Meta

Discussion and ideas about...

• what Puzzlebox is (it's become more than just a muck!)
• creativity and making it come more easily
• where our characters come from and what they mean
• philosophy of the muck
• the sort of things we'd love to see going on here.
• The care and feeding of plots
  • how to start them, keep them going, and avoid pitfalls
• different styles and forms of RP/invention
  • e.g. 'traditional' muck interaction, more experimental stuff, the wiki...
• tools such as MUCK toys
• when the Puzzlebox assimilates into our very dreams.
• invocations of beings both real and imagined.

What it is

I think the path to enlightenment is always circituitous and obscure.

I mean, when I read that, and thought about it that way, I realized that, yeah, I think that's a lot of what Twin has to teach me: How to love my fellow sentient beings. Whatever the hell they may be.

I found my spirit animal and (she) is a genderqueer black hole. Okay!

-me, in [some discussion on early PB troubles] (may be locked), also quoted in the very first entry of my PB journal. -Twin (Made public 8-21-04 :) -- OR)

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

There's a certain level of Augmented Reality Game to it all, isn't there... -- OR

I've even seen websites for other mucks, with logs and character descs and whatnot. And I've seen communtiies of RP in other media - forums, LJ, and so on. But Puzzlebox refuses to be contained to one medium. The primary interaction is the muck, but there's a weird zone between OOC and IC that happens on Livejournal. I've put material somewhat crucial to a plot in my LJ in the past. Compare and contrast with [Bandari], another specialized muck of similar vintage, that began with a wiki... -- Twin

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.

• [Carnival: A model for culture] - brief article by Brian Eno; it'd make a lovely statement of principle for PB.

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...