Puzzlebox is, sometimes, practice for a possible future. We'll all be more ready to deal with the post-scarcity, post-mortality era if it comes in our lifetime; we've been exploring it already...
It's more than a muck. It's always had a vivid background and theme, thanks to the materials the functions posted (cribbed in no small part from OR's ongoing RPG designs). And it was organized on LiveJournal, of course, but an extra dimension suddenly appeared when people started posting logs, and then began signing up for specifically-IC journals. Suddenly the muck gained a memory - a small but growing gallery of stories. And when this wiki appeared, it added another dimension that's not usually present on a muck. The "datasphere" hinted at by various people in their RP really does exist now.
None of this is completely new, of course - plenty of people on older mucks have shared logs, I'm sure, and posted character profiles and pictures, and tossed around ideas for background off-muck. But LJ and the wiki, by virtue of being so easy to use and so decentralized, have made these 'extra' discussions into a major focus in themselves. They make it easier to keep track of things, and easier to build a shared world, than fleeting encounters in real-time chat ever did. Each channel - muck, wiki, LJ, web page, email, etc. - has its own strengths. -- Amanita
It creeps into dreams. I've never had other mucks creep into my dreams as anything more than a dream about mucking, with dreamt text on a dreamt screen, but Puzzlebox has slid in more intimately. It's even slid into the dreams of at least one person whose only contact is reading Twin's LJ. When it started to come together, there felt like an inevitability to Puzzlebox. A sense sometimes that it already was and we were just finding it.
It's art. It's a bunch of creative thirtyish queers dreaming together on whatever medium seems appropriate.
Hey, guys. One neat thing we had at the DScream was a huge stereo system, with a little MPI command that would let anybody, at any time, define the artist and track being played in the main room. It was simple, but incredibly evocative -- a way for people to subtly communicate moods or comment on the action. I wonder if there'd be any value in, I dunno, maybe a "soundtrack" command -- maybe even some crazy way to have this link to a real audio file in a shared media library, so we can be listening to similar mood-making music when we do a scene? Music is such a big motivator for me -- I thought of this idea while listening to Afrika Bambaata, and that alone made me want to fire up my old alt N'kenge and march her straight into Strangewarp armed to the teeth...