The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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1:37pm on Wednesday, 19th January, 2022:
Anecdote
Today, I ran the class I always run at this time of the year, in which I get my students to play MUD2.
Formally, it's a lab not a class. Students had been told they had to go onto campus for labs, but I emailed them telling them that they didn't for this one. I wouldn't be there, but if they wanted to catch COVID-19 off each other then they were welcome to show up in person. Instead, they were to access the game using telnet from wherever was convenient for them.
I explained how to do this using the university's virtual desktop system, Horizon. I pre-recorded a video explaining to them what to do. I began my Zoom webinar with a screen pointing them at the instructions and the walk-through I had mentioned in the email. It was all looking good.
Unfortunately, all the slots to use the virtual desktop were in use. My students could not access the virtual lab that they were timetabled to be able to access. They were not happy with this. I was not happy with this.
Fortunately, as I'm in a Computer Science department, my students are at home with computers and most were able to download the executable for Tera Term and run it on their own machine. I can't require them to do this, which is why the instructions used Horizon, but a good many of them did so anyway. We had 30 players in the game at one point (out of 67 who should have been in it). This is actually quite good for any kind of class these days.
It's interesting to see how few students are familiar with command-line interfaces these days. I was asked "How do I pick up this key?", and had to explain that you just type what you want to do: PICK UP KEY, or GET KEY, or simply G KEY.
The students who made it to the game seemed to like it. Some of them really liked it. I doubt they'll continue to play it in their spare time, and even if they did they'd be playing with only a handful of other players. Still, at least they know now what a text world is like, and that graphics are an interface, not the game itself.
Horizon is often problematic these days, as a consequence of changes that had to be made when students were using it (or selling their access to it for others to use) for cryptocurrency mining.
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Copyright © 2022 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).