Tinytalk Episode 001: What's it all about?

Great job. Looking forward to more installments.

Fantastic podcast. I like the idea of cooperative challenges. Thank you for doing this!!

Just a me too comment, this was excellent. I loved the basic division of the topics (theory/story, mush visit/specifics, news).

Jav, what are you using for your software/hardware setup?

How feasible is it for people to record stories (like public radio journalists) and incorporate them into the show?

What are your submission guidelines?

An idea for a future segment:

A 1 minute 'this I believe' recorded segment by people in the community.

I'm impressed. I thought I was listening to something on NPR. That was great Jav! And thanks for stopping by AM :D

Intro

Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and this is the first episode of a brand new podcast, so be gentle with it. As far as I know, this is the first podcast devoted to games in the tinymud family: mush, mux, and the like, and now you're in on the ground floor. My plan for the podcast is to produce a 15-25 minute show every few weeks, with a set of segments, including some of my thoughts on mushing, an interview with someone doing something interesting that's relevant to mushing, a visit to a mud, Q&A, and some news and notes.

Play

So I wanted to start by talking a bit about some things I noticed when watching my son playing at the playground recently. It occurred to me that playground equipment falls into a number of categories that you can organize around how you interact and with how many others.

First, there's the play structures - you know, with the ladders and slides and bridges and poles and so on. what are the key features of a play structure? It supports any number of kids, even one kid alone; it usually offers a variety of activities; and it goes better with imagination. Kids can work together; they can also compete in various ways. A sandbox is similar. Most of the RP and social mushes I've been to are play structures, and they get this really right. The builders provide places to play, but it's up to the players to decide what to do with it.

Then you've got see-saws. These only work with two people, and the two people have to cooperate to make it work. There are games for adults like this, too; I'm thinking particularly of the two-player tabletop RPG Breaking the Ice by Emily Care Boss, where the players are roleplaying the first three dates of a couple. There wouldn't be much point in running a mush for two people (although running one where all the important interactions were dyads would be an interesting experiment), but there are definitely opportunities in mush to develop activities and gimmicks that demand player coordination to function. The simplest example are things like heavy doors that require two players to push them open; adventure muds often do a good job of building challenges that can only be faced by a party of adventurers. I'd like to see more of that in mushes.

Then there's swings. Swings are interesting, because while they're essentially solo affairs, another person is usually necessary in the beginning when you're learning how to use one. Swings are all about mentorship and momentum - finding someone to push us until we learn to get ourselves started and keep ourselves going. Those principles apply to many kinds of mush activities: learning activities, like learning how to build or code are obvious examples (code, especially, as it's still pretty hard for most people to divide mushcoding projects among a group), but also roleplaying activities, where a feature character or faction head serves primarily as a highly visible guidepost to orient new players and push them toward roleplaying opportunities until they can generate them for themselves (and for others).

Play is at the heart of what most of us do with mushes. Obviously, these are not the only models for play. What's important is that mushers keep looking at models, particularly models outside of what's going on right now on their mush, to find new ways to look at our games and new ways to improve them.

If you'd like to comment on these thoughts, or anything in this show, you can do so in response to the show notes, which are posted in Javelin's blog at community.pennmush.org.

Visit to Arabian Moons

I took the opportunity to visit Arabian Moons, a roleplaying MUSH that just opened at the beginning of this month after a long playtesting period. Arabian Moons is set in a world akin to the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Barry Hughart subtitled his novel "Bridge of Birds" as "A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was ", and that's what's going on here – an ancient Arabia that never was, complete with magic, intrigue, and some curious hints about clockwork technology. Staff is friendly and helpful, RP is player-driven, and they seem to be rapidly gaining enough players to reach a critical mass to keep the action flowing.

Arabian Moons uses the FUDGE system, which I've always thought is well-suited to games looking for dice-based resolution mechanics. OtherSpace: New Journeys also uses FUDGE, and a stalled project of mine, Archipelago, will use it if it ever gets done.

If you're not familiar with FUDGE, it stands for "Free Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine". And it really is free to use and adapt, which is great. What people first tend to notice about FUDGE is that the set of character traits, like attributes and skills, can be different for each milieu, so Arabian Moons has, for example, a Chutzpah trait that is related to the ability to perform or resist magic. They've got about 101 player skills that run the gamut from combative to courtly. They've also added Gifts and Faults, which are chosen by the player at chargen, and Wealth, which is assigned by the staff when the character is approved.

The next thing people often notice is that while the underlying mechanics do involve numerical stats, players deal with their stats verbally, on a seven-category basis that runs from Terrible to Super or Superb. Dice rolls modify traits. You might attempt something that you're Good at, and the dice might increase your attempt's result from Good to Great, or drop it from Good to Mediocre. Paul Tevis, in his excellent podcast "Have Games, Will Travel", recently pointed out you get the unexpected when you have degrees of success/failure, and I agree with him completely.

Another neat trick they're playing at Arabian Moons is MUSH/web integration. The in-game news files and bulletin board can also be read through the game's website, because both share a common SQL database. This idea – using an SQL database as a method of interprocess communication between a MUSH and some other information system, like a website, is gaining a lot of momentum. My prediction: one of these days, someone will write a sort of softcode library for doing these kind of interfaces in an elegant and general way – sort of a phpmyadmin for mushcode – and this will become nearly ubiquitous.

You'll find a links to Arabian moons and to a bunch of the other things I've mentioned in the show notes.

News and notes:

• Only one piece of news for now. My mush, M*U*S*H (which is unpronounceable, but spelled ...), is holding a teaching and learning festival in the month of April. Some of the sessions that have been announced include X, Y, and Z. If you want to find out more about them, or you want to come and teach something, you can read more at community.pennmush.org, or log in to mush.pennmush.org 4201 (or 4202 for ssl).

• I'd be delighted to receive news and notes from other mushes. I won't promise to read everything I get on the show, but I will promise to give it a look. You can send those by email to tinytalk@javelin.pennmush.org