How to online conference in 2020? Make a MUD!
October 22, 2020 10:55 AM Subscribe
Using Game Design to Make Virtual Events More Social.
A thoughtful writeup of how this years's Roguelike Celebration conference was designed as a MUD-like social space, avoiding some of the pitfalls of online events in 2020. "Instead of using Zoom and Discord, what if we built our own event platform and social space, built from the ground up to foster the sorts of intimate social interaction that made the in-person event special?"
MUDs are so cool. It's kinda a bummer that as technology advanced and servers became easier to run these became less common.
One of my happiest early Internet memories was wandering around a MUSH collecting currency at random that could be spent to add new rooms and locations to the world. It was an accessible collaborative roleplaying experience you don't really see anywhere anymore.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:21 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
One of my happiest early Internet memories was wandering around a MUSH collecting currency at random that could be spent to add new rooms and locations to the world. It was an accessible collaborative roleplaying experience you don't really see anywhere anymore.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:21 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
The MU* I was active on for about ten years starting in 2001 is still online but saw activity fade away. The big problem it was never able to solve was finding a way for people to easily log in and interact using a browser. Some attempted to create something, but they were never able to get exactly what they wanted so that the next generation could log in and interact using clickable buttons to execute commands rather than having to use the command line.
It did see one good burst of activity near the start of quarantine/self-isolation, but the activity flamed out.
posted by Fukiyama at 11:28 AM on October 22, 2020
It did see one good burst of activity near the start of quarantine/self-isolation, but the activity flamed out.
posted by Fukiyama at 11:28 AM on October 22, 2020
I love this! It hits on all the emotional reasons I have yet to really engage with any of the online conferences (both professional and hobby) which have happened over the past six months.
I'm struck that it was 28 years ago that I was helping to build content into The Mud Institute mudlib, in a space much like this - where the primary purpose of going there was to meet people and learn, not to play a game. Intriguing how this effort re-purposes decades of reflection on some of those core interfaces and interactions.
posted by meinvt at 11:40 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm struck that it was 28 years ago that I was helping to build content into The Mud Institute mudlib, in a space much like this - where the primary purpose of going there was to meet people and learn, not to play a game. Intriguing how this effort re-purposes decades of reflection on some of those core interfaces and interactions.
posted by meinvt at 11:40 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
I love the idea of this, I love that a conference was interested in messing using it and I love that gather.town is also trying this out. I also feel old because these seems like an indentical retread of the game-as-workspace enthusiasm of the mid-to-late naughts. I’m excited, but this seems like an ephemeral artifact of this COVID moment and not a pathway to the future.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:24 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 12:24 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
Virtual worlds exist and are perfect for this. It's much more comfortable to gather in a beautiful virtual space than to awkwardly talk over one another while kids keep running around in background and cats keep jumping on the camera. Videophones were a sci-fi dream of a previous generation, though, and virtual worlds carry a stigma of "perverts and nerds," so we're stuck with hellworld conferencing.
posted by Lonnrot at 12:34 PM on October 22, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by Lonnrot at 12:34 PM on October 22, 2020 [10 favorites]
I'm glad people are thinking about these things. I've only looked at one virtual conference—some sort of ComicCon, I think—and it was terrible. A bunch of prerecorded talking-head youtube videos unlocking at various times, with nothing I could find where people were supposed to talk to each other, let alone to the panelists. I wouldn't watch such videos under ordinary circumstances and nothing about that conference made me any more interested.
posted by one for the books at 12:57 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by one for the books at 12:57 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
Comic conventions would be an interesting experiment as you’d have to find ways to interfere with chat due to attendance. Can you imagine trying to chat during a virtual Hall H panel? Maybe virtual seating of some sort, and you can only chat with people in your “vicinity” in the room.
posted by bixfrankonis at 1:22 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by bixfrankonis at 1:22 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
Virtual worlds exist and are perfect for this. It's much more comfortable to gather in a beautiful virtual space than to awkwardly talk over one another while kids keep running around in background and cats keep jumping on the camera.… Videophones were a sci-fi dream of a previous generation, though, and virtual worlds carry a stigma of "perverts and nerds," so we're stuck with hellworld conferencing.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I once saw Raph Koster suggest that Facebook was essentially what all social virtual worlds aspired to be, and that’s why it “won”. It’s not, I think, that virtual world are the domains of perverts and nerds, but rather that it is essentially nerdy to want pretend to be somewhere artificial as a proxy for seeing a real person. Even at this conference, it’s worth noting that people are having one-on-one video and audio chats now - because that lets you see and/or hear the person you’re talking to. At some level, virtual worlds are about limiting the ability to communicate - walk here, find me here, etc. - and the need to make interaction difficult seems like a very specific use case.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:45 PM on October 22, 2020
I’ve mentioned it before, but I once saw Raph Koster suggest that Facebook was essentially what all social virtual worlds aspired to be, and that’s why it “won”. It’s not, I think, that virtual world are the domains of perverts and nerds, but rather that it is essentially nerdy to want pretend to be somewhere artificial as a proxy for seeing a real person. Even at this conference, it’s worth noting that people are having one-on-one video and audio chats now - because that lets you see and/or hear the person you’re talking to. At some level, virtual worlds are about limiting the ability to communicate - walk here, find me here, etc. - and the need to make interaction difficult seems like a very specific use case.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:45 PM on October 22, 2020
A thought that has been going round and round in my head recently: your brain is the best rendering engine you have.
I'd much rather have a sketch of the virtual space and some (decently written) textual description than "together mode" or whatever it's called.
You're sitting in a nondescript auditorium. At least, as far as you can tell, the floor is not sticky. To your right and left, in front and behind, some of your colleagues are also seated. None of them want to be in this meeting any more than you do.
posted by emdeesee at 2:50 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'd much rather have a sketch of the virtual space and some (decently written) textual description than "together mode" or whatever it's called.
You're sitting in a nondescript auditorium. At least, as far as you can tell, the floor is not sticky. To your right and left, in front and behind, some of your colleagues are also seated. None of them want to be in this meeting any more than you do.
posted by emdeesee at 2:50 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
Man, this seems like it could be great for Big Bad Con, the tabletop rpg conference that is my one recreational conference each year...
posted by kaibutsu at 2:54 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by kaibutsu at 2:54 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
I attended this conference and it had the most conference feel of any of the half dozen or so virtual conferences I've attended this year.
The proof of that was, I sometimes left talks and a) felt kind of bad to be slipping out the back that way you sometimes do, and b) ran into other people who had done the same, and found social stuff to do, despite not having attended in person and so only knowing one or two people.
posted by joeyh at 2:58 PM on October 22, 2020 [11 favorites]
The proof of that was, I sometimes left talks and a) felt kind of bad to be slipping out the back that way you sometimes do, and b) ran into other people who had done the same, and found social stuff to do, despite not having attended in person and so only knowing one or two people.
posted by joeyh at 2:58 PM on October 22, 2020 [11 favorites]
Thanks for this; it's a very interesting idea.
I've been thinking about ways of keeping in touch with friends and such, in the age of the Rona and whilst living far away from friends, and ideally of ways other than the path of least resistance that is going through Facebook/Instagram, where every interaction is an iteration of a continuous consumer survey, and every preference, let alone vulnerability, you reveal is shared with predatory ad-targeting and monetisation algorithms.
So far, I've created a Discord, on which a handful of friends are somewhat active. I've also been building a web-based hangout, sort of modelled on a private bar/listening party: it's basically a web page with a text-based chatroom and audio streaming, through an embedded Icecast server, with one person DJing by streaming music to it. It's still in the alpha stage, and currently has no persistent storage (and hence no user profiles/avatars; you log in, choose a nick and join, like IRC), though this has me thinking whether or not a more maximalist approach with profiles and a sense of community would be better.
posted by acb at 3:00 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
I've been thinking about ways of keeping in touch with friends and such, in the age of the Rona and whilst living far away from friends, and ideally of ways other than the path of least resistance that is going through Facebook/Instagram, where every interaction is an iteration of a continuous consumer survey, and every preference, let alone vulnerability, you reveal is shared with predatory ad-targeting and monetisation algorithms.
So far, I've created a Discord, on which a handful of friends are somewhat active. I've also been building a web-based hangout, sort of modelled on a private bar/listening party: it's basically a web page with a text-based chatroom and audio streaming, through an embedded Icecast server, with one person DJing by streaming music to it. It's still in the alpha stage, and currently has no persistent storage (and hence no user profiles/avatars; you log in, choose a nick and join, like IRC), though this has me thinking whether or not a more maximalist approach with profiles and a sense of community would be better.
posted by acb at 3:00 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
Dragon Con did something similar, though not as tightly and nicely integrated. Dragon Con takes place in five Atlanta hotels plus a marketplace building. It has over thirty topic-specific tracks, each of which has a home hotel. This year’s virtual con had streaming video and a Discord server, but each track got its own Discord channel grouped by hotel. Event discussions took place in a channel in the hotel where they’d happen during the in-person con. Wanted to talk about writing? The writing track’s channel was grouped in the Westin. The science track? We were in the Hilton group.
It let us have focused conversations about each track’s panels and events, and gave the event a physicality that most other virtual events I’ve attended didn’t have.
posted by sgranade at 4:26 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]
It let us have focused conversations about each track’s panels and events, and gave the event a physicality that most other virtual events I’ve attended didn’t have.
posted by sgranade at 4:26 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]
The article makes a brief mention of Mozilla Hubs, which is also pretty compelling for nerds. Here’s a nice tutorial with some details if you’ve got twenty minutes.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:45 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 4:45 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]
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posted by bz at 11:15 AM on October 22, 2020