Mark and Maxie

Madlib was written by the awesome IRC guy cahaya. We had #madlib correspondent and player extraordinaire lotuslily interview the busy man and below are the results!:

How long have you been on IRC?
A little over three years, I think. I first found out about IRC from a friend who played acro.
ahhh so that's how you got addicted so early :)
*laughing* Yup!
When did you first start thinking about Madlib?
How did the idea pop up?
I started thinking about coming up with a new game about 6 months ago.
Something interesting and humorous with a lot of player interaction.
What's the ultimate goal for #madlib?
goal? Just to have a lot of fun! A place for people to come and laugh and joke with each other.
sounds good to me :)
So how did madlib strike you....I remember play with books as a kid?
Game channels are good for that. A game helps carry the chat along.
Yeah, I remember reading Mad mags a long time ago, and got a kick out of MadLibs. We used to make up a lot of our own and try them out on each other as kids.
When did you start working on the bot itself?
It got pretty hilarious. :) And I guess that just popped out, when an idea for an IRC game came up.
About 3 to 4 weeks ago, at least the coding part of it. Probably two months of idea toying before that.
I'm amazed
It's very talented botwork
Well, mIRC script isn't that difficult to write bots with... a nice scripting language that can do quite a lot of things on IRC.
Where does the idea of colors stand?
Colors add a trademark "flavor", I think.
hehehe flavor....i agree
How have people's reactions been to it so far?
There's a problem with colors, though...
Not all clients are color enabled, or standardized yet. That may change in the near future.
Anyway, we're working on that aspect of it, so as many people can play without color problems.
I wish there would be a study done on people who use IRC and what they use, it would help a lot of botmakers
I think it would. We pretty much just see who comes onchannel and if they have a problem, try to help out.
I think you see a lot of mIRC users for PC's, for the most part. There's quite a number of Mac users on IRC, too.
ircle has become quite well used
What about the talk of a #madlibs for kids?
Interesting you mention that.
We see all kinds of age groups and personalities on IRC, and it's kind of difficult to have a channel cater to all of them.
Of concern for kids, of course, is adult-level jokes and language content.
yes
I'm considering a seperate channel that's for kids, G or PG content rating.
How has the response been?
Pretty good. A lot of players are "hooked" on it already... most of them are game addicts to other channels like #acro, #chaos, #triv and so on.
Any date yet when the game is registered as a channel?
We registered about a week ago... the rest of it is up to Cservice. It'll be a few weeks -- in the meantime, we continue to playtest the #madlib bot. :)
Any ideas about a tournament or special events people who visit the site should know about?
Yes, that would be a lot of fun! The channel is still quite young (just a couple of weeks), so that'll come about as time goes along.
People have been really good about supporting #madlib... sker with the web page, many players (especially Devlo) with madlib submissions, so it's really a "player's" channel.
And your e-mail address is the comment or drop-box for suggestions about the game?
Yeah, there's two ways to submit ideas, suggestions and new madlibs...
one is to my email address, and the other is sker's players' web page.
mtraas@tm.net.my
http://www.oocities.org/TimesSquare/Fortress/1972
okay :)
that's about all that I need.
Maybe a couple of comments to add, if I may? :)
sure go for it!
I think a lot of credit goes to the early IRC game pioneers like Mach, Eingang and later Kenny. They're the ones who created a circle of game channels for us to have fun on. Without that, it would have been hard to get the #madlib channel rolling so quickly.
Secondly...
a lot of people were supportive of #madlib during the early playtesting stages, too many to name, but they know who they are. Thanks, to them! :)
Ok, Mitzi :) That's about all I can think of for now.
thanks a lot :)

Session Close: Sun Dec 07 16:05:25 1997