Goodbye Gabbo Hello Acme
I moved the project from my personal github account to a github organization, and officially changed the name of the project to “Acme MUD.” I’ve been pondering the name change for a while and was just waiting for a good time to pull the trigger, and this is it. It’s actually the second namechange, if you count when I demoted the name “Gabbo” to just a codename and adopted “untitled gamification project.” When I settled on not giving it an official name, it was because I wanted the name to be chosen later by the players, to reflect the democratic nature of the gameplay I was designing. But there’s about giving it a real name now that procludes that from happening, and I think trying to actually say something with the name is just all around better than purposefully saying nothing. As far as the name Acme goes, I think the generic nature of it as a brand is good for the kind of sandbox experience that I’m trying to create, and I love its connection to Road Runner cartoons. It’s also deeply connected to EotL, and the some of the earliest code I wrote for the project was directly influenced by the Acme libraries that Zamboni and Aleron wrote. By changing the name to Acme I’m committing myself to getting some version of the platform running for EotL players to play, but that’s may take a non-trivial amount of additional work if I want to also preserve the current game experience.
It also just flat out calls it a MUD, which I used to avoid but now embrace. MUDs are not known by a lot of people, and I think even the ones that know them may not recognize what I’m building as one. But it is one, and not just because it runs on the ldmud MUD driver. I find the term Multi-User Domain beautifully open-ended. There’s nothing that says it has to be text-based, or an RPG, or any of the other things that people think of when they think of MUDs. It just has to be multi-user, and provide a virtual space to exist in. “Multi-User Dungeon” is good too, because it conveys a game experience by using a gaming term. It’s just a bit archaic.
I did still want to make sure people understood it was a game, but I like using the word gamification more than game, so I included the former title as the new tagline. In my view, I’m not giving people a game. I’m giving people the tools to build a virtual model for a game, and then giving them the tools to gamify that model, and what emerges from that interaction will be a game. I may end up building some small games of my own with it along the way because it’s fun, but in the end I think it’s the games that players create about their own worlds that are the most interesting and most relatable, moreso than anything I could ever give them.
If you’re reading this, you should already know that coinciding with the namechange is also a change of location for the git repository. I’ve broken up the old ‘gabbo’ repo into separate repos for platform, docs, tools, web client, and the flavors and installed submodules into the mudlib repo. I also created a fork of ldmud. It all belongs to the ‘acmemud’ organization, of which I am the only member! Go team me!