From: rubins@mindvox.phantom.com (Charles Rubinstein)
Subject: Re: MUD
Organization: Phantom Access (tm), Mindvox BBS
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 17:49:26 GMT

> 
>  
> 
> 
> You know, I find it quite fascinating that so many of the MindVox members 
> choose to act out on this particular board.  What you deem silly, or 
> choose to laugh at here, are the very topics that keep so many of your 
> own members happy in Maelstrom, which correct me if I'm wrong, is 
> something that is going a few steps beyond current MUD's and therefore a 
> logical and technical extension of the very concepts that people are 
> discussing here.
> 
> What you find so amusing, are the topics that others who do not have the 
> luxury of owning their own network of NeXT's, find important to the state 
> of their social interaction. 
> 
> I don't think anyone is saying that MUD's are yet equatible to real VR, 
> but again, isn't that EXACTLY what the entire Maelstrom project is 
> directed towards remedying?
> 
> It gets a "LITTLE" annoying to find people who take VR *very* seriously 
> and in fact write their masters thesis on it (right Fish?), go onto the 
> usenet and blithley act like 10 year olds, when ADMITTEDLY misguided, if 
> not confused, people attempt to compare real rape to virtual rape, they 
> are not starting the conversation in the hopes of turning it into one big 
> joke.
> 
> When people are just plain dumb, they have an excuse.  When people are 
> far from stupid, and just think it amusing to prod the confused, that's 
> not very helpful. Lord knows there is enough confusion on the usenet 
> without any additional help from people who KNOW BETTER.
> 
> I JUST KNOW that the minute I enter a room, there is going to be a 192nd 
> level Automaton waiting to eat me for posting this.  But that's life.
> 
> Larry 
> 

 
well actually I think that vr, if you exist there by text or graphics or 
total immersion, is all in the head.  If you can imagine it, so it is.  
So that would mean that whatever problems people have in the realworld, 
so they would have in vr.
 
What does that leave us with ?  More of the same.  
 
"It's nothing new" --Lawnmower Man (lame movie, but applicable statement) 
 
I think that for the most part, what draws so many people to Maelstrom in 
the first place, is not the current state of the software, which shows 
incredible promise but facing facts, is still lumbering into being at the 
moment, and probably won't have stable graphical front-ends for the PC or 
Amiga lines for the next 8 months (yeah it's nice that NeXT is supported, 
but when all you do to program the interfaces on the thing is point and 
click with IB, it makes for a very nice demo of what is possible, but 
with less than 100,000 NeXT machines on earth, it's not very useful to 
most potential members, that the front end is running on a $10,000 
workstation), but what draws them is the diverse crowd onboard, and the 
visionaries heading up the Phantom Access effort.  
 
It's not just about hack and slash and bullshit, and there is a conscious 
effort to see what the boundaries of human interaction truly are, within 
a grouping of very smart and excited people.  Then again, there is also a 
very large group of "spam-heads" who have over-developed minds, and 
under-developed means of integrating into social environments without 
causing a fuss.
 
There are also MANY just fine people who do take far too many drugs in 
the real world and don't have ANY consistant behavour pattern that sticks 
around for longer than the duration of a single message, which can make 
things highly confusing.
 
I guess what I'm trying to say is, instead of going "hey gimme another 
hit off that bong, look at how entertaining rec.games.mud is today" why 
not say something productive instead.