this is the secret sauce for any good online network like mastodon, or game world like Furcadia:

“Okay. So it's 1978, and you are a student at the University of Essex, and you're studying computer science. You're not supposed to be there.
You're not supposed to be at university: no one in your family's ever been to university before... [Roy and I,] we weren't rich. My parents my father was a gas fitter, you know. He spent all day installing cookers in people's houses. My mother was a school meals cook.... I've got a Northern accent, [and] Roy comes from Wolverhampton, and he's got a West Midlands accent.... It doesn't matter, being really smart, if people-as soon as you show up, as soon as you open your mouth, they've pigeonholed you because you're working class.
And we wanted a place where we could go where none of this mattered, where who you were was based on your strength of character, on who you were as a person, and it didn't matter what sex, gender, class, whatever you were, you could just go there and be and become yourself.”
- Richard Bartle, on Matt Chat 296 “On MUDs and British Snobbery”

source: @aaronareed’s exceptionally good 50 Years of Text Games (p. 143)

#mastodon #virtualworlds #furcadia