[E-Lang] Electric Communities

[Paul Snively]

on 9/15/01 5:38 PM, Will Glozer at wglozer@yahoo.com wrote:

> Hi folks, I've been reading about the history of E and
> Electric Communities, or at least what information there is.
> A pity such a fascinating project got canned.  Is anyone
> aware of similar projects currently in the works, or any
> interest in such?

Absolutely. I have a long-term interest in precisely this, which I have felt
compelled to think about more in the context of <http://www.mozart-oz.org>
than E for a number of reasons that I will gladly explicate upon request
since they are off-topic for the list.

Robin Lee Powell is already attempting to develop a MOO in Oz and is very
much in the process of learning why capability security is the right tool
for the job, and digging bulldog-like into the issues in implementing it
well in Oz. There are a number of threads that have arisen out of this on
the Oz list; the granddaddy of them can be found at
<http://www.mozart-oz.org/lists/oz-users/0941.html>. I'm sending this to the
list because the general issues are relevant to the group IMHO, and the
particulars of how some specific needs are or are not addressed by Oz are
probably also of interest at least to some of E's implementors.

>  Seems to me that a distributed and secure
> community would be a very handy thing to have.

Agreed wholeheartedly. My long-term goal is to provide an extremely
immersive virtual environment with a self-sustaining economic system
in-game, but to have that economy map somehow onto real money, so, e.g. if
you want to play, you have to "buy in" as you do in a poker game. Also, all
abilities will be capabilities, so, e.g. if you want to build a house, you'd
better either have the "construction capability" or hire someone who does.
The "building capability" would provide its holder with a user interface
akin to the "build mode" of the wildly popular "The Sims," and so on.

My thesis is that MMORPGs are becoming quite popular and will only become
moreso as broadband Internet access becomes more widespread. Much is said
about how these environments are "persistent," but very little is said about
how participants can side-effect these persistent worlds in a principled
way. My answer to that is capabilities, as was Electric Communities.

I have some other goals, too, like lifting RPGs out of the "sword and
sorcery fantasy" ghetto and constructing an environment that wired women
will want to participate in as well, but those are largely tangential to the
issue of the environment's security regime (although I have a thought in the
back of my mind that "patterns of cooperation without vulnerability" are a
necessary, but not sufficient, condition to the construction of successful
"girl games.")

> On another note, is there any idea when a persistent version
> of E  will be available?

As MarkM has noted, funny you should ask... :-)

Having spent a great deal of this list's bandwidth talking about Oz, let me
ask the ob. E question: does the new alpha release address MacOS X?

> Thanks,
> Will
> 
> 
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Thanks,
Paul