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The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

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Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#31

Post by norea-armozel »

paublyrne wrote: post #5

I signed up for Second Life, and jogged around it for an hour or two. An Oculus Rift version would be intriguing. I found my original experience to be aimless. I wandered off and found a sort of castle or something, and enjoyed rambling around it, but ultimately felt there was nothing to do.

As an SL user, that's the norm with regard to the platform. It just seems LL hasn't a clue or just doesn't care if users stick around. I'm not sure how they make money when the vast majority of the users are now bots and the remainder aren't as cash rich as they use to be (Anshe Chung comes to mind).

If there's anything that future VR platform developers can learn from SL is this: engage your users, own up to mistakes, and be willing to break things that depended on kludges to fix things. If you do that you'll be light years ahead of the competition.

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#33

Post by distances »

soylentcola wrote: post #23
fennecfoxen wrote: post #19

You can see lots more if you're willing to go text-based. Like LambdaMOO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO (telnet: lambda.moo.mud.org 8888) - not the oldest but one of the oldest that's substantially community-built (it doesn't take much to get permission to make things) and still running.

MUDs and the like were my first thought as well. I guess they don't have the immediate visual effect of the later graphical worlds but over the years I occasionally log back on to some of the old MUDs I used to frequent if they're still up and running. Always weird to see a place that used to be filled with at least 20-40 people now only populated by maybe the sysop's character idling for months in the public channel…

Interestingly MUDs still have some niche to fill. Granted, a lot of them withered roughly a decade ago when MMORPGs became mainstream, but there are some that are fully alive and kicking. For example, Aardwolf MUD [1] seems to have about 300 players online most of the time, with peaks of 400 players [2].

[1] telnet: aardmud.org 23 [2] http://www.aardwolf.com/stats.html

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#34

Post by peckrob »

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games.

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still have characters on a couple of them that I connect to every so often, like maybe once a year or so.

The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s/early 2000s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In that time, Warcraft and Second Life sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text that MUDs provided.

Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#35

Post by ocdtrekkie »

matheusd wrote: post #10

In the late 90's there was also Active Worlds[1][2]. It was one of the first online communities I frequented. It seemed to follow exactly the path second life went, except with the diminished number of people that were on the internet at the time: very high initial interested (the "wow - 3d internet factor") and very little engagement after that. I really thought 3d web would be a thing. :) [1] http://activeworlds.co…

The moment I read this article, I thought about ActiveWorlds again. I was never a paying citizen, but I used to visit a fair bit, a long time ago. They had so many different worlds and projects people did through it, I was surprised nobody mainstream ever gave it attention.

Perhaps once VR goes fully retail we'll see world creators like this become popular.

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#36

Post by duskwuff »

troymc wrote: post #28

Most of the no-longer-updated stuff in Second Life eventually vanishes completely, because it costs money to own land (rent it). A small parcel isn't super-expensive though, so some people forget about it.

And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "real estate" owned by schools and corporations is tied to some long-forgotten expense account, so it may keep on getting paid for a very long time if nobody's paying attention. Either that, or Linden Labs may even be giving free service for some schools as a promotional deal.

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#37

Post by pdkl95 »

minikomi wrote: post #6

Does anyone remember something about a minecraft server which is never reset.. and turned into a desolate stripmined wasteland around the spawn point, where you have to hope to luck into a food cache just to survive.. Edit: it appears the server is called "2b2t" .. searching for it brings up a ton of interesting stuff: https://imgur.com/a/bt3zi

http://mcgs.crummy.com/

The ultimate Minecraft "abandoned virtual world" is the Minecraft Geologic Survey, by Leonard Richardson of the New York Public Library (assisted by the wonderful Joe Hills). The survey archived over 170,000 Minecraft maps (2TB!) from various public fileservers.

A[1] map called "The Reef" (which is available at the link above) was created from those maps, by using the Python libraries from MCEdit to select a heuristically "interesting" chunk[2] from each map and grouping them (approximately) by ground height and other features into a single map. Each chunk has a chest added with a single book inside it, containing the bibliographic reference.

Joe Hills introduces the map with Richardson in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpkdtv68DYU

If you found the Reef interesting, you may also like the "Sign Dungeon" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPNysdgIbQY ), which was created from all of the written signs from the same MCGS archive, again filtered by a heuristic which is discussed in the video.

[1] Actually several maps of various sizes.

[2] Minecraft stores the world data in 16x16 block wide, 256 block tall "chunks" ( http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Chunks )

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#38

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mhurron wrote: post #32
j_s wrote: post #18

Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434760

You can get that any time a game starts dying or there's just no compelling reason to go to places because something so much better has been released since then.

The biggest thing with WoW, is they push end game content so heavily, and part of the way they do that is accelerating leveling through old content.

So while you used to have to grind through most of these regions, players now end up leveling much faster and only seeing a few of them.

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#39

Post by bamie9l »

peckrob wrote: post #34

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still a…

Can you recommend any for a newcomer to look at?

Re: The Weird Abandoned Spaces of Virtual Worlds

#40

Post by Diederich »

peckrob wrote: post #34

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still a…

Indeed. I still play MUME (http://www.mume.org/) from time to time. Not nearly as much activity as the 'good old days', but it's definitely possible to fall victim to an orc/troll raid if you wander in the Misty Mountains. (:
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