New issue (vol 7, issue 2) of Imaginary Realities!

[Griatch Art]

A new issue of Imaginary Realities is now out! Imaginary Realities is an e-zine about Mudding and other text-based gaming. You can find it here: http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-02/index.html

A pretty small issue this time, it contains an article written (and illustrated!) by yours truly on bartering systems as well as study on rogue-likes by Matthew Ward.

Enjoy!
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Griatch

[Tristano Ajmone]

Dear Griatch,

I've read your article linked above and found it not only very good but also very interesting. Coming from Interactive Fiction I often puzzle at the mechanisc of MUDs, which are so different for obvious reasons--like the "quantum tree" question examplified. I really hope to see more of these type or articles and discussions.

I had read a good book on video games emergence: Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, by Joris Dormans.It's a very interesting book that presents a model to plan, design, create and then code game mechanis with an eye on game emergence. The author also built a framwork to actually test the mechanics in the browser (via FLASH). On this website it's possible to see and use the Framework, and find many articles on the subject of mechanics and emergence.

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/article.php?ref=machinations

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/wiki/index.php?title=Machinations_Framework

I thought it might be worth sharing the links and the book title. Apart from that book, I didn't come across all that many other books on the subject, but there quite a a number of articles, but mostly of very academic nature--Dorman's book is not for math scientists or engineers.

Thanks for the article, it was appreciated.

[Griatch Art]

Glad you liked my article! It's a good thing to support Imaginary Realities I think, I only hope more people start to contribute to it regularly.

The seminal book on designing a MUD is Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle. Anyone even remotely interested in mudding must read that, it covers basically everything you need to think about without going into the specifics of the engine. Haven't read the book you recommend but it sounds interesting, I will check it out!
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Griatch