Gazira Babeli: Second Life Hacker

The other link Jon sent me was about Italian "Second Life" coder Gazira Babeli. Her avatar for "Second Life" has been hacked so that she is able to summon swarms of Super Mario armies, punctuation marks, tornadoes, and "grey goo". It seems she would attack rude users who engage in improper netiquette with these maneuvers, forcing the users to think twice before speaking rudely again.

I've never played "Second Life" myself, but from what I've heard it is essentially a virtual world for players to create an avatar and enjoy a life outside their own. There doesn't seem to be any real objectives beyond just socializing and enjoying oneself. Very much like Anarchy MUD, actually. This gets me thinking about how flexible I should allow Anarchy MUD to be; the more flexibility I allow, the better chance another Gazira Babeli joins the game and hacks it to her favor. But at the same time, if the game is easily hackable, it might be very possible that the hackers would disallow any other players from ever joining the game. How flexible is "too flexible"?

BumpList

During our discussion last week (I was presenting my media proposal and simulation for Anarchy MUD), Jon sent me two links to websites that might help me flesh out that idea more. If I end up switching over to the animation, these links wouldn't matter too much, but I'll post about them anyways. The first one is for BumpList.

BumpList is, as the website describes it, "an email community for the determined". It is essentially an open forum that anyone can join and post to, as long as they have a valid email address, but there's a catch: BumpList can only hold six subscriptions (Or is it five? The website gave both numbers. Perhaps it changed to allow one or two more after a while). What this means is that when a new person subscribes to the forum, the oldest subscription is removed so that the list only has six people. If that person who was bumped wants to post again, he/she would need to resubscribe.

Unfortunately, the forum seems to be down until they find a new server, and the last date mentioned on the website was in 2004, so I don't think it will come back, but the idea behind the website fits one of the principles behind Anarchy MUD, and so is something to take note of.

Only around seventeen years too late?

I was researching late last night for some possible source codes that I could work off from for Anarchy MUD, and I stumbled into something that could either make or break my project: TinyMUD. Apparently, about seventeen years ago, James Aspnes developed a MUD that allows all players, and not just administrators, to create items and rooms. Later derivatives improved on this, allowing more control over the world (such as being able to destroy items and rooms as well, adding recovery methods for deleted work, creating a system to limit power to certain players, and even allowing universal game rules to be changed (like Nomic)). The more I researched it, the more I've discovered games that had the same exact characteristics of Anarchy MUD. Every characteristic was present in another game somewhere.

Except for one.

As flexible as all of these games seem to be, I am yet to find one that incorporates the modification and deletion of player characters as a feature. This might be my only saving grace. It is also, in my opinion, the most interesting characteristic, so I'm not completely dismayed that everything else has been done before. If anything, it might make programming that much easier, if I am able to use the source code from a TinyMUD or TinyMUD-derivative game. I will be doing some more research, however, to make sure that I am indeed doing something at least partially original.

Ingenuity is hard work.

Lunchtimers

In response to my "Sand Box" idea I mentioned earlier, one of my classmates sent me a link to Lunchtimers, which is an interactive refrigerator magnet simulator. Players can move around colorful letters to spell words or sentences, and everyone has equal control over where the letters are placed (so someone in the middle of writing something can get his letters removed by someone else also writing something). Play isn't limited to just words, though--another player and I spent the last ten minutes organizing all the letters by color, and then sorted out each magnet by letter. Already, our work is being decimated by other players, and no one can expect their words to survive for too long. Sadly, the game seems to be most popular with thirteen-year-olds, and so the language reflects that, but the idea behind the game is clever nonetheless.

When I was brainstorming "Sand Box", I actually was partially inspired by this game, but I could not remember what it was called. It's a good thing some people in the class have a better memory than I do. The largest difference between Lunchtimers and Sand Box would be that Sand Box would allow for more control over the visual aspects: you are not limited to refrigerator magnets, and are able to hand draw not only your letters, but whatever you like. This, of course, would be much more difficult to program, and would definitely use more resources than Lunchtimers, but the trade-off might be worth it.

Man With A Movie Camera

Another link Jon Ippolito sent me for research purposes is for an experimental film initiated by Perry Bard called Man With a Movie Camera. It is essentially a "participatory video", in which people from anywhere around the world select a shot or a scene from the original script of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man With A Movie Camera, film it, and submit it to the website so that everyone's shots can be compiled into one film.

This gets me thinking about how I could do something similar with my idea for an animation. Unfortunately, it would be nigh impossible for me to ask many people to animate a shot or scene, as there are far fewer people who have the capability to animate (especially in 3D, but if I were to do this, I wouldn't limit the media to strictly 3D computer animation) than there are people who can film. Almost anyone can pick up a camera and use it, and get their scene done within a day or two. An animation is much more involved, and creating a scene of the same length might take weeks, or even months. But it's a good idea to start with, nonetheless, and it might help inspire me for my capstone piece.

Nomic

While researching for ideas and inspiration regarding capstone, Jon Ippolito sent me a link that talked about the game Nomic. Nomic is a game invented in 1982 by Peter Suber, and is essentially a game where proposing and voting on rule changes is the game itself. It begins with a simple, yet flexible set of rules (which are all able to be modified and/or removed if the players elect to do such a thing), and the simple goal of reaching 100 points. Everything, including the goal, is able to be changed, but the players must propose the change and vote on it. And actually, even the whole voting part is not immune to being changed--if the players elect a new way for rules to be added or modified (such as a dictatorship, instead of a democracy, for example), then that new way takes effect. There's even a rule that demands that the rules be followed, and if players vote away that rule, then they must suffer the consequences that result from their action.

I'm interested in testing out Nomic with a few people sometime, so I can see how people behave in such a setting. In some ways, Nomic is similar to my "Anarchy MUD" idea, such as the notion that the players have total control over the game's mechanics. However, my current idea is more like a Nomic that starts with almost no rules (but at the same time, there is also no goal to be achieved, and no way to "win"). Also, everyone has equal power, and there's nothing preventing a 4-month old veteran character from being deleted by some random bloke who just happens to try out the game for the first time. As a result, things can get very messy. I am currently thinking of ways to implement "levels" of admin rights, so that people that somehow "earn" higher levels of admin are able to do more, or at least have more power over what they do (for example, perhaps a new character can't outright "ban" someone, but can grant "admin points" to other people, and those people can do the same back. Positive points allows admins to go up in levels, and negative points force them down levels. The higher level you are, the more points you can grant/remove. If you're at a sufficiently negative number, you are deleted. So in this way, a high-level admin can auto-ban a new character, whereas a new character can't immediately ban a higher character, unless he got help from others who want to get rid of him. Higher level characters would also have more control over the game world itself, such as perhaps being able to create/destroy more rooms/items/monsters per day than other admins. Etc., etc., blah, blah, you get the picture). Maybe I can work out some way to do it after studying how the game Nomic is played. And maybe I might even think up a "goal" for Anarchy MUD, of some sort (although simply trying to achieve a high level of admin might be goal enough).

If anyone is interested in testing out Nomic with me sometime, we can try to work out something.

Masstransiscope

While doing some research about the zoetrope, looking for sources of inspiration for my capstone idea, I came across this neat little piece by Bill Brand, dubbed the Masstransiscope. Made in Brooklyn, New York in September 1980, Brand used the same principles behind the zoetrope to create a 228-frame animation that is viewable only by passengers riding past it while on the subway. I recommend taking a look at the website for yourself.

I found the piece very clever, and got me thinking about how else an animation can be presented. Could there be another way for me to publicly display an animation using the zoetrope (or other analog optical toy) as the basis of it? I don't have access to a subway system, or anything resembling one, in the middle of Maine, so what other alternatives might be available for me? Vehicles would be too dangerous, as distracting the drivers is always a bad idea--I would not like to be responsible for causing a dozen accidents on the highway.

I suppose I don't have much else to say, except that it's just more ideas for me to ponder over.