Ahra Pahts Fan Content

This part of the series is about ways people have tried to make changes to Uru and/or the guilds. I have seen people take two paths to making changes. Both of these efforts center on an aspect of training people in world. I’m not sure the goals of the two are comparable but how they have gone about it shows comparable methods.

A European teacher wants to use Uru in a RL classroom as a teaching aid. She builds ages* for the coming open source version of Uru, no small feat. So, she is knowledgeable and involved with the guilds and contributing toward the open source effort. But the basic game engine does not really support what she needs. Someone will have to introduce new features into the game engine.

Another fans sees communication problems among the guilds. He would like to see the guilds restructured into something more useful to the fans, with better communication and add the service of in-game training for new and existing players that want to learn to build ages.

Both people have what could be considered noble goals. From there the differences start to become apparent. The teacher is literally building her classroom for in-world use, the actual 3D space built in Blender. She needed an easier way to change information in her game area, age. Recompiling and age and have everyone download the new age is a lot of effort and time for small changes. She asked for specific help with a clear problem and objective. A few people pointer her at some possible alternative ways and people pursuing something she might adapt. She connected with them and people started contributing ideas and then techies start looking at how it could be accomplished and she is well on her way to having a classroom to meet her needs. (Update: There are now 3 or 4 educational ages resulting from her desire.) Getting people to commit to changing the game engine is no small feat. The time to go from concept/question to figuring out the mechanics and coding was amazingly short.

On the other hand the perceived communication problem amongst guilds is meeting more of a… Huh? What problem? It was simply not well defined. No one knows what was not being communicated or what the suggested fix was to be other than ‘restructuring the guilds,’ whatever that means. Adding the idea of providing in game training for new age builders as a task for the guilds leaves many guild members wondering which guild is to do the in-game training. I’m left wondering how many people are really interested in learning Blender to build Uru ages…

Admittedly it is early in this process for this second person. I see the differences as the clarity of an immediate problem and goal and a fuzzy dream of what someone thinks will be better. It also was very much a “you-need-to-do-this” concept. Community reaction and support is very different in the two somewhat similar projects.

A third path is also being pursued in Second Life Eder D’Uru. Here people are experimenting with a new set of guilds. New people running them, new names that fit more closely with the needs of Uru fans in SL. This springs from a group of fans deciding to build a Myst-Uru style build in SL. Now they have questions on how to best organize. They have the previous OOC guilds to look at, their SL experiences and have decided to try some ideas out. Now the experiment is in progress. Guilds are providing services and classes and students are signing up.

I will say I think asking for help in clearly defined terms and having narrow goals seems to work very well for those wanting to achieve something in the Uru fan community. In both of the above cases it appears easier to get help on a project one is doing than getting people to sign on to do something for someone that has what they think is a good idea. It is somewhat an aspect of open source’s, “Code please.”

Visit MO:UL or Uru Guild of Maintainers – Educational Ages or OpenUru.org’s D’ni Web to join the discussions.

Update 8/8/09

Another new idea for a Cyan fan club change can be found in this blog post titled: The Guilds – How I would do it

*If you’re not a Myst-Uru player think of ages as a SL region or any self contained area area in any game.