Richard Bartle

Don't know what he wanted to talk about, but here's one I remembered off hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine All the old Infocom games were ported to this Engine and its existence is why they're so wonderfully well preserved nowadays and can be played in a really playable form with Frotz

Also in the Adventure Game space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM

The oriignal MUD was an engine, and there are hundreds of derivatives of MUD that are also engines, I recommend Richard Bartle's book for a really good history of it, I think it's free online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon#Wider_access_and_early_derivatives

https://mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf

Bartle's own words:

> MUD was programmed in MACRO-10 assembler on a DecSystem-10 mainframe at Essex University, England, in the fall of 1978. Its author was a talented Computer Science undergraduate, Roy Trubshaw. Version I was a simple test program to establish the basic principles by which a shared world could be maintained. When it worked, Roy immediately started on version II, a text-based virtual world that would be instantly recognizable as such even today. It was also written in MACRO-10, a decision that led to its becoming increasingly unwieldy as more and more features were added. Because of this, in the fall of 1979 Roy made the decision to begin work on version III of the game. He split it in two: The game engine was written in BCPL (the fore-runner of C); the game world…

> I also think people willingly participate because it's a way to substitute mediocre/subordinate social acceptance for the much more intermittent reward/thrill of genuine work.

The drive to seek "intermittent rewards/thrills" isn't universal. Specifically, in people with naturally low dopamine responsivity[1][2], it's almost non-existent. Within this group, you don't tend to see anyone who enjoys casinos and/or casual-social-mobile games, for example; they experience no dopamine hit from one session, so they aren't drawn to replay.

There's a categorization system of psychological reward profiles, originally derived from MMO play-styles, called the Bartle test (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm). Of the four Bartle types, people with low dopamine responsivity are almost never "Achievers"--instead tending to focus on the other three. Here's the description of the category:

> Achievers regard points-gathering and rising in levels as their main goal, and all is ultimately subserviant to this. Exploration is necessary only to find new sources of treasure, or improved ways of wringing points from it. Socialising is a relaxing method of discovering what other players know about the business of accumulating points, that their knowledge can be applied to the task of gaining riches. Killing is only necessary to eliminate rivals or people who get in the way, or to gain vast amounts of points (if points are awarded for killing other players).

In a business context, people who…

More UO nostalgia:

I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years.

I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player.

Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate…

> So, even if highfalutin phrases like “virtual machine” weren’t yet tripping off the tongue of the average bedroom hacker, it wasn’t hard to divine what Infocom must be doing in the broad strokes. The specifics, however, were another matter. For, while Infocom didn’t hide the existence of a Z-Machine in the abstract, they had no vested interest in advertising how it worked. ... But plumbing the depths of a virtual machine whose very existence was only implicit was hard work

This is extremely misleading. Sure, some of the depths weren't published, but Infocom published how the Z-machine worked in a variety of forums. Most accessible is "How to fit a large program into a small machine" by Marc S. Blank and S. W. Galley, published in Creative Computing, 1980. Creative Computing was widely read at the time. It explained how integers and strings were stored as well as the general approach. Blank was one of the key developers of Zork. You can view the paper here: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm

Of course, it took some effort to work out the exact opcodes, but there was a lot of publicly-available information to start from.

It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost.

I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_culture.htm http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144

I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.

> my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model/big 5) they are not taxonomies.

The types are labels for the extremes of a dimensional analysis of motivation:

INTEREST GRAPH

Consider the following abstract graph:

ACTING
Killers | Achievers
|
|
|
|
|
PLAYERS ---------+--------- WORLD
|
|
|
|
|
Socialisers | Explorers
INTERACTING

https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

ed: much like archetypes in personality tests