Reflection Overview
This week, class discussion was focused upon the hypertext markup language and its past and present implications. Hypercards served as a precursor that pre-date HTML and, similarly to those virtual communities we discussed last week, have a range of oddities archived for our viewing pleasure.
Lambda Discoveries
Garf(#125405), my newly created character, has been sucessfully initialized into LambdaMOO! To aid in my exploration, I plan to address my findings on a weekly basis as a section in my weekly summaries.
After my conversation with Mars last week, I decided to attempt learning the basic commands that would help for the sake of progression. In my first couple of days using the MOO, I wondered if a wiki of sorts existed. I have since been introduced to “Yib’s Guide to MOOing,” a how-to book that contains a glossary of commands essential to all MOOs. Those commands I found especially useful were those related to communication and traversal: “
- -name ‘text’ = allows a user to speak to a specific individual
- @ways = shows the directions a user is able to traverse from a given location
- @sethome location = sets the current area as the user’s home area.
- @describe me = sets description of oneself for others to see when using “look”
- @age = used to figure out when someone first joined (can also be figured out by looking at the numbers after their #). Helpful for determining who else isnew to the land of Lambda.
- among many others.
Hyperstacks and Hyperconcepts
After my prousal around Geocities, I was eager to see what hyperstacks were in store for me at the Internet Archive. Although many of those featured were used for contemporary uses such as presentations, I was surprised to see the presence of basic games.
One game in particular I found interesting was “Da Game” by J. Stoddard, a click to progress dungeon crawler. One wrong mistake sends you back to the beginning, so it’s a game that relies more on memory than skill.
When discussing hypertext, those precursors to HTML and the web come into focus. Our table focused upon StorySpace, a primitive software akin to the modern-day Twine where users can use hypertext to write stories that branch in multiple directions. If the software were created in 2022, our table considered highlighting its key attributes as a focus for our poster (featured below).
