TextSmith

or...

How to Run a ~~Corridor Track in a Remote Conference~~
Maze of Twisty Little Passages (with Python)

Nicholas H.Tollervey

The Focus of this Talk:

How humans communicate via computers.
How software influences the nature of that communication.
Digital archaeology of old technical solutions.
Show and tell a fun (brain break) experiment in recreating these solutions with modern technology.

Remote Corridor Track..?

The current situation has also brought into a focus an important question:

How could folks remotely recreate the opportunity for chance encounters, unexpected conversation and exploration of a venue and new city with friends..?

How is such bonhomie, warmth and friendship expressed most effectively through a digital medium?

Perhaps more importantly, how do we foster tolerance, compassion, corrections-of-misunderstanding and all that other good stuff needed so a diverse community, full of differences and unique perspectives, is able to live with itself without becoming fractured and toxic?

EuroPython has decided to use Discord - a chat service written for gamers.

I like Discord a LOT and I'm really pleased the EuroPython organisers chose it over, say, Slack or, heaven forbid, Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts.

Yet Discord is typical of the current state-of-the-art (they all look and function similarly).

Yet I don't feel comfortable with the current state-of-the-art.

So let's start by exploring my problems and discomfort with these platforms.

Let's also try to imagine more expressive, simpler or perhaps "humane" alternatives.

So let's take Discord to pieces to see what's going on.

Interactions are digital transactions.
Transactions have metadata for analysis.
Transactions are dislocated (no sense of place).
Transactions are impersonal (shouting into the void).
Transactions are evaluated (likes, retweets, reactions).
Transactions are curated to capture attention (Click here, react, reply, share)

</rant> ✨ 💩 🐯 👍

Also, is it just me, but why do I always get the impression that the design of social media has been designed by Peppa Pig (soft colours, cute, neutral and just a little bit infantile in tone).

Perhaps I'm just getting old..? (The digital version of, "Damn kids, get off my lawn").

Or perhaps current technical solutions to remote collaboration, community and friendship feel like I'm being analysed, my attention is being manipulated and I either have to pay or see adverts? None of which is condusive to making a place to have humane conversations and make friends.

Could there be a more...

natural way?

creative way?

simple way?

expressive way?

respectful way?

authentic way?

...to meet, make friends and interact online.

Less is more..?

Xyzzy

Mazes of twisty passages...

RIGHT-CLICK / RELOAD FRAME

Bear with me as we go on an adventure in computer history...

For young'uns, this is what a text based adventure game looks and feels like. This is Douglas Adams's own recreation of his novel "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" as a text based yet interactive virtual world.

Explain the mechanics.

look
switch on light
stand up
get all
wear gown
examine gown
open pocket
take tablet
s
get mail

The original MUD 1

PLAY VIDEO

But that was a single-player text based virtual world. Soon after the appearance of such games some university students in the UK invented MUD.

A MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) is a multi-player text based adventure game. They were, and continue to be, very very popular in certain parts of the net.

This is a video of me playing the origial MUD yesterday. In it you'll have seen I've just finished chatting with a Wizard called Pyewacket, and come acropper with some rats. It is:

Low-tech - telnet (proper clients are available)
Quirky - humour, imagination, playfulness and sometimes serious.
Literary - narrative driven, sense of place, time and genre (usually fantasy or sci-fi).
Lots and lots of fun

There are also many varieties of MUD. In the mid-1990s, while at university I would play on MOO - Multi-user-dungeon Object Oriented worlds.

In a MOO the textual world is a collection of user generated objects. Users program the behaviour of the world as well as inhabit it.

A Rape in Cyberspace

MUD/MOO became very popular. Before all the toxic aspects of current social media platforms, such behaviours were manifested in these virtual textual worlds (and most famously documented in Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace"). Yet at the same time, these were progressive places and I made many friends all over the world at a time when such things were still viewed with incredulity.

Social scientists, psychologists, literary critics, artists and educators all got interested. MIT Professor Sherry Turkle famously analysed such online role playing as a way for folks to explore different aspects of their identity in a relatively safe manner. Challenges that arise allow folks to reflect upon their behaviour and to know more of themselves. A sort of narrative development of their lives.

Being British I spent most of my time asking my fellow players what the weather was like where they were (San Francisco, Paris, Tel Aviv, Singapore). This was strangely satisfying and it made me feel like a true citizen of the global village delivered via the information superhighway that was my 56k modem.

I also built a textual interactive representation of a remote Scottish island my girlfriend (now wife) and I visited over the summer of 1995. I still have a backup, and it's an interactive digital momento from my 21 yo self.

It was, and continues to be, fun to write, explore and interact within such worlds.

What would a MUD/MOO written in 2020 look like?

This all feels very low-tech, but I like that. I don't miss the transactional and manipulative nature of the current state of the art, and the focus is definitely on being in a specific place, at a certain moment, with particular people.

Things I love about MUDs are that they:

Tell, rather than show. The user's imagination is paramount. And this is reflected in the simple and uncluttered user interfaces where the text is most important.
They can be playful or serious but always tell a story within a recognisable literary genre that sets the scene for interactions between users.
Graphical games focus on hand/eye coordination, text based worlds put narrative, meaning and intent at the centre of their process.
While the reader may have to do more with their imagination, the reward is far greater for what you imagine will always have the best special effects.
Literary worlds are more egalitarian and accessible - within the realm of a single developer.
Very low overhead in technical terms.
Difference between making a film or writing a novel.

So, what would a MUD/MOO written in 2020 look like?

https://pyweek.org/

As it happens, I'd already answered this...

PyWeek is a gamejam for Python developers. Organised by Dan Pope, it's a wonderful hidden gem of the Python community. You should try..!

I entered in 2019 with my buddy Andrew Smith. Andrew is an author and journalist - so we wanted to do something text based.

The theme was six worlds... and we decided to create a simple MOO-like game where folks could build things, add behaviour via a LISP-like scripting language and interact with each other in the style of six different literary genres: Jane Austen, Poetic Passions, Hardboiled detective novels, J.R.R.Fantasy, Sci-fi and future worlds, and, of course, "Parry Hotter" - so called so we didn't infringe copyright (but you get the idea).

(Et voilà, "TextSmith" was born.)

An awful hack written in a week...

“The idea for this is unique, and I had some good fun messing around in a couple of the worlds.”

“This has great potential. The object attributes system is neat and the choice of font and markdown really invites creating a rich literary world.”

“Really cool entry, I like the idea of a multimedia MUD.”

“REALLY would have liked to see that "scheme-like scripting" bit mentioned in the help text. I think that would have pushed this over into "Extremely cool no matter what" territory and also would have inclined me to play with it way more.”

Mission: Finish TextSmith :-)

Research List

Designing Virtual Worlds ~ Richard Bartle (very good)
A Theory of Fun ~ Raph Koster (also very good)
My Tiny Life ~ Julian Dibbell (good historical context)
The LambdaMoo Programmer's Manual ~ Pavel Curtis (technical inspiration)
Get Lamp ~ A CC licensed documentary about adventure games (watch here)

Quart - Asyncio web framework a la Flask. Provides websocket support. Phil Jones, does an amazing job, and it has been a joy to use.
Output to the user is framed within Jinja templates.
Babel - slots into Quart. TextSmith is fully translateable. Text based virtual worlds are not just English virtual worlds. I want my code to respect and acknowledge the diversity of folks who may use it.
The middleware of the app is Python asyncio and I use some really wonderful libraries to help make this easy to code. Structlog is really helpful for letting me see what the application is doing, and the asyncio related libraries have "just worked" for me.
Dave Beazley's SLY (Sly Lex Yacc) is used to process the nascent LISP-y scripting language used by players to create the behaviour of the textual world. Dave's work has been a fun way for me to learn about language design and implementation. Still lots of work to do.
Finally, Redis is used as an object store (where Python dictionaries become JSON objects stored against a key). Redis is a fantastic key/value datastore with a host of simple yet powerful features. It also comes with a message queue used by TextSmith for inter-object communication.
For example, if a user (an object) says something in a room (another object), then a message from the user, describing what's been said, is sent to the room via the message queue. Then the room itself will send messages to objects representing the other users in the room, telling them someone has said something. It is these messages that are sent to the user's browser via websockets.

TextSmith is also designed to be scalable.

Python instances of the app can scale horizontally.
All interactions between instances are via the Redis message queue.
There is, of course, a Redis cluster sitting behind all this.

However, you could always just run it as a single app with Redis on the same machine.

Steps for Parsing User Input:

Escape any HTML in the user input. ;-)
Handle special shortcuts (", !, :, @).
Check if first word is a built-in verb (get, drop, build etc).
Break sentence into: verb, direct-object, preposition, indirect-object.
Match verb to an attribute name of objects in the room: user, room, direct object, indirect object.
Place the attribute value in the necessary message queues. If the value is a string starting with #!, evaluate as a script.

stack treasure on table

verb
direct object
preposition
indirect-object

Script Evaluation (work in progress):

Scripts are evaluated in a context containing: user, room, exits, other users, things, this, direct_object, preposition, indirect object, raw user input.
Scripts must complete within a certain period of time.
Scripts may only update objects within the context.
Scripts execute with the privileges of the user who caused them to run.
Scripts may only emit messages to objects in the context.
If the script fails, users get a meaningful error message / stack trace.

TextSmith is 80% finished

Only the other 80% to go... ;-)

(The worlds built in TextSmith)

Nested textual systems...

In Conclusion

Code: https://github.com/ntoll/textsmith
Docs: https://textsmith.readthedocs.io/
Site: https://textsmith.org/ (eventually)

Technology cannot, of itself, stop folks being rude, thoughtless, ignorant or intollerant.

But that shouldn't stop us from trying to imagine and create technology that emphasises our humanity, autonomy and promotes mutual respect, tolerance and compassion in a diverse and cosmopolitan society.

TextSmith is a goofy game.

TextSmith is also a thought experiment in code.

Most of all, it's a multi-user collaborative development platform for creating and inhabiting interactive textual and multi-media literary worlds. All this without transactions, analysis of your social graph, manipulation of your attention or click bait adverts tailored to your user profile.

You can find the code and docs here.

Find out about MUDs

Titans of Text ~ US based podcast.

The MUD Coders Guild ~ I'm not the only one.

(There's also a "Multi User Dungeon" server on Discord)

Questions... :-)

Please feel free to get in touch..!

Email: ntoll@ntoll.org Blog: ntoll.org