Spacers’ Lounge: Back to MUSH

I shifted OtherSpace to Slack and away from its traditional home on a PennMUSH platform accessible via client software mostly for convenience.

Simply put: I could be on Slack far more often than on SimpleMU* or MUSHClient, given the demands of my job and family life.

I liked the idea of saving scenes through threaded conversations. I appreciated the value of people being able to visit the Slack community and find stories in progress. I thought it was at least somewhat helpful to provide the capacity for scenes to be more asynchronous, less-reliant on everyone being online at the same time.

However, over time it became apparent that:

· Letting stories drag out proved terminal to momentum, no matter how convenient that was to me and other participants. The platform doesn’t offer the immediacy of the old MUSH environment. I knew that was a weakness going into the project in 2016, but I had hoped we could overcome it.

· Keeping those threads as an archive sometimes just showed how slow scenes really were. Sometimes it took months for me to get back into them. Horrible. That’s on me.

· The threads wouldn’t last forever in Slack unless we paid a premium price to keep them around – to the tune of $8 per user per month. No thanks.

So, I decided that we should keep an online community presence – through Discord, a platform much more aligned with gaming. But we’re taking the stories back to the MUSH – jointhesaga.com port 1790 – where they truly belong.

This won’t work without a commitment from all participants – including myself, of course – to throw ourselves into the mix and restart the beating heart of this MUSH. We’ve made a few solid first steps, with Newt upgrading the PennMUSH codebase to the most recent patch (version 1.8.7 patch level 0) and Colchek latching onto the CSpace database.

In future posts, I’ll talk about the big changes ahead for the OtherSpace story and where you might fit in.

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