Tinytalk Episode 003: Edumacation

Intro
Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and this episode focuses on learning things with and about MUSH.

Asking questions

First up, I want to say a few things about asking questions on MUSHes. These thoughts are based directly on Eric Raymond and Rick Moen's excellent essay "How to ask questions the smart way", which is linked in the show notes. That essay focuses on how to ask a hacker a question about some software. Even if you don't agree with all of the details – and I don't – it's a very good read. I want to highlight a few parts of it that I think are particularly apt for MUSH players asking questions about a game, about mush coding, or about most anything else on a MUSH channel.

Everything I'm going to say follows from two basic principles of volunteerism. If you're paying for support, of course, none of this may apply.

For a statement of the first principle, I'll quote a part of the essay's Introduction directly: "The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, “Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment."

The second principle is that a good question is one that, when asked and answered publicly, gives the community more benefit than the effort required to answer it. As Raymond and Moen put it, "You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking question – one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others."

There are several good ways to contribute to the community. When you get your question answered, think about how you can share that answer with others. If everyone wrote up their questions and answered somewhere publicly available, that would be a powerful resource. The PennMUSH Faq-o-Matic and the TinyMUX wiki are two good examples of this for technical matters; for things like RP game information, many MUSHes have their own wikis or forums. Another way to make your question serve the community, particularly if you're asking about code, is to take your answer, implement it, and make the implementation freely available for others to use and adapt.

By the way, these two principles also apply to a good answer. A good answer should also be thought-provoking and lead to higher-level understanding and synthesis – which sometimes means a good answer is showing the asker how they can work out the answer themselves. And a good answer should give the community more benefit than the effort required to ask the question. That's why I think it's better to ignore a question that you don't think is worth your time than to provide a flip, sarcastic, or intentionally wrong answer.

How you ask is important, too. It's important to be precise if you're asking about a problem, and to describe the steps you've taken so far to try to solve the problem yourself. You do try to solve the problem with existing resources, help files, game websites, etc. before asking, right? It's also important to focus on your goal and the problem you're having in reaching it. As Raymond and Moen point out, two really poor ways to ask for code help are opposite poles: claiming you've found a bug – maybe you have, but are you really sure you want to imply that because it doesn't work for you it must be broken? – and spending a lot of time disclaiming your lack of knowledge and begging for help – which often comes off sounding like unwillingness to do your own legwork.

The Raymond and Moen essay has a lot of other good advice for MUSH players, including suggestions for how to answer questions helpfully. This is just a taste.

Interview with Bill MacKenty

Bill MacKenty, who plays Boris on M*U*S*H, is an educator and instructional designer at Hunter College Campus Schools. In this interview, we talk about one of his earlier projects, teaching concepts in geometry to middle school students using a Star Trek MUSH.

(No transcript of interview)

Summer reading list

Summertime is nearly upon us, and I thought I'd share my summer reading list for MUSH players and designers. Some of these I've read, so I'm recommending them, and some I haven't read yet, but hope to in the near future.

First, the stuff for roleplayers. As you may know, I think that live-action roleplaying games, or LARPs, are much closer to what we do on RP mushes than tabletop roleplaying games. So my summer reading for roleplayers is the series of anthologies produced from the annual Knudepunkt LARP conference. These books are available as free PDFs, or you can order bound copies. I've read the 2003-2005 books, and plan to read the 2006 and 2007 books. The 2007 book, "Lifelike", has 30 articles, including such titles as:

• Immersion revisited: roleplaying as interpretation and narrative
• Technologies of experience
• Playing Beyond Facts: Immersion as a Transformation of Everydayness
• Breaking the invisible rules: borderline role-playing
• What was the story about: Poetics for Larp in practice
• The ”Bigger! Better! More!” Problem - and Thoughts on How to Solve It
• Impact of relationships on Games
• Confessions of a Schoolteacher: Experiences with Role-playing in Education

And a bunch of other really interesting ones. Link in the show notes.

For the game designers, four books, two I've read and two I plan to. The two I've read are Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds", and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's "The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play anthology". I can't recommend these highly enough. Every mud designer should read these. Really.

The two I plan to read are the original "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals" book, also by Salen and Zimmerman, and Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun for Game Design". Raph Koster, for those who don't already know of him, was responsible for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and has a ton of smart things to say about gaming, and about what makes games fun. Sometimes when I'm deep in the details of designing a mechanic for a mush, I focus too much on making the mechanic work as intended, and not enough on making the mechanic – or the game as a whole – fun to play. Raph's one of my gurus for this.

I've also got the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana by Jess Nevins on my stack. This looks really cool as a source of inspiration even if you're not planning to build a Victorian-era RP game.

What's on your summer reading list? Post a note or leave me a voice message and let me know.

News and notes:
• Hot on the heels of its recent teaching and learning festival, my mush, M*U*S*H has scheduled an Arts Festival for the month of June, and is looking for people who want to display, exhibit, perform, or discuss art during that month. You can read more at community.pennmush.org, or log in to mush.pennmush.org 4201 (or 4202 for ssl).