“You chose your avatar, you chose where you hung out, you chose your house, you chose the items that decorated it, you chose the clubs you belonged to,” Rayken recalled. Signing up could feel like joining both a community and a real space in a digital world, years ago it was a daily occurrence. Cytonians could even run for office inside the city, though developer Blaxxun Interactive has retained the lion’s share of power thanks to a semi-mythical figure dubbed the Founder. The Cybertown bank in the Cybertown Revival pre-alpha. With platforms like Active Worlds and Onlive! A traveler, Cybertown helped bridge a generational gap between textual worlds and virtual 3D worlds. The city is pure 1990s cyberspace, full of bright, sharp-edged rooms with minimal decoration and low-poly graphics. Even people too young to remember Cybertown can find its influence in more recent projects like the 2019 game. Hypnospace Outlawwhich – according to designer Jay Tholen – was inspired in part by Blaxxun’s promotional spreads in Gamer on PC.Ĭybertown lasted until the next decade. In the early 2000s, cyber-ethnographer Nadezhda Kaneva said that Blaxxun boasted over a million inhabitants, although only 350-500 people were online at any given time. But it never reached the prominence of later virtual worlds like second life. After being sold by Blaxxun and implementing monthly fees in 2003, the platform slowly declined in the second half of the 2000s, eventually shutting down in 2012.Ĭybertown’s death never pleased some former citizens, however. “Returning several years later, I was surprised to find that no one had made a concentrated effort to revive the website.” “Cybertown was a place where so many people met in a virtual world for the first time,” says Rayken. Rayken says he started searching the web for anyone who remembered Blaxxun or Cybertown, from small Facebook enclaves to random commenters on Twitter and Reddit. And starting with a group of five or six people, he founded a Discord server dedicated to bringing him back. Slowly, the group grew to over 300 people, including a handful of members with coding skills that allowed them to participate. Believing in the power of empathy and storytelling, Yucheng intends to continue to create solutions that propel people forward.Today, it operates with around five core developers and a slightly larger group that regularly provides technical support. She also works as a graduate assistant at the Innovation Partnership Building, where she utilizes visual communication to construct bridges between the sciences and arts. Yucheng is currently an MFA candidate in Digital Media & Design at the University of Connecticut, focusing on web and interactive media design. With that motivation in mind, she developed creative projects in UI/UX design, web design, and motion design. She started to use emerging technologies to create digital experiences that resonate with emotion and warmth. During that time, Yucheng became interested in the intersection of design and technology. She received her BE in Digital Media Technology from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2019. Born in Yangzhou, China, she is currently based in Storrs, Connecticut. Yucheng Hang is a UX/UI designer, creative technologist, and multimedia artist.
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