An Interview With Mouse (August 18, 1994)
[This is the first in a hopefully long series of interviews with players on HoloMUCK. With any luck, each of these interviews will be in some way fun, poignant, informative, insightful or humorous. This particular interview is a learning exercise for both myself and Mouse. Some of the text has been edited in marginal ways to eliminate the problems of netskew and the fact that half of the interview was not even done in the radio station where the text would seem to indicate that it happened. In any event, the transcript is as close to the original as humanly possible, keeping in mind that it has to be generally readable. Such techincal difficulties should be weeded out after a few interviews are under my belt. You'll probably notice that the questions and answers both get better as the interview goes along, but at the beginning at least I was headed for the empty pool at a high rate of speed with both my eyes closed. Enjoy it, and maybe we'll see you here. --Sjade]SJADE: You are described as being the Chancellor of the Internals. Could you describe what sorts of things that entails?
MOUSE: Well, internals. I maintain the server, the C code that supports Holo. I'm responsible for a few of the MUF programs, though I haven't needed to do much to them in quite a while. The title reflects a tendency, which is carried over from my real life persona, towards system-type stuff, tools rather than end-user applications. I could illustrate with a couple examples, if you want.
SJADE: Please do.
MOUSE: Well, for example, some time ago--months--we had a problem with someone setting up an object that was supposed to disappear as one picked it up. If you know what it means, this was done by putting a program in the @succ which recycled trigger @. Now this is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, but the code wasn't prepared to deal with it. When picking such an object up, you ended up carrying a garbage object, and things went downhill from there. I was the person who had the, er, fun, of finding and fixing the original problem, and also repairing the damage done to the database - or more pre- cisely, writing code to repair that damage. In this case, there was a problem with the internal workings, the code underlying the muck world, and--I'm tempted to say "therefore"--it fell into my bailiwick.
SJADE: It sounds as though you are solely responsible for problems such as that.
MOUSE: Well, I'm responsible for fixing them. In some cases I'm responsible for introducing them in the process of fixing something else, such as some of the recent trouble, but usually they're long-standing problems that I just end up dealing with.
SJADE: Well, slipping onto another topic briefly here because it is standing out. Your name begs the question of why you choose to be a mouse in the scheme of things.
MOUSE: The ultimate reason behind that--if I might get a little imprecise--is lost to history. I call myself, and am called Mouse in real life as well. It's a convenient abbreviation of a nickname for me in my real life family. The real life nickname is of some 20 years' standing, and I no longer recall where it came from, if indeed there is anything distinctive one can point to as that "where."
SJADE: I can go with the premise that it is long-standing, and the origin is lost to the depths of history.
MOUSE: That's probably an accurate brief summary.
SJADE: Does being associated with the "underbelly" of the system keep you from normal interaction with players on the top level?
MOUSE: Sometimes. It does not inherently have that effect, but it often ends up that way because when I'm online I'm often dealing with or looking at some aspect of the implementation. Besides, recently, I don't have a lot of spare time, so mudding for mudding's sake tends to suffer, leaving only mudding for the sake of supporting the muck - and even that suffers occasionally.
SJADE: Is that something you perhaps regret? Or can you chalk it up to being a part of your average range of duties?
MOUSE: Well, I regret that I'm no longer as much a member of the social circle I once was, here on Holo. But it amounts to choosing between real life and Holo where I want to invest the limited time I have each day, and I've been choosing real life more recently. As for "average range of duties," it depends on what you consider my duties to be. Any wiz has a certain degree of wizard duties, which tend to be borderline internals anyway--stuff like granting builder bits. It's never really been specified what is and is not my function, though, so it's hard to be definite about whether that counts.
SJADE: So you do undertake some of the other jobs of a wizard on HoloMUCK?
MOUSE: Certainly. The things I remember doing commonly, these days, are creating characters and checking out apartments for builder bits. Though, again, I've never seen an exact spec for what a wizard's job is.
SJADE: Apparently any number of jobs can overlap. I won't ask you to pick favorites in all things, but which part of being a wizard would you say you like the most? The least?
MOUSE: Hmmm. [Pause] Least is probably easier. I'd say dealing with "undesirables," people who connect to cause trouble. For example: a couple of weeks ago I was talking with some people when a guest showed up and started getting obnoxious and insulting, eventually saying right out that he--I assume he--showed up specifically to harass people until he got kicked off. I lost no time in doing so. And that was one of the easier, more clear-cut cases.
SJADE: Do you find this to be the case more often than not, or is the world basically a stable place?
MOUSE: A player who will not honor the mucker or builder rules--we've had a couple of those--is a nastier case, but being a wizard means I have to take them with the good. More often than not, people are reasonably decent, in my limited experience.
SJADE: You say limited experience. How long have you been a part of HoloMUCK?
MOUSE: I said "limited experience" more because I've not even met the vast majority of the over four hundred players here. I've been here since late February, 1992. So in length of time, I've been here nearly as long as Holo has.
SJADE: I see. So you mean limited in terms of actual interaction, rather than length of time.
MOUSE: Yes. Limited in that--for example--we could have hundreds of real slimes, and I might well never know it.
SJADE: Have you built anything on HoloMUCK?
MOUSE: Have I built anything? Oh yes...let's see. My first building project was a stairwell for Tanstaafl Towers apartment building. It's since been torn down. Remaining, though, is the subway, which is my work, and my house out near North Arch, some odds and ends here and there, but I don't recall anything else of substantial size.
SJADE: The subway is quite a remarkable thing. Give us a little history of it, if you would.
MOUSE: Again, in keeping with my tendencies, I tend to create tools, rather than end-use things. [...] That was my first big MUF program. I don't recall what got me thinking about it, but it seemed like a neat sort of thing to have, and it looked feasible. I wrote a little code and dug a few rooms, and it proved itself workable. I wrote more code and talked with Snark about where it would make sense to lay out the lines. I think I may have scared Radagast a bit with it, though. Didn't really think about the possibility beforehand.
SJADE: What was he afraid of?
MOUSE: Well, I heard about this only well after the fact, and I think not directly from him, so it may be confused. But he signed on as programming wiz, as I understand it, and to have me, a complete newcomer to the mudding world, show up and turn out a thousand-line MUF program would give anyone in that position visions of being elbowed out. Not that I wanted to, of course, but he couldn't know that then. Nor did I realize that coding skill was as rela- tively rare as I now realize it is, or I would perhaps have been more careful. I hadn't realized that the subway program was remarkable.
SJADE: Ah. Well, it appears that that has worked out for the best.
MOUSE: Yes. I feel no problems between Rad and me now.
SJADE: How would you characterize your rapport with the citizenry here? The wizardry?
MOUSE: Rapport with people--hm. Depends on the people, and of course I don't know what's typical, so I haven't much to compare it to. I'd say I get along well with the wizards, though I don't see much of any except for you and sometimes Snark nowadays. I feel I get along well with those players I inter- act with. There aren't very many such, though, since as I mentioned my social mudding time has taken a sharp nosedive. Most of my interactio nwith the players is things like: "Can you check out my apartment," or "Such-and-such program seems to be broken."
SJADE: Have you done any exploring of HoloMUCK?
MOUSE: Some. Not much. That suffers from the same trouble social mudding suffers from--lack of time--and I also tend to hesitate to explore for two reasons: one, I have to take care or my wizbit lets me see things that make puzzles/quests too easy, and two, I am somewhat paranoid about tripping Trojan horses. Neither is insurmountable, of course, but they make the activation energy that much higher, to use a chemistry analogy.
SJADE: You're listening to a live interview with Mouse on WSAJ, 102.1 FM, the Talk of HoloMUCK. We'll be back after this server break.
[Checkpoint]
SJADE: Welcome back. You're listening to a live interview with Mouse, HoloMUCK Chancellor, on WSAJ, 102.1 FM. We were discussing exploration of HoloMUCK. I wonder if you have a few places that you like to frequent here?
MOUSE: Recently, most of the stuff I do is independent of where I am. A fairly sure sign that it qualifies as "internals," by the way. Other than that, let's see. There's my house. There's Berith's weyr. There are some areas downtown that I end up using simply because they're central. There are the Mirror Image game rooms. Any sort of puzzle/quest that comes to my at- tention is something I'm likely to explore eventually. I keep meaning to check out this thing of Siegfried's, for example.
SJADE: As a high-ranking member of a fairly large gaming facility on the Internet, what do you hope the people who come here get out of HoloMUCK? What would you like them to take with them when the go? And what place do you think HoloMUCK has in the "Information Superhighway?"
MOUSE: What do I hope our players get out of Holo? Primarily, enjoyment. To my mind, that's the major thing we have to offer. Enjoyment both of exploring multiple megabytes of shared world and of interacting with its populace. I hope we can serve as a meeting point for people to interact with existing friends and meet new ones. Take with them when they go--perhaps the knowledge that computers don't have to be dehumanizing, perhaps new friends, perhaps something they've learned from someone else. To my mind, it serves many of the same purposes as a real life club: meeting people, sharing experiences and infor- mation and thoughts, broadening horizons. As for the information superhighway, define it and perhaps I can tell you. [Chuckle] I would hope that the NII would not affect Holo per se, except to make it more accessible. Holo, and other MUDs, may affect the NII by making it clear that not all non-serious uses of the net are Bad Things. Though, perhaps, if we're lucky...
SJADE: [Chuckle] Well, finally then, briefly give a prediction, silly or serious, about some aspect of the future of HoloMUCK.
MOUSE: The future of Holo? Perhaps I should play it safe and predict that the db space crunch will continue. No, I think it'll keep growing in various ways, hopefully not in terms of disk space used, but in other ways; perhaps evolving would be a better word. I hope it doesn't stagnate, and I don't think it will.
SJADE: Excellent. It's been a pleasure to talk with you tonight. Thank you for being here.
MOUSE: Thank you for having me here. It's been an enjoyable time, and I look forward to listening to other interviews in your series, whether I do it live or Memorex.
SJADE: [Chuckle] This has been a live interview with Mouse on WSAJ, 102.1 FM. Tune in every Wednesday night from 8pm to 10pm Eastern for another interview on issues topical to HoloMUCK, with one of its many participants. This is Sjade saying goodnight from the WSAJ studios, Tilbardin Island, Tanstaafl.
