Author: Sam Lindsey
Assignment: Post #7, Davis Chapter 7-8
Davis describes the MUD (Multi-User Dungeons) as place where you could be "free" and build your own identity. They, "...functioned as toy cosmologies, their graded level of personal power mimicking both the ladders of the corporate world and the hierarchical degrees of Freemasonry...grant(ing) increasing spiritual powers."(pg 231). I think that the funniest things about these older games in just how crude they were, by crude I mean simple. Looking at today's MMORPGs is amazing to see where we currently stand looking back at our ancestors. The MUD was one of the first ways that people could interact with each other in these sorts of ways. There weren't any online shooters or games at the time, this is what came before. These things were purely text based (later introducing some small pixel art), but it didn't stop people from playing.... What's crazy to me is how much will power it would have taken to stay in that "world". In order to role play and act out and talk to one another in this world you'd have to really have such an imagination as too need no pictures whatsoever. Davis wants to make it clear to us just how strange this is. In World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons as he has said above, there is no real "end" to how high you can go. There's always a new set of rules or a new expansion to be added on, similar to Scientology's leveled tier system... It never ends.
I was surprised to find that games like this actually still exist.... I've always heard of, but never played, Dwarf Fortress which seems to be in the same sort of mindset as MUDs. Not only that but MUDs still exist as well... With a simple YouTube search I was able to find some pretty interesting stuff....
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| Dwarf Fortress |
Taking a final second here to tie together this chapter with the other we read this weekend which I didn't do as much research on. Davis ties the two worlds of each of these chapters together by basing them around a sense of the discovery of new worlds or the belief that they exist. Especially towards the end of chapter where he begins talking about the Heaven's Gate suicides. The members actually believed that they were just living in the shell of a real world, a headset covering their eyes to what lay beyond. Games in general, have a way of doing that too. With new improvements to VR (making headsets wireless, more powerful, and more believable, we are deepening those worlds and beginning to truly create worlds that aren't really here....
To quote Mal, the antagonist of one of my favorite movies, Inception, "You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope the train will take you, but you can't know for sure..."
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