Fuzzy Logic II - A Critique for the Future
If the term "Fuzzy Logic II" doesn't really hold any special significance to you, then this LJ entry is not for you. If, however, you do gain some entertainment value from what that term entails, then please carry on reading...
For those not too familiar with this blog, which I suspect is most of the other players on FL2: Hi, Dyluck here, welcome to my not-used-often Twig (because it's not updated regularly enough to be a web Log). You're probably here because you were directed here, one way or another, because you consider yourself a stakeholder in the Fuzzy Logic II project and you are interested in the future of the world(s) our little blocky avatars inhabit, mine and build stuff in.
As am I, very much. This blog post is meant to be a critique (and not a criticism) of the world: a personal examination of the world through my eyes and experience and what I view as a number of possible futures, especially with the founding of the new Fuzzy Logic III, which is linked via the world portals. I view this development of FL3 as a critical juncture of people's individual projects and plans on the server, to make sure that when it is open for all crafting and construction, that it is done in a way which I hope we can all say is "right" and "fair". I feel I need to speak out about this as a fellow stakeholder in the project and also offer my expertise, especially when we have the serendipity of most of the players being physically in one place at one time over this coming week.
Despite my façade of an aloof evil guy in his lair, I would like to think that I am co-operative towards all other players and I help out where I can, especially in regards to another concern I have with the server, that of accessibility and permeability: being able to get to where you want to go and being able to work your way through the world to get there. In other words, in-world transport. This goes back to my area of expertise, in that I am a student of urban and regional planning with a strong interest (dare I say speciality) in transport planning. The Blue Line, which connects the cold eastern regions of the map with the central metro, was one of my projects, so as to allow the players with bases up there to get into the central area quickly. The signage in the tunnel near the spawn point, so that people know which way to head towards people's bases, is mine. Naturally, all of this has been superseded by the ability to /warp, /spawn and /home, but that has not discouraged us transport builders from continuing our projects.
The transport projects are, in fact, the reason for this critique in the first place. Upon completion of the Harbour Observation Tower, I started to look immediately for "that next project", but couldn't really find anything that grabs me. My outstanding projects are mining beneath my base and exploring the depths of the Diglett's Cave/Drake's Dungeon system. Both of these projects, though, are feeder projects for a construction project, which I find no inspiration for right now; I'm shunning hoarding for a time as a sort of catharsis after the tower's completion. I still want to -do- something, though, so I was originally going to set up a meta-project: FuzzyTrans.
Drawing on my experience in topological map-making, I wish to create a system map of the transport routes for the entire FL2 world: all the public and semi-public tunnels, minecart routes, and other important nodes like the spawn, portals and the warp points. It feeds into one of my favourite activities of Minecraft, that of exploration. After the tunnels were explored, destinations noted, and permissions asked for and obtained, I would make a Flash-based map of the transport routes for everyone to see and have reference to. One reason for its creation was after one fellow player told me that he finds getting around the place intimidating, unwelcoming and confusing - something that I hope that this map would go some way to address.
As I started to draw the map in my mind, I went through the "usual" processes of matching land use and found myself coming back to, what I think, is the elephant in the room: we're cheek-by-jowl with one another, our growth is limited, and any time we try to expand we conflict with our neighbours' expansion plans. We have more and more people coming into the server, and they want to set up their new places and individual projects - all the prime real estate is taken, and so they're forced to the edges of the map, which creates strains on the existing transport systems, including the warps. It is from my town planning background that I'm looking at the server right now, especially as it is becoming more and more a simulation of the real world: we have a basic economy, we have construction and land use, we have mineral resource extraction and use, and we have patterns of settlement. On the flipside of that, we also have "mineral footprints", environmental degradation and destruction, and property disputes. This is the world of a town planner, trying to create order from the chaos that is the Tragedy of the Commons. We all have our own interests, and there's only so many blocks (in various configurations) in the world. We all want everyone else to Look What I Can Do, but we don't want to move too far away from each other so we can see what everyone else is up to and help each other out easily, much to the detriment of the resource of land and space. The creation of a warp system to allow us to spread out, however, is a different Tragedy of the Commons: that of physical server resources, lag, and time spent waiting for chunks to load.
So, we are truly faced with the dilemma. Do we sacrifice land for cycles, or cycles for land? The creation of FL3 has, and will, give us more land that we require. I have been to FL3 (though I probably shouldn't have) thanks to my portal in my tower which, I thought, was going to take me to the Nether. And what I discovered is just about as scary. FL2's world is basically an archipelago, with many of our construction projects being forced to build in and over water and generally constrained by it, especially as we all clustered around the spawn point. Water is, perhaps, the most defining feature of FL2's geography. All around FL3's "spawn", however, is mountainous terrain and land. Lots of land. That is a problem of itself: how does one know the extents of someone's land claim? Also, the issue of spawn clustering is likely to repeat itself: the three portals I am aware of (Bingo's, the spawnpoint and mine) are located in close proximity. My portal to the spawnpoint and from the spawnpoint to Bingo's are around 150 tiles away from each other; Bingo's to mine is around 225 tiles. That's not a lot when you consider a stack is made up of 64 blocks - 150 tiles is around two and a half stacks placed block by block contiguously. There's no natural breaks between the FL3 "drop" points, unless you count the mountains but that's nothing a tunnel or twenty can't fix. Instead of one cluster, we may see three smaller ones. Or, it will just re-merge into another supercluster like FL2, and then we've gone nowhere.
These are the challenges that, I feel, we must address now and moving on into the future:
Last, but not least, thank you very much to Weasel for his time, energy and money in giving us Fuzzy Logic II and III, and doing it so very well. =D
For those not too familiar with this blog, which I suspect is most of the other players on FL2: Hi, Dyluck here, welcome to my not-used-often Twig (because it's not updated regularly enough to be a web Log). You're probably here because you were directed here, one way or another, because you consider yourself a stakeholder in the Fuzzy Logic II project and you are interested in the future of the world(s) our little blocky avatars inhabit, mine and build stuff in.
As am I, very much. This blog post is meant to be a critique (and not a criticism) of the world: a personal examination of the world through my eyes and experience and what I view as a number of possible futures, especially with the founding of the new Fuzzy Logic III, which is linked via the world portals. I view this development of FL3 as a critical juncture of people's individual projects and plans on the server, to make sure that when it is open for all crafting and construction, that it is done in a way which I hope we can all say is "right" and "fair". I feel I need to speak out about this as a fellow stakeholder in the project and also offer my expertise, especially when we have the serendipity of most of the players being physically in one place at one time over this coming week.
Despite my façade of an aloof evil guy in his lair, I would like to think that I am co-operative towards all other players and I help out where I can, especially in regards to another concern I have with the server, that of accessibility and permeability: being able to get to where you want to go and being able to work your way through the world to get there. In other words, in-world transport. This goes back to my area of expertise, in that I am a student of urban and regional planning with a strong interest (dare I say speciality) in transport planning. The Blue Line, which connects the cold eastern regions of the map with the central metro, was one of my projects, so as to allow the players with bases up there to get into the central area quickly. The signage in the tunnel near the spawn point, so that people know which way to head towards people's bases, is mine. Naturally, all of this has been superseded by the ability to /warp, /spawn and /home, but that has not discouraged us transport builders from continuing our projects.
The transport projects are, in fact, the reason for this critique in the first place. Upon completion of the Harbour Observation Tower, I started to look immediately for "that next project", but couldn't really find anything that grabs me. My outstanding projects are mining beneath my base and exploring the depths of the Diglett's Cave/Drake's Dungeon system. Both of these projects, though, are feeder projects for a construction project, which I find no inspiration for right now; I'm shunning hoarding for a time as a sort of catharsis after the tower's completion. I still want to -do- something, though, so I was originally going to set up a meta-project: FuzzyTrans.
Drawing on my experience in topological map-making, I wish to create a system map of the transport routes for the entire FL2 world: all the public and semi-public tunnels, minecart routes, and other important nodes like the spawn, portals and the warp points. It feeds into one of my favourite activities of Minecraft, that of exploration. After the tunnels were explored, destinations noted, and permissions asked for and obtained, I would make a Flash-based map of the transport routes for everyone to see and have reference to. One reason for its creation was after one fellow player told me that he finds getting around the place intimidating, unwelcoming and confusing - something that I hope that this map would go some way to address.
As I started to draw the map in my mind, I went through the "usual" processes of matching land use and found myself coming back to, what I think, is the elephant in the room: we're cheek-by-jowl with one another, our growth is limited, and any time we try to expand we conflict with our neighbours' expansion plans. We have more and more people coming into the server, and they want to set up their new places and individual projects - all the prime real estate is taken, and so they're forced to the edges of the map, which creates strains on the existing transport systems, including the warps. It is from my town planning background that I'm looking at the server right now, especially as it is becoming more and more a simulation of the real world: we have a basic economy, we have construction and land use, we have mineral resource extraction and use, and we have patterns of settlement. On the flipside of that, we also have "mineral footprints", environmental degradation and destruction, and property disputes. This is the world of a town planner, trying to create order from the chaos that is the Tragedy of the Commons. We all have our own interests, and there's only so many blocks (in various configurations) in the world. We all want everyone else to Look What I Can Do, but we don't want to move too far away from each other so we can see what everyone else is up to and help each other out easily, much to the detriment of the resource of land and space. The creation of a warp system to allow us to spread out, however, is a different Tragedy of the Commons: that of physical server resources, lag, and time spent waiting for chunks to load.
So, we are truly faced with the dilemma. Do we sacrifice land for cycles, or cycles for land? The creation of FL3 has, and will, give us more land that we require. I have been to FL3 (though I probably shouldn't have) thanks to my portal in my tower which, I thought, was going to take me to the Nether. And what I discovered is just about as scary. FL2's world is basically an archipelago, with many of our construction projects being forced to build in and over water and generally constrained by it, especially as we all clustered around the spawn point. Water is, perhaps, the most defining feature of FL2's geography. All around FL3's "spawn", however, is mountainous terrain and land. Lots of land. That is a problem of itself: how does one know the extents of someone's land claim? Also, the issue of spawn clustering is likely to repeat itself: the three portals I am aware of (Bingo's, the spawnpoint and mine) are located in close proximity. My portal to the spawnpoint and from the spawnpoint to Bingo's are around 150 tiles away from each other; Bingo's to mine is around 225 tiles. That's not a lot when you consider a stack is made up of 64 blocks - 150 tiles is around two and a half stacks placed block by block contiguously. There's no natural breaks between the FL3 "drop" points, unless you count the mountains but that's nothing a tunnel or twenty can't fix. Instead of one cluster, we may see three smaller ones. Or, it will just re-merge into another supercluster like FL2, and then we've gone nowhere.
These are the challenges that, I feel, we must address now and moving on into the future:
- If people head to FL3, then what becomes of their old projects in the FL2 world? Do these become urban blight, something that is not used but can't be touched? Do they count as an abandoned project and thus would the land be suitable for redevelopment? If so, who gives the green light for redevelopment, and who does the demolition? Who has the right to the blocks?
- How can people set themselves up in FL3 so that a legible and comprehensive transport system can be created instead of the ad-hoc systems we've created in FL2? Should we favour warps over passages and minecarts? What is the definition between public and private passageways and other pieces of transport infrastructure? Would maps of the systems actually be useful, or too much trouble?
- I suppose the more important question is should we allow for some domineering planning controls, or let development be laissez-faire-but-don't-touch-someone-else's-stuff like it is now?
Last, but not least, thank you very much to Weasel for his time, energy and money in giving us Fuzzy Logic II and III, and doing it so very well. =D