Hi! (Assignment 1)

Well, this is quite late, but I just joined the class and am trying to get caught up! My name is Mark and technically I'm a second semester senior but preferably I'm a SUPER Senior. Believe it or not even through my fifth year at Cornell, I am without a "real" major. Currently, I'm what one might call an Interdisciplinary Studies Major. It's not exactly the best claim one can make at a party, but generally I'll get a follow up question i.e. "what the hell is that?" Basically what it breaks down to is that I need to fulfill the CALS requirements to graduate and that is it. Everything else is upto me. In reality, what it has resulted in is me looking to graduate this December with no major and four minors (Finance, Business, Comm, and Info Sci). Anyways, that's all well and fine but also quite boring. What I really do with my time is work and work out. This past summer I was doing 64 hours a week between my primary job as a Marketing & Communications Intern at Advion BioSciences, Inc. which is based out of Ithaca and my moonlight job at Nestle Library in the Hotel School. Now, I just started at the Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise & Commercialization (CCTEC) as a Marketing & Economic Development intern which keeps me busy for 20 hours a week on top of my classes and the 8 hours I still put in at Nestle Library. Beyond that I try to work out at least once a day and just enrolled in Beginner's Yoga M & W at 6 in Teagle (you should come it's open to all as long as there is room, no sign up necessary!).

As as far as Internet Phenomenons go, well they're all pretty sweet. But, the one I'm most interested in-- which won't be very interesting to most passive readers of my post-- is Browser Based MUDs. I'm sure you've all read a little about MUDs by now from Wallace Ch.1: they're multiplayer games, text-based, mostly for nerds. Well, that's pretty much true. Sure now we have fancy pictures and terrible monsters to look at in games like World of Warcraft and Everquest, but the classic text-based MUD still exists in its niche market and has moved off the private telnet systems onto the World Wide Web. Thusly, we have Browser Based MUDs. These interest me, because well I'm trying to build one myself after having played one or two for years and taking some web programming classes it's finally starting to come along. Why would anybody still play text-based games (and why the heck would you want to make one!)? Well, for starters accessibility is often the key in many senses of the word. Text-based gaming allows blind and handicapped web-users an entertainment outlet unavailable through consoles and graphics heavy games. For users with old computers, browser based games are a good alternative to processing heavy programs. And, it's a heck of a lot easier to access to a stand-alone website game than install World of Warcraft on your work computer to get in your gaming addiction fix without getting caught.

I've already explained the "online space" that Browser Based MUDs take place in: the World Wide Web. Basically, people take the same old game style and ported it over onto web browsers using newer programming languages. What's most compelling about using web browsers for MUD making is the new surge in the so-called "Web 2.0" technologies that back most active content and community building (including this blog). Not only are game makers creating a world for their users to dive into, they're using web technology to allow their players to create the community that surrounds their game in the form of messageboards, fansites, player-groups, derivative works, wiki-based game guides, and more. From a business standpoint (mind you that is one of my many minors), tapping your clients as creators of auxiliary content is an extremely powerful and cool tool.