What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

Because in SL, they can be the person that they really want to be in the real world.

The MUD that I played on in middle school and high school, Viking MUD, is still around. http://www.vikingmud.org

I think the directions to the main areas will be burned into my memory forever. On this MUD, when you reached level 20 (which took around a week) you had a choice to make your character "eternal" and continue adventuring or you could choose to make your character a "wizard" who could create new areas yourself and write scripted actions for your area. However, you could no longer take part in the actual game itself. Scripting the areas I had created was some of the first programming experience I ever had.

A big difference between most of the games today that I play and some of those old MUDs was that there were very serious consequences to dying. You lost a level and all your gear if you died and it was extremely easy to die in the game, both from NPCs or other players in certain zones. Dropping from say, level 28 to 27 represented a solid week of hard leveling effort that was lost. I remember I died 3 times in one evening and almost wanting to cry I was so upset. It did make the game that much more intense though because the stakes were so high.

I still login occasionally but it is rare to see more than a few players who aren't idle. I remember that the quality of the community was very high. I don't know if it was because there was a relatively high bar to join and interact with the game that self-selected those kinds of people or what. You had to have the technical chops to connect to the internet, download and install a MUD client and then connect to the appropriate server. Then to be successful at the game itself you had to have a lot of patience, have a good memory and be able to read and react quickly.

> I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days.

Sometimes that wall isn't as high as it seems and as long as people know that, they can still break in.

For example, Minecraft (which is mentioned in another comment) has a pretty good ecosystem of mods and plugins that you can look at the raw code for, twiddle with, change, etc. I could easily see kids learning from that the same way I learned from screwing with ROM.

The video game community I met my wife in 15 years ago... still exists. Pieces of it died over the years (there was a time when basically nobody could get the game to run and the competitive sites all disappeared) but there have always been a handful of core sites that stuck around, and a handful of developers managed to revamp the game for modern play. One of the major groups has been running since 1996, though it had a few years of extremely low activity.

About a year ago, an old friend contacted us and let us know he was playing again. We contacted friends, and they contacted friends, and now we've got a bunch of us back together -- playing every day, even going to a LAN party this week.

Part of what's interesting is that some of the major sites that didn't survive have sort-of but not entirely lived on in new incarnations. The new competitive ladder is based around some of the same principles as the old one, but with some influences from newer games as well (like a Starcraft2-style tier system that ranks players as gold, silver, or bronze.)

If you remember Descent fondly, come join us: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php (includes links to many of the still-active sites and groups.)

I used to play a different Wheel of Time based MUD (WoTMUD), that apparently is still at least partially active: https://twitter.com/WoTMUD and https://www.facebook.com/groups/657945314285131/ (I guess they're having server issues and are trying to raise funds to get it going again?)

Weird reading the Twitter account and recognizing the names of people who were active when I played a decade ago.