mucks
By the end of 1984, I was quite active on BBSes and DDials in the Chicagoland area. The picture to the right is terrifying evidence of this fact. In 1992, I had discovered how to use the research terminals in the library at University of Illinois at Chicago to check my email. (The irony this created for my later profession as She Who Busts Sophomore Miscreants Who Insist On Using The Reference Terminals To Check Hotmail is not lost on me.)
I had also, for some reason, learned how to “finger” a remote machine to see who was logged in, and to “talk” someone on that machine, the precursor to instant messaging. One day I was bored and fingering a machine in Colorado, looking for a friend of mine, and he wasn’t logged in but someone else was. I decided to send that person a talk-request.
That person was Merlin. Merlin, being interrupted by a total (albeit charming) stranger, was very eager to turn my focus elsewhere, and so he thought to turn it to a virtual community, specifically TimeTravelerMuck.
TimeTraveler was a whole new world for me, literally — a text-based one. Like most worlds, it stopped spinning, but I found other ones, like DruidMuck and QWestMuck. That’s where my longest-lived character, Carinah, was born. When QWest stopped spinning in 1994, my friend Mystikite started DelusionsMuck, and asked me to be one of its first Wizards. I accepted, and have been the Wizard of Citizen Relations ever since.
A few years later I branched out to other types of worlds, and roleplayed on a few, especially Tales of Ta’veren (as Tazendra), ChivalryMux (as Tiamat and Seadlin), and TrekMoo (as Lhana). Because of my background in both theatre and writing, I enjoy interacting this way, and much prefer it to any other form of game or online interaction. I’m still quite active at DelusionsMuck as Carinah, so stop by via our java applet and say hello!
So how does all of it work, anyway? Basically it’s as simple as using telnet to connect to a remote machine. I use TinyFugue in a unix shell account. If that doesn’t qualify as “simple” in your world, maybe you’d like to try SimpleMU if you’re running Windows, or Rapscallion for Macintosh. Visit OnlineRoleplay.com for more resources. And don’t forget your imagination.
