after a lot of digging, TIL that the original programmer of MOO was Stephen White, a canadian who was a student at the U of Waterloo in ontario at the time. he also wrote TinyMUCK (a descendent of TinyMUD) in the same period, but it’s not clear to me how much overlap there was between those codebases.

edit: in case you’re unfamiliar with MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

his AlphaMOO was then picked up by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC and rewritten into (beta, and then) LambdaMOO. everyone remembers Curtis’s contributions but I never see White mentioned.

what I find fascinating about this is that on the basis of pure code and design, MOOs and MUCKs are generally written with an eye for social interaction, creative expression, society-building and cooperation. compare that with the many descendents of MUDs which prioritize PvP and PvE combat/killing over all else.

the canadian connection is fascinating to me, because i don’t think this is accidental. there’s an implicit value shift in virtual world design at the code level. sure, people *can* build combat modules for MOOs and MUCKs, but they were not part of the base loadout.

when it comes to design, what you leave out is just as loud as what you put in.

#muck #moo #mud #virtualworld #canada