The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:38am on Friday, 19th January, 2024:
Anecdote
Every year, in order to ensure that the students on my CE317 Virtual Worlds module know what a virtual world is, I make them play MUD2. Hmm, perhaps "make" is too strong a word, given that I'm not allowed to use tasers on then, but if they don't play it and an exam question comes up asking them about "a virtual world you have played" then some of them may be lacking the requisite experience.
Yesterday was the day when I ran MUD2 in a lab this academic year. 45 students out of 90+ showed up, which is pretty good. The lab was for 2 hours, but I said they could leave after 20 minutes of play if they wanted. Most didn't.
Interestingly, there was a problem half-way through: the game crashed. I thought it was something I'd done wrong replacing treasure that had been cashed in, but it crashed again a few minutes later and didn't reboot. It was a server-side problem, then. There had been some sudden slownesses while we were playing, so I wasn't entirely taken off-guard. It was 15-20 minutes before I remembered how to reboot it without knowing the root password so I could kill the right process.
Now you might have thought that given this was a 2-hour lab with a requirement that you only need play for 20 minutes, a lot of students would have left when it looked as if the game wasn't coming back. Around 20 did so, in fact. However, the rest remained and waited patiently for the reboot. They didn't have to wait, they just did: they wanted to keep on playing. I was quite taken by this, given how most modern gamers will reject text the moment they see it's text. Maybe there are so few text games around these days that it's a novelty for them.
I left the lab at the end of the session and students were still playing. I doubt they'll play again, though: it doesn't have critical mass under normal circumstances, so if they came back in the evening they'd find it pretty well deserted. When there are a couple of dozen of them playing together, though, it brings back memories of the old days.
Sigh.
Oh well, you can't stop progress even if it isn't always progress.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).