ckolderup

yeah, I'm a professional software developer in my day job and a lot of times the thing that stops me from getting anything done in my side projects is over-engineering or using the kinds of best practices that I have picked up over my years of working on large teams with data that has to be carefully maintained/preserved. So when I started this I tried to just take the approach of "just make it work first". I'm glad you found it pretty readable! The fact that there's so little error-checking and rigor in general has definitely burned me a lot in the run-up to feeling able to share things, though. It's a real double-edged sword, especially in a language as weakly typed as Javascript (which is also not my first choice of language, but targeting Glitch for deploying this was ideal for spinning up test instances, and that's their main platform)

hey, I'm the one who built this -- it's not actually compliant with most of the AP spec right now. I started the project as a way to learn about the protocol and I've still got a long way to go; so far I've just been in "get things showing up across instances" mode, but will be trying to comply more fully over the coming months.

One of the things I think he's overlooking:

Frequently the reason that people don't go the extra mile of giving talks or otherwise sharing their thoughts and experiences is that they think that they're not good enough or worth less than other people. Sometimes this results in someone with a really great idea or a unique voice staying quiet.

In an industry dominated by men, women have been discouraged from participating or speaking up. It takes time and effort to reverse that damage. I'm glad that he took the time to invite women specifically, but I think his anger at the result is misplaced when it could be more effectively directed at a system that holds decades of inequality in place.

This is the boat I'm in. Everyone seems to be applying this exclusively to BUSINESS and DAY JOBS and MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS and CLIENTS and CUSTOMERS.

Why not empower people to spend their leisure time or their artistic pursuits in a new, challenging way?

(makes you do it)

I know a large number of librarians, some male and some female, and have had a discussion with most of them about the dearth of men in their profession. Most of them are concerned by it. So now we both have anecdotes, hooray!

It's not about whether or not it was serious, it's about the repetition and legitimization of things that are being taken seriously by plenty of people and are a legitimate problem for the people who are disadvantaged as a result.

It was something I had discussed with some friends who were testing it, but the combination of "would require more work" (although not necessarily too much-- there are various mods based around "survival" concepts that I could theoretically use) plus "gets away from the basic concept of out-of-the-box Minecraft" left me unmotivated to continue.

I considered it, but to me part of the impact of the meaning of your "life" in the game being a "life" would mean that it would have to last long enough for you to carry out some meaningful work before you die of "natural causes" (i.e. a timer running out). In that case, the timer would probably be long, on the order of months, and I was just hoping that something else could be done to make the game harder to survive (there are lots of server plugins to do things like require you to eat to stay alive, etc; I looked into those a little bit but then got busy with other things).

You're right. The project just ended up being underwhelming when we only got 3 players deep after a month or two of alpha testing. :P

It's interesting that Rohrer played around with the idea of taking Chain World online-- when I heard about Chain World, the first bit of sacrilege that came to my mind was "well, why should this be restricted to a USB stick? There's no reason a multiplayer server couldn't be governed to do this."

I wrote Lonecraft as a way of replicating the Chain World idea, but using an Amazon EC2 instance as a multiplayer server with a few custom Minecraft server plugins and a Heroku instance as a web app to govern the rules of the game (to make sure only one player plays at once and no one plays more than once).

The code is here: http://www.github.com/ckolderup/lonecraft It needs some more work to flesh out the idea of resetting the world after a set number of players and exposing the blog entries of each player after the world resets, but the general game mechanic is there and functional.

My instance of it is technically up and running, too, but one thing my friends and I quickly discovered while testing it is that people who have been playing Minecraft for a while have a nasty habit of not... really... dying. Once you've learned the ropes it's pretty easy to make armor, carry food, and fight monsters. Death usually comes only occasionally and as the result of a careless mistake.

I've toyed with the idea of imposing a time limit or a number of logins that you're allowed before you're also kicked off, but that seemed to defeat the whole purpose of giving meaning to the in-game death.