Home of Wes Platt and OtherSpace MUSH
Each Monday evening, we pick someone at random from players who are online and award them a random amount of Saga Points – as much as 30,000. This week’s Randomonday winner is Kethren! And the prize amount: 10,644 Saga Points.
Quick sketches of some of the many characters I’ve portrayed in real-time online roleplaying (on OtherSpace and elsewhere) over the years:
Zork was my gateway drug.
Using a relatively basic command parser, this text-only computer adventure game by Infocom allowed a single player to explore a grid of rooms, solving puzzles and gathering treasure, all the while trying to avoid being devoured by a grue in dark chambers.
I had no idea when I first played Zork, back in the 1980s, that my explorations of the Great Underground Empire would lead to my work on OtherSpace.
But Zork and other Infocom games undeniably served as the basic foundation for what would become my pet project for the past 15 years (and counting).
In the mid-1990s, I played a MUD (multi-user dimension) for the first time. It was called Infinity. Like Zork, it was text-based, with a grid of rooms and puzzles to solve. The difference, however, was that I could interact with other players from around the world in the same virtual space.
I enjoyed the diversion while the novelty lasted.
Ultimately, though, I found myself drawn instead to another multi-player text-based game called TOS TrekMUSE. This game, inspired by Star Trek‘s original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, didn’t have built-in puzzles to solve. It required players to submit a character biography that proved they grasped the theme. It had a coded space system, so players who joined Starfleet might be assigned as crew to virtual starships, such as the Yorktown and the Excelsior.
“Everything’s broken,” she said. It was hard for him to argue. The Nall hadn’t left much standing on this block when they pulled out of the Llivori capital on Kamsho. Their home, on the third floor of the Jarmol Building, had two fully collapsed walls. Most of the furniture that hadn’t been blown out onto…
