Re: Old online gaming site

I assume you are thinking of Garry’s Mod, which is alive and well and can be found on Steam.  It is a physics simulator where you can place objects and actors and define rules.  It isn’t really a game unless you turn it into one.  I think a new version is coming out soon too.

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> I remember about 20 years ago someone on the Internet had written a piece of software called "garry".  It was a chess simulator.  I can't find it any more so all of this is from memory.  The author had decided that he was going to just have 3-D chess pieces, with somewhat realistic pieces and physics collisions, all on a chess board.  The game didn't know the rules of chess and didn't enforce them.  He figured this would be the same as, say, having a chess set in the park; people would come by, maybe set up a game, maybe start playing, maybe walk away.
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> What he did not anticipate, which is perhaps obvious in hindsight, is that it was very rare for games to be finished.  People would set up a game, but then not follow the rules or follow turns, and then maybe other people would come and knock pieces around because hey, knocking around objects is fun for 3-year-olds (by which I mean people who have only been aware of the Internet for 3 years).  Eventually he gave in a little bit and added some code so that you could see who was around the chess set and when a piece was moved, you could see who moved it.  Which helped.
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> I wish I knew what happened to "garry".
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> -- 
> Wei-Hwa Huang, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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> "Where are all the time travellers?" -- generalizing the Fermi Paradox to four dimensions
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