Lambda Moo

[Oddysey]

http://www.lambdamoo.info/#COM

This thing is really, really weird. It's sort of like a chatroom, only it's set in this huge, surreal, weird, and sprawling house-type thing. I figure there are probably a few people here who might enjoy tooling around in it for a bit, since it's fun to explore, and there are about three zillion different commands you can use, and you can make more with a bit of command line fiddling.

[J. M. Pescado]

Ugh, no thank you. That's exactly the kind of place I avoid. We make fun of places like that.

[RainbowTigress]

I played around with some MUDs a long time ago.  I eventually got tired of them.

[Inge]

I wrote a lambdamoo game - and it was just like The Sims inasmuch as it was based on real life - you had to earn money and pay taxes, and wait for trains to take you places that were further away (I wrote in loads of dummy locations to get lost in if you tried to cheat and walk)  But if you could find your way to the commercial zone you could buy a car and go anywhere much quicker.

The new player started off in the mental ward and had to work out how to escape.  The first place he came to after finding the window and scrambling down the slope was the village pub - that's where most of us hung out anyway.   It had working slot machines, a variety of drinks you could order, and I actually wrote in getting drunk so your chat output was slurred and you ended up going the opposite way to the way you typed in etc.

Players woke up in the mental ward each time they reconnected until they had worked out how to buy themselves a house.  It was possible to earn the rights to build your own homes and puzzles, but that was written into the game and relied on you eating at intervals to keep up the strength to build.

People found it all really tedious and hard work and were begging for some fantasy and just plain old fashioned magic spells.

[Oddysey]

Inge, that sounds nifty.

And, after further experimentation with LambdaMOO, I have but one thing to say:

Why do nifty concepts always have to get hijacked by idiots?

Sigh . . .