Reborn
After what has seemed like and age, TerraMUD (tMUX) is once more.
For those who are unaware, originally TerraMUD was “hidden” on a school server, back when they were a thing. Sadly the school had an IT review, instigated and carried out by an outsourcing company who – surprise, surprise – recommended that everything was outsourced. This meant that ALL of the local services of the college (state of the art at the time) were dismantled and replaced with less bespoke solutions that almost, but not entirely, did nearly nothing like the services they were designed to replace.
With the change went a HUGE collection of educational innovation, resources and services – that is progress…. I guess. tMUX was one of many victims of the apocalypse our school is still coping with.
Thanks to the kind intervention of Ado (Adrian Malisano) and Mazil (Michael Smith), tMUX is now hosted on a server not affiliated with the school, open once again to players.
After some farting around, fucking stuff up then getting technical support, I have managed to get some DNS entries to make access simpler, so tmux.wonko.info and terramud.wonko.info now point to Ado’s server, port 4042 is the gateway for a glorious text-only telnet interface.
telnet:tmux.wonko.info:4042
Try it, it is so deliciously nerdy old school and just plain cool
There is a noobies guide also – HERE
I, Avatar
We are exploring virtual words with my year 9 students and it is a rich and varied experience, well, that is the plan at least. The worlds are textiverse (a custom MUD for them to edit), a browserverse (terraMOO, a hybrid world) and an Opensim (full 3d world called terraceLIFE).
Today we ventured into terraceLIFE and explored the notion of “avatar” – the brief for the first half of the lesson was simple enough – get your avatar to look like you.
What could possibly go wrong? Year 9 boys, in an opensim, where the default avatar is RUTH, a buxom female.
After some initial explanation, they took to creating a virtual presence fairly well – it is interesting to talk to them about how they see themselves – shorter than they really are, heavier than they really are, bigger nose etc. I guess it is a tall ask to do body-image stuff with year 9 boys, given the hormone storm they are currently weathering but, you know, they handled it pretty well.
Very happy with the performance of the opensim also – 30 kids at once, all doing wonderfully interesting things, worked a charm. Next session we will explore building techniques with a simple construction project, then we will get complex and go for a collaborative building project (there will be tears before bedtime there I suspect).
I have a chunk of terrain for them to play on, will let them mark their territory and see how it goes – the only real rule here is “don’t be a dick” – it will be interesting to see how they cope.
Story Tainting
My year 9 ICTE students have begun exploring the “Virtual Worlds” unit and we are set for some good (geeky) times as they will use a Textiverse (ICTEMMO), a Browserverse (terraMOO) and a 3D Opensim (terraceLIFE) to express non-linear narrative.
The focus of this unit is storytelling, actually – the worlds merely the delivery vehicle (but don’t tell the kids, right), although each pre-suppose very different skills, offer vastly different perceptions and appeal to different levels of geek.
I tried something (they were keen and had NO IDEA what I had planned for them – that sort of “on edge excitement” is useful sometimes) involving story tree generations.
I wrote a program to randomly pick people and set about dividing the class into random pairs (under the guise of “people have to form productive partnerships, regardless of whether they would choose to” or some such tripe) and then tainted their story – let me explain:
We fired up Inspiration (a mind-mapping software title, insert your fav, it does not matter – one pooter per pair), I got them to type a story seed as their first bubble: either
- “Timmy fell down the well” for one class or
- “You regain consciousness as the airlock hisses closed behind you and the oxygen levels return to normal” for the other.
I then preceded to explain how to spread the bubble map based on possible scenarios and decisions-different outcomes, spinning stereotype story arcs just to illustrate how a story tree might work. I then deleted all but the “seed”, left that on screen while the groups then spun their stories.
I apologised profusely for tainting their story, by exploring aspects of the narrative live in front of them. I begged them to think how the story would go from their own imagination, pleaded for them to think originally, then let them at it.
The instructions were clear – make it interesting, make it make sense, talk, confer – VERY quietly so as to not influence the group beside you … go!
After 15-20 of the most interesting minutes in class this week (wow were they absorbed) they were required to upload their story trees to Moodle (so they sort of “commit” to their work) and then we looked at structure/content.
Interesting how many of them took the seed as a “starting point” for their story (neither of which make particularly good opening scenarios, unless in flashback). “Delete everything that is not original” I said – I don’t want to read someone elses story, just what YOU have come up with … not a lot left. Well, not entirely true, some argued passionately the fact that they had re-worked the story from Halo, or LOTR or whatever so that made it original, some actually did use their own imaginations but most lost lots of their trees.
So what?
Original story telling is HARD, because there has been so much story telling in the past. It is a tall ask, cold, to try and invent a good, coherent, engaging story without plunging into stereotype and popularist tripe – doubly so when readers can choose their own pathway through it (I love non-linear narrative for this very reason – no 2 readers get the same experience).
Students suggested (spontaneously) that a plan of attack would have been much better than merely launching into the narrative – give those kids a prize as they worked out, for themselves, the purpose of the lesson.
Tutorial Zone complete?
…so I got to thinking about the overall “sense” of the tutorial zone – never a good thing when I have lots of other things to do, but the new procrastination plugin kicked in and I ignored my streaming head cold symptoms and began tweaking…
Object market re-worked
It seemed to me that the tutorial “shells” were facing the wrong way (they faced the road and had their backs on the internal lawn area) – by rotating them 180 (and re-arranging the foliage) it feels a lot more inclusive, like the tutes and the object market relate to each other – they are ALL about the art of building so that was settled (at least in my own fevered brain).
I added a campfire talk circle, with a “cone of silence” around it so private group discussions can go on there, re-jigged the guided tour a little so it made sense and I think I am pretty well done here.
Tut Zone overview
Looking at it from above, it looks like there is very little here, but I know how long it has taken me to make, and feel pretty proud of it.
In the one compact u-shaped area we learn how to make, move, rotate, scale, colour, texture, script and select objects, how to film them afterwards and share our plans for doing so – nice, compact, accessible and … yeah, I know, talking to myself, you get that.
What is missing? Suggestions gratefully received.
…you ought to be in movies
…so Cybernauts will need to present their final contributions, and one format will be in-world machinima, so I set about thinking about how to best teach how to do this.
I have fond (if wildly inaccurate) memories of the old clackety film projectors we had when I was in school, so set about modelling one in Wings3D
Model Work
While I was there, I also made a “wall” that is to be used as a sort of noticeboard on which I post tutorials and how-to’s. I thought the filmstrip metaphor would be a useful one so used that – I suspect however, our cybernauts have NEVER even seen actual film (that flimsy semi-transparent media we used to entrust our visual records to) – good or bad I do not know. I am not sure how I feel about the move to entirely digital records, particularly of things that are important – I guess they will never be accidentally deleted or become corrupt, hey?
With assets in-hand, I entered the world, set up an area in the tutorial zone, wired it to be the next stop in the guided tour and began decorating it with film-making resources
Entry to Film School
I popped the projector on a pedestal (where it belongs :P) and began animating and lighting it – the reels move at different speeds, as they did in real life, and I found a rather nice animated test pattern, and fashioned a transparent flickery light beam to add to the effect. Surrounding this I set about arranging display panels.
Projector, beam and screen (showing test pattern)
The aim was to “keep it simple, stupid”. Fortunately the in-world video capture system is pretty simple actually, so I aimed to show budding Spielbergs how to get to it, how to drive it and what the settings mean, briefly.
Setup explanation
As well as how to fire up the recorder, I thought it relevant to introduce some film language as well – tilt/pan, dolly/truck are all important – we do them without thinking but I thought that surfacing the terms explicitly the kids could have much better discussions when planning their movies.
Some film language
Rather than just post static resources, I thought a little meta-machinima was in order (machinima about making machinima) – check it out
Quite happy with the resultant tutorial – will it work with the punters – no idea – I guess we will find out.
I am not sure if I should also post info on storyboarding to formalise their planning – certainly the productions will be better quality if they are planned but i am not sure – what do you think?
