Tinytalk Episode 016: Happy 2008!

Intro

Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and happy new year. Since a bunch of ideas for future episodes are in the works, I'm going to use this episode to talk about some of my own MUSH new year plans.

My 2008 MUSH resolutions

First up, some personal MUSH new year's resolutions. Here are the five things I hope to accomplish mush-wise this year.

1. I had this great admin retreat with the admin of M*U*S*H back in September, and we made a bunch of good plans for changes to the game, implemented many of them at least partially, had a player meeting in December, and now I want to finish the implementations and tie up the loose ends. Like everyone, my spare time is limited, but I want to put a bunch of it into M*U*S*H.

2. I'd like to play some indie roleplaying games on mushes. I'd like to play a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach on M*U*S*H, where Walker built me some tools for running one. I'd like to play a game of Primetime adventures on someone else's MUSH – anybody running one?

3. One of my other online hobbies is nethack, a text-based solo dungeon crawl game. I'd really like to build a nethack themed area for a mush – or maybe a nethack-themed mud. A couple of years ago for April Fools, a fellow M*U*S*H admin, Cheetah, and I replaced M*U*S*H with an LPmud with the same main grid layout and a bunch of monsters (twinks, the admin, etc.) to chase the players around. I was really impressed with MudOS and the Dead Souls Mudlib that we used for it, and I wouldn't mind playing around with that again. On the other hand, doing it in a mush would probably result in a combat system that could be used by others, and would really emphasize the social flavor.

4. I'd like to do more charity projects in the MUSH community. I've had MUSHers sponsor me in a walkathon, I've toyed with the idea of a mushathon. I'd really like to see something that involves large segments of the MUSH community. More on this at the end of the show.

And 5., of course, is that I'd like to keep putting out Tinytalk regularly with material that's interesting to you and hopefully new or thought-provoking. Anybody you'd like me to interview? Anything you'd like to talk about or hear me talk about? Let me know.

I'd like to know if you have goals for the year too? Leave me a voice mail or send me an email.

Staff rotation

Another thing that happens regularly on my MUSH at the start of each year is that two of the three Head Wizard positions rotate to different Wizards. I've done rotating Head Wizships on several MUSHes, social and roleplaying, but haven't seen it done too much elsewhere, so I'm going to make the argument for it right now.

There's a tendency in MUSH administration for people to specialize. Code wizards and building wizards and roleplaying wizards and so on. This is especially true in roleplaying MUSHes that are heavily factionalized or use themes with strongly distinct groups or spheres, like World of Darkness, where you'll have sphere admin who focus on plotting or the like within a specific faction. The apex of this was probably the Architect system developed by Geoff Tuffli originally for Taeis MUSH back in the early 1990's, which really leveraged the advantages of having discrete responsibilities for different admin.

Specialization has many benefits, of course. It gives admin the chance to focus on their specialty without distraction, to get really good at it, and to develop relationships with players around it. Moreover, some admin have different interests than others, and what one finds fun, another might find tedious.

But there's downsides, too. Admin can become distanced from anything that's not in their area. Conversely, admin can get so attached to their own area that they work to its benefit without enough consideration of the MUSH as a whole. Or without enough consideration for the other admin they're working with.

That's why I think it's beneficial to required each admin to take a turn at a role that requires them to have a game-wide vision but which doesn't require them all to learn to be great coders. Giving everyone a turn at being Head Wizard, explicitly tasked to do things like take a broad view of the game, manage admin conflict, and serve as a player ombudsperson can expose all the admin to this kind of thinking, and make them better admin even when they're off rotation. Give it a try?

One Laptop Per Child

In the top segment of this show, I mentioned that I'd like to see the MUSH community come together around some charity projects. I'll mention one that I think is pretty neat and that I've recently donated to: the one laptop per child project, or OLPC.

OLPC provides laptops to kids in developing countries. A $200 donation sends a child their XO laptop. And in terms of engineering, these laptops are a great study in how to build a rugged, child-friendly, educational computer for a low price. The laptop is a bit more than 3 pounds, and the keyboard is sealed, rubberized, and sized for kids. It transforms into an ebook reader and a gaming system. It's got built-in wifi, speakers, microphone, and videocamera. It's flash memory-based, no moving parts, so it's highly power efficient, and you can get kits to charge the battery by solar or hand-crank if necessary. It runs a Fedora-based linux OS, with an unusual lightweight desktop called Sugar. Most of the system software is written in python and there's a keyboard button that splits the screen to show the source code for whatever's running. It detects other XOs nearby and sets up a mesh network, for educational collaboration. It's pretty neat.

Ten MUSHers with $20 can send one of these to a kid. Of course, donating money is not the only way to support a worthy cause. In fact, if you have code expertise, OLPC could use people to help port and test activities for the XO laptop – they provide a software emulator for developers to use. Links in the show notes.

There are plenty of other good projects too that can draw on the MUSH community's strengths: in writing, in online social interaction, in coding and computer skills, and in volunteer organizing. How about it?