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Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD
She’s obsessed with this idea. She likes playing video games
too, but it’s just not the same. Experiencing the world, even
defeating the world, is too passive. She wants to make the
world.
So I made her a game where she can make games. A multiplayer world
made of text and images and a tiny new scripting language, where she
can take anything and everything apart to see how it works. I first
learned to code in the days when View Source was a reliable
teacher, and I think she deserves the same.
The game has a lot of limitations. The language, Cant, is
not a very good language, and that’s on purpose.
But it also turned out to be a lot of fun. I call it:
Canon is a modern, web-based take on the classic
MUDs
of the Old Internet.
For the uninitiated: back before World of Warcraft made the MMORPG a
big studio genre, we had text-based MUDs (and
MUCKs
and
MUSHes) where players could adventure and socialize in vast realms made of
pure written words.
I spent countless hours exploring these imaginary places. I wanted to
make something in that spirit that would feel more familiar to a
modern audience.
Canon has strong opinions about what makes a good MU*, and what makes
a good learning environment. Every room, object, and interaction in
Canon is player-created, and it can all be inspected, copied, and
modified.
The kiddo loves it. If you’re the kind of grownup who’s into
roleplaying or text adventures, or has some nostalgia for the age of
telnet and the early web, you might like it too.
But first, recipe blog style, let me tell you how we got here.