Skip navigation.
Home
Si 684
1
Home » blogs » Ryan Cannon's blog

DragonRealms: A text-based world and community

Submitted by Ryan Cannon on Mon, 2006-02-13 05:18.
Current Score:
0

My Vote:
You have not voted yet :
Set vote to:
Ryan Cannon's picture

This paper ended up as part of my ongoing experiment in using XHTML+CSS as a media-independent word-processing format. You can view the results online at: http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~rcannonz/coursework/si684/first_paper/index.xhtml

Internet Explorer completely barfs at real XHTML documents, so don't even bother clicking the above link in that browser. If you care to, please add comments/ideas about the formatting or references as well as the content.

 Attached is a PDF version created with PrinceXML.

» View Paper 1: The Basics | login to post comments | 953 reads
Brian Kerr's picture

I'll comment on this paper!

Submitted by Brian Kerr on Sat, 2006-02-18 15:38.

Good paper overall.

I'm not sure about your statement of the joint enterprise in the MUD. Maybe that part of the paper just needs to be unpacked a little bit. But it's important because it's so fundamental. What does it mean to create "real-time fiction," and how is role-play understood (I suppose "negotiated" if we are using Wenger's terminology) by participants?

I don't have experience with this MUD, but it seems likely that -- based on your description of the guild system and different fantasy races -- there might be overlapping communities of practices in the MUD, each with their own enterprise, repertoire, and forms of engagement. When giving examples, you discuss membership in and boundary between these groups. It may make sense to highlight the existence groups right off the bat, and discuss basics like joint enterprise with respects both to DragonRealms as a whole, and the different guilds, species, etc. within it.

The paper had a several errors in grammar and usage, which should be pretty straightforward to clean up.

The specific examples you chose were well-placed in the paper, and given the right amount of explanation -- something which is not easy to do when writing about a text interface in this kind of context.

I didn't have any problems resulting from your word processing experiment, good luck with that (I'm a TeX holdout myself).

» login to post comments