For starters, a few questions sprang into my head even as I rolled through the "next"s of the tutorial: where did this name come from? who came up with it? and to what end (as far as advertising is concerned) is the point?
well, after a bit of research all made sense. ah yes, the nineties. (1990, I believe).
Upon exploring the site more and "coming out of the closet", so to speak, the oddness of the program continued.
The typeface and overall set up struck me as totally primitive. If we are trying to connect with other people in this day and age i'm not really sure how we can suspend our disbelief was we type on something that resembles my parent's 1st computer. It seems odd that though the network was est. during that time, the set up itself has not progressed with technology.
Comparing it to Facebook, for example, I don't really understand why one would choose to communicate with friends (or dare I say it, MEET people) in such a strange setting. You start in a closet, for example. You are running into people in someone's house. WHAT? In playing the 'game' (for lack of a better word) I felt like some half-shy and awkward, half-sexual perverted guest at a christmas party waiting to prey on lost fellow guests.
Aside from its creative potential (in that one can literally create a 'character' with no semblance of reality), [not to be rude, but] what would motivate users to choose Lamdawhoomooschmoo over another site?
Perhaps it just had to do with my own experience on the site. Let's recap a brief moment of my virtual existence (4 moves i made, to be exact):
[nb. the moves in quotations are words i typed, the rest is the results i got]
Move 1) "north"
-you can't go that way
"south"
you open the closet door and leave the darnkess for the corridor, closing the door behind you.
corridor.
There are starits going down to the west...etc.
Move 2) "south"
Master Bedroom.
This is main master bedroom, overlooking the pool to the south ...
You set off the burglar alarm! Better find it quick and disable it!...
Move 3) "south"
You slide aside the door and exit to the deck,
What's this!? you're just abandoning the place and leaving the alarm beeping!? It will annoy all the neighbors! You should turn it off.
...
Move 4) "Pull lever on rube"
Red_Guest pulls doen the handle on the Rube Goldberg contraption.
The lever pulls on string, releaseing a steel ball high up.
The Ball enters a maze of passages.
Somewhere deep inside, the ball hits a switsch with an audible click.
A tv comes to life, showing re-runs of "Gunsmoke".
The sheriff's bullets fly out of the screen....
okay so in four moves (save for the ones I cut out where I 'interacted'...hmm..), i managed to go north and south (directions I see most commonly on maps not during social situations), set of a fire alarm (or supposedly do so--- there's no sound, remember?), and make a tv come to life.
It seems like such an odd juxtaposition of 'real' elements (ie. the house, the fact that I, a living person, am moving the character) and totally fictitious ones (other characters' identities, and basically everything else). The thing it seems to really lack, is truth.
I think this fact - that players buy into the 'real' while avoiding or not considering what is 'true' about the situation (and thus not considering the dangers of it) - might lead to this "cyber rape" or rather cyber-intrusion.
Of course, I'm not sure about the voodoo dolls. See in Indiana Jones for more information.
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