A brief history of botting

 Posted by (Visited 21316 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Mar 252008
 

It’s funny to see how the old debates sometimes just don’t change — they just move from being flamewars on forums to being flamewars couched in more polite language, as in the case of the Blizzard vs WoWGlider lawsuit.

The issue of running bots or enhanced clients is very very old. MUDs originally were played via vanilla Telnet. Vanilla Telnet is extremely annoying, because there’s no separate input bar from your output. Given that writing a vanilla Telnet client is very easy, it was not long before there were dedicated clients that wrapped Telnet with additional functionality. The best known of these were TinyFugue and TinTin, and today it seems like zMud is still retaining dedicated users.

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CopyBot

 Posted by (Visited 94216 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 152006
 

It certainly seems like everyone is talking about this issue. Both Cory and Robin have had their say, Second Lifers are organizing boycotts and ‘legislation’, and the original authors of the code that led to CopyBot seem slightly flummoxed by the whole thing.

In short, what’s happening is a small-scale social crisis that brings into sharp relief the split between the hacker-ethic-libertarian-info-must-be-free ethos that underpins much of the technology of virtual worlds, and the rampant commercialism that has actually enabled its embodiment. What we have here is a case of bone fighting blood.

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Mihaly interviews Bartle

 Posted by (Visited 6740 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Sep 222006
 

A Chat with Richard Bartle. Among other things, it discussed the possibility of WoW having an “honorouable retirement” system.

Progenitor says, “OK, well at the moment the top level is 60. I’d like for it to keep accumulating points until you got enough for level 61.”

Progenitor says, “At that point, it would ask you if you wanted to retire with honour. if you said yes, you’d go on the high score list and that would be that, you could come back to chat and stuff but no more achievement-oriented play.”

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Mar 042000
 

Wow, it’s been a while since I updated anything here…. ah well, there’s new stuff today!

I’m going to be at the Game Developer’s Conference next week. I’ll be doing a panel on online community with a bunch of great folks including Brad McQuaid of EverQuest, Toby Ragaini of Asheron’s Call, Mike Sellers formerly of Meridian 59, Jonathan Baron formerly of Kesmai and Air Warrior, Dr Amy Bruckman of MediaMOO, and of course Amy Jo Kim. That should be an all-day thing and quite a lot of fun. I’m reprising the usual roundtable on the Laws of Online World Design with Rich Vogel, and also doing a production lecture.

As part of the tutorial panel, Amy B. was doing slides on history of muds, and it set me on an obsessive tear this weekend. So if you look under Gaming/Misc Writings you’ll find a timeline of important events in the history of development of muds, MMORPGS, and whatever else you choose to call them.

My CD should be getting released by MP3.com in the next week or so. So for all three of you out there who want it, keep an eye out on my artist page there for more info.

A special poke in the ribs goes out to Brad, by the way, for saying in his interview with CGW that he’d pick me to play Aradune in the EverQuest movie. I dunno, Brad, I just don’t see how audiences would go for that… after all, you look soo… California. And I don’t. : Oh well, I imagine that at least Mark Asher (who did the interview & who does Game Spin over at Gamecenter) laughed–I doubt the rest of the world got the joke. Mark, next time footnote the interview. 🙂

Imaginary Realities Reprints

 Posted by (Visited 8345 times)  Game talk, Music, Writing  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 271999
 

Just got word that Imaginary Realities (to my knowledge the only webzine covering muds in any serious manner) has reprinted a couple of items from this website. They also reprinted Marian Griffith’s essay on mud critique from the MUD-Dev list–definitely worth checking out.

On the music front, the CD is mixed but not mastered.

More news once it’s actually done! 🙂