Chapter 74 13.8 Consensual literal superorganisms

David spends 12 hours a day in the underworld of elves and castles, a swaggering explorer.The character he plays is named Lotsu.He's supposed to be in class and getting top grades, but instead he's drifting with the latest school fad and indulging in multi-user fantasy games. The multi-user fantasy game is a video adventure game that runs on a large network of school and private computers.Fantastic games with story settings from Star Trek, The Hobbit, or Anne McCaffrey's best-selling novels about dragon knights and wizards, players spend four or five hours a day lingering on them in this fantasy world.

Students like David use school or personal computers to access the Internet.This vast network is now jointly funded by governments, universities, and private companies around the world, subsidizing all ordinary Internet users.The university provides free accounts for all students who want to go online.Logging on to the Internet from a dorm room in Boston, students can "drive" to any network-connected computer in the world, hang on for free, and stay there for as long as they want. Besides being able to download some papers on genetic algorithms, what is the use of this virtual tour anyway?It would be so much fun if 100 other students also popped up at the same virtual spot!You can party, play tricks on each other, role-play, intrigue, or figure out how you can make the world a better place together.These can all be done simultaneously.All you need is a multi-user meeting place.A place where everyone can gather online.

In 1978, Roy Dubshaw wrote a role-playing game similar to "Dungeons and Dragons", which was the last year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.His classmate Richard Bartle took over the game the following year, expanding the number of players it could accommodate while also increasing their action options.Du Boshaw and Batu called this game "MUD" (MUD), and then put it on the Internet. "Mud" is very much like the classic ZORK game, or any other text adventure game that has been around since the dawn of the computer.In this type of game, something like this will appear on your monitor: "You are now in a cold, damp dungeon, lit by a flickering torch. There is a skeleton on the stone floor. A walkway leads To the north, and another to the south. There's a hearth on the filthy ground."

Your job is to explore this room and the various things in it, and eventually discover the treasure hidden in the maze of other rooms connected to it.To win great prizes, you may need to collect a small collection of treasures and clues along the way.The prize is usually breaking a spell, becoming a wizard, slaying a dragon, or escaping a dungeon. Your exploration is carried out by entering some text on the keyboard, such as "see the skeleton".And the computer will respond: "Skeleton says to you: 'Beware of mice'".You enter: "Look at the fireplace", and the computer responds: "This road is dead." You enter: "Go north", and then you walk out of this room through a passage and enter another unknown room.

Mud and its many modified descendants are very similar to the classic adventure games of the 1970s, but with two standout improvements.First, Mud can organize up to 100 other players to play with you in a dungeon.This is a distributed and concurrent feature of "mud".Other players can fight alongside you as great allies, against you as evil foes, or as capricious gods who reign over you, performing miracles or spells. Second, and most importantly, other players (and yourself) can spend time adding rooms, changing paths, or inventing new magic items.You can say to yourself, "There better be a tower in this place, so bearded elves can imprison and enslave the unwary." Then you get a tower here.Simply put, players can build this world while living in it.The purpose of this game is to create a new world that is cooler than the old one.

Thus, the "mud" becomes the parallel distributed platform for the appearance of the consensual super-organism.Someone is just tinkering with a virtual deck for fun.Later, someone else added a bridge or an engine room.As a result, after a while, you find that the Enterprise number in "Star Trek" has been made out of words.Over the next few months, hundreds of other players (who were supposed to be doing their calculus homework) connected to the platform, creating lots of rooms and equipment until you could build a fully equipped Fleets, and then planets, and interconnected galaxies.A Star Trek version of "mud" is formed (there are such places on the Internet).You can log in at any time, 24 hours a day, and greet your fleet companions on it-they all play a certain role, jointly execute the orders issued by the captain, and jointly fight against enemy warships built and controlled by another group of players. fight.

And the more time a person spends exploring and deciphering the world of "mud", the more status he gains from the ruler who oversees the world.A player who helps newbies, or a player who works as a database administrator, can gain higher rankings and powers, such as being able to teleport for free, or being exempt from certain common rules.Becoming a god or a wizard is the dream goal of every "mud" player.There are good and bad gods.Ideally, God should be able to promote fair competition, ensure the smooth operation of the system, and help those who are "left behind".But it is often the stories of those tyrannical gods that circulate on the Internet.

Real-life events are recreated in the "mud" world.Players will hold funeral vigils for dead characters, and there have been small weddings for virtual characters and real people.The blurred line between real and virtual life is one of the main draws of Mud, especially to teens struggling with self-identity. In Mud, you can customize your identity.When you enter a room, others will read a description of you: "Judy enters. She is a tall, dark-haired Vulcan female with small, pointy ears and reddish skin. She's cute. She walks with the flexibility of a gymnast. Her green eyes look glamorous." And the chrysalis who started this line could have been a little schoolgirl with acne, or a bearded of men.This type of male pretending to be a girl is rampant in Mud, forcing most savvy veterans to assume that all players are male unless proven to be female.This leads to a bizarre bias against actual female gamers who are constantly harassed by demands to "prove" their gender.

In addition, most players play multiple roles in their virtual lives, as if they were trying to experiment with the multiple sides of their personality. "'Mud' is really a workshop for approval," says Amy Bruckman.He's a researcher at MIT studying the sociology of "mud" games. "Many gamers have noticed that they behave somewhat differently online than off-line, and this has led them to reflect on who they are as their personalities in real life." Flirting, infatuation, romance, even online sex in Mud You can find them everywhere—just like on a real campus.Only the protagonist is different.

Shirley Turk, who sometimes refers to computers as "second selves," goes even further."In 'mud,' the self is multiple and decentralized," she says. Understanding this, it's not surprising that a multiple, decentralized structure has become popular as a model for understanding real life and healthy personality. Mischief is also rampant in "Mud."Some demented player sets up an invisible "hoe" that will amputate all of the visitor's limbs if another player (the "visitor") accidentally picks it up.At this time, other players in the space will read this message: "The visitor is rolling around on the ground, twitching all over."The god is then called to heal the visitor.But they also get a hoe when they "see" visitors, so everyone reads: "The wizard rolled around on the floor, twitching." Functional manipulative props.In fact, the best pastime in Mud is making something that looks good and having someone copy it without knowing its true power.For example, when you unsuspectingly look at a book hanging on someone's wall that has "Home! Home Sweet Home!" cross-stitched, the thing might immediately force-teleport you back to your home ( At the same time, a few large characters flashed: "No place is as good as home").

Since the vast majority of "mud" players are males in their 20s, violence is often rampant in this world.That kind of hack-or-kill world disgusts everyone except those with the thickest skins.But an experimental "mud" run at MIT has outlawed all killing and has amassed a following of middle and high school kids.This world named Cyber ​​City is a cylindrical space station.Every day about 500 kids flock to Cyber ​​City to hang out or build stuff.To date, the kids have built 50,000 objects, characters and rooms.There is a shopping center with a multiplex (which shows text films written by children), a town hall, a science museum, a The Wizard of Oz theme park, a civilian radio broadcasting network, acres of suburbs with real estate, and A tour bus.A robot realtor hangs around doing business with anyone who wants to buy a house. Cyber ​​City intentionally doesn't provide a map, because exploration is exciting.Know or not, know it.You should do what kids do: ask other kids.Barry Cotter, the project's real-life manager, said: "One of the attractions of entering an unfamiliar environment or culture like Cyber ​​City is that it pulls adults back to the same starting line as children. Some adults would see this as upending the balance of power." None of Cybercity's principal architects was over the age of 15.The noise and complexity of the land they constructed intimidated the lone, overeducated newcomers trying to get somewhere or put up a building.As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll described his first visit: "This place—all those rooms, and all those 'dolls' running around—makes you feel You were thrown in the middle of Tokyo, and all you had with you was a chocolate candy and a screwdriver.” Here, survival is the only goal. The kids get lost, then find their way, and then are lost forever with another lapse in judgment.A computer center could be overwhelmed by the constant traffic of communications caused by non-stop playing with mud.Amherst College bans "mud" on campus.Australia relies on a handful of precious satellite data lines to connect with other parts of the world, so all international "mud" is prohibited on the Australian continent.The virtual worlds built by the students are powerful enough to bring down banking and telecommunications systems.Other agencies are sure to follow with bans on unlimited virtual worlds. Every "mud" that has worked so far (there are about 200 of them) was written by a few avid students in their spare time, without anyone's permission.There are several commercial online games like Mud that have gained a large following.These are almost "mud" things, such as Federation2 (Federation2), Gemstone (Gemstone) and Imagi Nation's "Yserbius" (Yserbius) all allow multiple users to participate in the game at the same time, but only grant Its limited power to change the world.Xerox Palo Alto Research Center is brewing an experimental "mud" that can run on its corporate computers.The attempt, code-named "Project Jupiter," aims to explore the possibility of "mud" as a commercial operating environment.Additionally, an experimental Scandinavian system and a startup called Multiuser Network (which runs a game called Kingdom of Drakkar) both boast prototypes for visualizing "mud."The "mud" that can generate commercial profits is not far away. Twenty-second-century kids look at Nintendo games from the 1990s and wonder why anyone would bother to play a simulation that only one person can get into.It's a bit like there's only one phone in the world, who can you call? The future of "mud", the future of SIMNET, the future of "Sim City", and the future of virtual reality will eventually be unified.At some point this fusion will produce the ultimate god game.In my imagination, this is a vast world that moves according to a few carefully chosen rules.Dwelling in between are countless autonomous living creatures, and simulacra of other human players.As time goes on, the characters come on stage one by one, intertwined with each other. As the interrelationships deepen, the simulation becomes more alive as individuals change and shape their worlds.The players—real, fake, hyperreal—co-evolve with the system into a completely different game from the one it started with.So God himself put on the magic eyes, fully dressed, and descended into the world of his own creation. The descent of a god into a world of his own creation is an old topic.Stanislav Lem once wrote a great sci-fi classic about a tyrant who hides his world in a box.And another similar story is a thousand years earlier than this one.