I used to consider myself a staunch minimalist when it came to MUCK "toys" like greeting-globals, zombies, and tram libraries. I was of the opinion that it was fine if the techies wanted to play with MPI and MUF for fun, but all a
real roleplayer ever needed was a colon and a quotation mark. Now, I'm not so convinced. Some of the projects people have suggested have convinced me that maybe an intelligently coded toy can give a lot of structure to a scene. At the very least, they can provide for an independent element of randomization that can snap somebody out of a creative funk (see Brainstorming, above.)
They can also simply be useful props - the work I put into building Sophia?, with automatic name-and-description changing, was well worth it in the way it made the raccoon-and-symbiote relationship more real in the context of the muck. -Twin
On FurtooniaMUCK, there was a little transformation club called the "New Outlook." At the time, I found it a little too reliant on gadgetry. There were little remote controls that could randomize your @desc with permission, control collars that would allow people in the room to use "sayme" and "poseme" commands to control your actions, hypnotic Walkmans that spoofed messages about your personality being changed... They were neat on their own, but seemed to exist for their own sakes, distracting people from being creative. But in reflection, I wonder if that wasn't more an effect of social conditions. There were never many people there, and the regulars seemed to be more into the technology than the sensual and literary possibilities. I wonder what a troupe of Puzzleboxians could do with some of those gadgets? -- OR
Off the top of my head, a few ideas for MPI/MUF gadgetry already discussed elsewhere, keeping in mind I am not technical and have no idea what is and isn't practical. (Somebody might want to move this to a specific Development page, if Meta gets too cluttered.):
- A MUCK-wide "consensual STD" opt-in system. Some characters would be listed as carriers of harmless microbes that have bizarre effects, perhaps in the form of spoofed reminder messages on a timer. If two characters exchange bodily fluids, they both type in the command, and anything they have is transmitted, perhaps according to contagion and immunity rules of some sort. Perhaps Messian culture treats this as a harmless hobby, akin to collecting Magic: the Gathering cards, with "ultra-rare" or unusually pleasant "infections" particularly treasured?
- A Puzzlebox oracle. Sort of a self-consciously artificial I Ching/Tarot/[Oblique Strategies]/Creative Whack Pack/magnetic-poetry equivalent, that exists ICly in the Puzzlebox world, with imagery appropriate to the Mess. Players and characters would be able to deal X "cards" at random. This could serve as a creative nudge, a game, a divination system, a religious ritual, a form of non-violent conflict, even as part of some kind of random transformation engine... (PS: [Oblique Strategies on LJ].)
- A script, perhaps some kind of Markov chain tool, to generate surreal automatic writing from the Wiki or some other body of text. This would probably be put to use in the Reference Library in Strangewarp, as schizophrenic viral rants about the Mess's secret history...
- A "plot" command that would allow players to send a short summary of a just-finished scene to a Livejournal, a la [Here Lie Monsters MUCK]'s [Yaparfmoo].
- Drugs. I still want to see the drugs from the DScream ported. They were simple, just a series of time-release bits of text, but they worked. I'd do something along those lines but I'm utterly lacking the real-world experience. -Twin
- I've coded some MPI before. If someone gave me the bits of text, I could try to hammer something out... -Kehari?
- Someday I should revisit the 'cutup' command I wrote ages ago... try it, it's available in the muck. How could it be better?