What is Muppyville

Muppyville is an imaginary place that people can visit using technology. Muppyville uses a technology which was a kind fore-runner of instant messaging. It creates a sense of place using only words -- no pictures. You'll find descriptions of places and be able to move from one place to another. You may also find interesting and magical objects that you can interact with. But furthermore, you will meet other people. They will be able to see you (or read how you've described yourself) and you will be able to see them. And talk to them. As you learn about Muppyville, you can begin to create your own places and objects within Muppyville.

Muppyville began as a game design between Charlie and me. We first set up a Muppyville when Charlie was in 4th grade and it went through several versions at that time. This year, Daniel is beginning 4th grade and Charlie has set up a new Muppyville for Daniel's class. Charlie is the wizard this time around and you'll need to get an account from him.

One of my goals in creating Muppyville is to encourage kids to be authors and creators of technology environments. I think that children spend too much time being passive users of other people's creative works. Muppyville is a place where children can become co-creators of the environment: create places and objects with rich descriptions and, with some help, script them with interesting and fun behaviors.

Connecting to Muppyville

There are a few ways to connect to Muppyville.

The most satisfactory is to use client software. If you're using a Macintosh, use Mudwalker or Atlantis-- I think they're by far the best clients for interacting with a MOO. On Windows, there's a client called SimpleMU that's supposed to be quite good, though I haven't used it myself. (The big advantage with using a client is that they let you edit things "out of band" -- type "help @edit-options" for more info.)

Try this next: We have installed a java client that should work in most web-browsers. Connect to this URL: http://revo.homelinux.org/muppyville/ and see if you can log in that way.

Try this last: Most computers come with telnet client software. Your web-browser may know how to use it even if you don't. Try connecting to this URL: telnet://revo.homelinux.org:7001/ in your web-browser. If that doesn't work, you may need to install client software. The next best cross-platform solution I'm aware of is the Firefox web-browser and moozilla.

Once you've connected, you'll need to log in. You should have received a username and password. Type

connect username password

and press return. You should see a message welcoming you to Muppyville and telling you where you are.

You can type "help" to get help on how to do things or "help command" to get special help for particular commands.

After you get the hang of moving around and interacting with objects, you might be ready for MuppyvilleProgramming.