Per my previous post, I anonymized the graphs for public posting.
This is data for the last two weeks of December or so, which means it's got some strange skews, as people play differently during the holidays. But as colorful pictures of what's possible, they may be of interest.

• Raw social connections
• Affinity by percent time
• Affinity by ( Read more... )

This is a MUSH design and administration post, but those who run or play LARPs, MMORPGs, or other large-scale games may find it interesting as well.
This post is about:

• Player base growth, information dispersal, and culture wars.
• Visualization of character connections.
• Using affinity maps to look at playgroups and latent relationships.

( Read on... )

I'm hoping to make a series of short posts on "how MMO design influenced the design of The Road to Amber MUSH". A lot of research went into our previous commercial MMO design foray, and a number of things we learned are applicable to a broad spectrum of games, not just MMOs.
This first post is on the Dunbar number, group size, and its applicability ( Read more... )

There are days when I wonder if running a MUSH is worth the headache, and then there are days when I stumble upon things like benedict_rta's diary, and the payoff in hysterical amusement makes it totally (probably) worth it.
For some reason, the bit about the hand is just fall-down funny for me.

The new MUSH, The Road to Amber has now hit the "pre-opening phase" -- open to builders and people who want to talk about characters and setting.
Come check it out: roadtoamber.com 6250, or peruse the wiki. Feel free to tell your friends; it's an open invite.

Alan Schwartz (Javelin) has a podcast called TinyTalk, in which he covers various MUSHing-related topics. This week's episode is an interview with me.
TinyTalk, Episode 8: Interview with Amberyl

Iin the podcast, I blather about my MUSHing history, how I got started ( Read more... )

rob_donoghue is, as usual, a goldmine of the pithy RPG observations.
First, you need to read the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell article that he linked to recently: Open Secrets: Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information
At its core, it is an article about the difference between puzzles and mysteries: If things go wrong with a puzzle, ( Read more... )

TooMUSH has moved to too.logrus.com 6660 (note new port).
bryant's box had a hard drive failure. The old database might be salvageable, but at the moment it's not available, so there's a new database on a maybe-temporary maybe-permanent basis. That means you need to re-create yourself.
I bbposted on PernMUSH and on Chronicles of Amber, and figured that ( Read more... )

Back in the Madhouse days, we used to run a lot of Big Games, LARP-style one-shots involving a ton of our friends from about a five-state area. (I miss those games, and the people I haven't seen in ages, a lot. Alas, a casualty of the end of our MUSHing days and our immediate post-college lifestyle, I guess.)
Anyway, these were almost all Amber ( Read more... )

I blame captain_boots for finding this one. Shangrila MUSH's Baskin-Robbins
It starts as just an ordinary bad desc, but then... well, you really ( Read more... )