[Noisebridge-discuss] on games as an introduction to deeper tech

[travis+ml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org]

You know, when I was a CS undergrad, I spent a great deal of time
playing MUDs, specifically LPMuds.

Many of my friends learned C (well, LPC) once they started programming
the MUDs.

It used an ed-like interface to upload the data (ASCII upload,
basically), and so I owe my deep understanding of ed, sed, ex, and vi
to that.

I started running 386BSD around this time, and started running a MUD
on my home machine.

I ended up doing some special magic so that telnetting to a port ended
up getting you to the game on my dynamic IP.

I eventually hacked the PERL regexp libraries into MudOS and my NPCs
would respond to patterns in spoken speech, eliminating special verbs
for interacting with them.

By adding a few randomly-driven behaviors, they'd wander around,
doing idiosyncratic things, and fooled many a person.

MudOS introduced socket calls, and I coded a dictionary object that
would look up words online, and display them.  Some people thought
I had typed in an entire dictionary :-)

In one experimental game, I wrote a computer in the game that you
could sit down at, and it would let your character telnet out to the
real Internet, making what Hofstader calls a "strange loop"; you sit
down at a computer, connect across the Internet, go into a game, sit
down at a computer, and connect across the Internet again.

In thinking about security, I came up with a buffer-safe pointer-free
language and was talked out of it because it couldn't be as fast as
compiled C.  This was well before Java.

Having given up on language-based security, I started working on a
better MUD and realized what I needed was a full OS.  I started
research into OSes, and eventually became a contributor to NetBSD,
FreeBSD, and wrote part of GRUB.

I also started studying emergent behavior, and started taking classes
on microeconomics to see if I could get real economies out of
individual NPC behavior.

Had someone just told me I should do these things without a
motivation, I may not ever have had the interest.

I hardly played any video games from 1995-2009, so may have been
inclined to feel the way you do.  But I still miss the camraderie of
those all-night game playing sessions (either LAN parties or wasting
resources at the comp center).  And lately I've found some stress
relief in aerating enemy skulls in Fallout 3.  Perhaps you should
look into it.

Anyway, I've been thinking someone just needs to come up with a better
way to use games to seduce people to the light side of the Force.  I
hear many of the games now use python as a scripting engine.  I'm
thinking someone needs to come up with a game that allows people to
play, but lets them play _better_ with increasing programming skill.
-- 
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
My emails do not have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail
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If you are a spammer, please email john at subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.
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