-of-second-life/) there are people defending Second Life and
its educational usage. I didn't see any students offering their perspective,
though. I wonder if students who take these courses actually find them useful.

------
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.

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around.
I still have characters on a couple of them that I connect to every so often,
like maybe once a year or so.

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.

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s/early 2000s 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.

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)

~~~
bamie9l
Can you recommend any for a newcomer to look at?

~~~
peckrob
It's really a question of what you're into. MUDs run the gamut from purely
social with little combat (a bit like IRC with more functionality) to
traditional medieval fantasy hack-and-slash to sci-fi space combat.

Some have specialized clients they recommend; I'm a big fan of just using
TinyFugue [0] in a shell window, but that's just me. :)

MUD Connector [1] is a great place to start, as it has a few thousand listed
with average sizes, themes, reviews, etc. All searchable, so you can find what
appeals to you.

As a _very general_ rule, start with the bigger more active ones. The smaller
ones can be very fun and you can make great, close friendships with other
players, but they also can tend to get kind of insular and hard for a new
player to penetrate.

[0] [http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/](http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/)
(it's also in most package managers and in homebrew for Mac)

[1]
[http://www.mudconnect.com/index.html](http://www.mudconnect.com/index.html)

~~~
bamie9l
Thanks very much :)

------
paublyrne
I signed up for Second Life, and jogged around it for an hour or two. An
Oculus Rift version would be intriguing. I found my original experience to be
aimless. I wandered off and found a sort of castle or something, and enjoyed
rambling around it, but ultimately felt there was nothing to do.

~~~
norea-armozel
As an SL user, that's the norm with regard to the platform. It just seems LL
hasn't a clue or just doesn't care if users stick around. I'm not sure how
they make money when the vast majority of the users are now bots and the
remainder aren't as cash rich as they use to be (Anshe Chung comes to mind).

If there's anything that future VR platform developers can learn from SL is
this: engage your users, own up to mistakes, and be willing to break things
that depended on kludges to fix things. If you do that you'll be light years
ahead of the competition.

------
fennecfoxen
You can see lots more if you're willing to go text-based. Like LambdaMOO:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO)
(telnet: lambda.moo.mud.org 8888) - not the oldest but one of the oldest
that's substantially community-built (it doesn't take much to get permission
to make things) and still running.

~~~
soylentcola
MUDs and the like were my first thought as well. I guess they don't have the
immediate visual effect of the later graphical worlds but over the years I
occasionally log back on to some of the old MUDs I used to frequent if they're
still up and running. Always weird to see a place that used to be filled with
at least 20-40 people now only populated by maybe the sysop's character idling
for months in the public channel.

~~~
distances
Interestingly MUDs still have some niche to fill. Granted, a lot of them
withered roughly a decade ago when MMORPGs became mainstream, but there are
some that are fully alive and kicking. For example, Aardwolf MUD [1] seems to
have about 300 players online most of the time, with peaks of 400 players [2].

[1] telnet: aardmud.org 23 [2]
[http://www.aardwolf.com/stats.html](http://www.aardwolf.com/stats.html)

------
toothbrush
I was never into _Second Life_ , but it would be really cool if this sort of
thing were to be maintained (perhaps read-only) by an archive.org-alike
organisation... Especially with decreasing digital storage costs this should
be feasible, and it would be really cool if a generation from now people could
poke around in these way dated spaces, a bit like someone today dusting of an
Apple II lying in a cupboard... :)

------
j_s
Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434760)

~~~
mhurron
You can get that any time a game starts dying or there's just no compelling
reason to go to places because something so much better has been released
since then.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The biggest thing with WoW, is they push end game content so heavily, and part
of the way they do that is accelerating leveling through old content.

So while you used to have to grind through most of these regions, players now
end up leveling much faster and only seeing a few of them.

------
sotoer
Reminds me of this [http://www.avclub.com/article/theres-hidden-beauty-
abandoned...](http://www.avclub.com/article/theres-hidden-beauty-abandoned-
world-warcraft-citi-203779)

~~~
WalterGR
I remember another similar article, which wasn't specific to a particular
service. I probably found the link on HN, but I can't find anything.

There's this, which I don't think is what I was thinking of:

The abandoned college campuses of Second Life

[http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-
abandon...](http://fusion.net/story/181901/we-took-a-tour-of-the-abandoned-
college-campuses-of-second-life/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079400)

------
troymc
Most of the no-longer-updated stuff in Second Life eventually vanishes
completely, because it costs money to own land (rent it). A small parcel isn't
super-expensive though, so some people forget about it.

~~~
duskwuff
And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "real estate" owned by schools and
corporations is tied to some long-forgotten expense account, so it may keep on
getting paid for a very long time if nobody's paying attention. Either that,
or Linden Labs may even be giving free service for some schools as a
promotional deal.

