boris's blog

Hi community.

I currently manage and pay for 4 websites and one mush. I think I probably pay about $400.00 a year for all of these services combined.

I like these services because someone else takes care of support, security, and patching. I don't like these services because I lose some flexibility.

In the last year or so, virtual private servers have gained some traction - it looks like a year on a vps server with 512 RAM would cost me $240.00 (and my time). I liked the idea of dedicated servers, but they are waaaay out of my price range.

Because at some level, all text-based games are related, I thought it appropriate to share this link with the community.

http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/a-note-on-the-word-zork/

From the article:

The lowdown on Zork’s name, inasmuch as a lowdown has been provided in print, was given by authors Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson in 1979 in the article “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” Computer 12:4, 51-59 (April 1979):

part 1 part 2 part 3

We began our explorations of MUSHes today. In a nutshell, the activity was slightly disappointing, but I learned something important (especially at the end of the class).

part 1 part 2

I've started teaching a small group of 4th and 5th graders (age 10 and 11) about text based games. We are meeting in an after school program. I wrote my first introduction about this project here and cross-posted it to to a couple of community listserves.

I work in K- 12 school (ages 6 to 18). I am thinking about designing an after-school course on text-based games.

I think I can sell it to parents "A game your kids have to read..." and I'm pretty sure I can generate enough excitement with the kids to get 5 or 6 students. The class would last an entire school year (September to June), meeting once a week. So we would be looking at about 30 class meeting times (probably more like 20 with interruptions and field trips).

I have thought about this a bit, and here's my basic outline:

Text based games

The classics:

I'm creating an IC coded assistant for my players. Each player will have their own assistant. The purpose of these assistants are to help new players with common tasks, and act as an intermediary between coded and the IC game space.

Almost of all of the commands on my mush follow a syntax like: +cgsk/pol, or +priority/pol 1=12

Cryptic and unintuitive.

Behold! our heritage!!! This is the original Fortran code which ran colossal caves, which then mutated into adventure, which then turned into zork, and inspired Bartle et. al. to write MUD 1, etc etc etc!!!!

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=460192

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/15/interactive-fiction-on-the-iphone/

neat! I know iPhones have an SSH client now, so I'm sure mushing could happen!

Hi everyone !

I added a new page to our wiki today, and I'm inviting you to to add your .2 cents!

http://community.pennmush.org/node/488

In the nebulous-ness that is our community, I'm wondering "what exactly constitutes the text-based gaming community?" Please add any sites or RSS feeds you regularly parse.

Boris