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In online gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), pronounced /m?d/, is a multi-user real-time virtual world described entirely in text. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
Traditional MUDs implement a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players being able to choose from a number of classes in order to gain specific skills or powers.
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Encyclopedia
In online gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), pronounced /m?d/, is a multi-user real-time virtual world described entirely in text. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
Traditional MUDs implement a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players being able to choose from a number of classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The object of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.
Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others are set in a science fiction–based universe or themed on popular books, movies, animations, history, and so on. Not all MUDs are games; some, more typically those referred to as MOOs, are used in distance education or for virtual conferences. MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, including communications, sociology, law, and synthetic economies.
Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to players; some may accept donations or allow players to purchase virtual items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee. MUDs can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients which are designed to improve the user experience. Numerous games are listed at various web portals, like The Mud Connector.
It has been argued that modern games like World of Warcraft, and social virtual worlds such as Second Life can have their origins traced back to the early MUDs. Originally graphical virtual worlds were called graphical MUDs, most notably Everquest, but by 2000 the term MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) had become the standard. The MMORPG RuneScape started out as a text-based MUD before graphics were added. Many MUDs are still active and a number of influential MMORPG designers, such as Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Mark Jacobs, Brian Green, and J. Todd Coleman, began as MUD developers and/or players.
History
Adventure, created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely used adventure game. The game was significantly expanded in 1976 by Don Woods. Adventure contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlled dungeon master.
Inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT, wrote a game called Zork in the summer of 1977 for the PDP-10 minicomputer which became quite popular on the ARPANET. Zork was ported under the name Dungeon to FORTRAN by a programmer working at DEC in 1978.
In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.
MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987. The game revolved around gaining points till one achieved the wizard rank, giving the player immortality and certain powers over mortals. The game became more widely accessible when a guest account was set up that allowed users on JANET (a British academic computer network) to connect between the hours of 2 am and 8 am and at weekends. MUD1 was reportedly closed down when Richard Bartle licenced MUD1 to CompuServe, and was getting pressure from them to close Essex MUD. This left MIST, a derivative of MUD1 with similar gameplay, as the only remaining MUD running on the Essex University network, becoming one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity. MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.
During the Christmas of 1985, Neil Newell, an avid MUD1 player, started programming his own MUD called SHADES because MUD1 was closed down during the holidays. Starting out as a hobby, SHADES became accessible in the UK as a commercial MUD via British Telecom's Prestel and Micronet networks. A scandal on SHADES led to the closure of Micronet, as described in Indra Sinha's net-memoir, The Cybergypsies.
In 1985 Pip Cordrey gathered some people on a BBS he ran to create a MUD1 clone that would run on a home computer. The tolkienesque MUD went live in 1986 and was named MirrorWorld.
1985 also saw the creation of Gods by Ben Laurie, a MUD1 clone that included online creation in its endgame. Gods became a commercial MUD in 1988.
In 1985 CompuNet started a project named Multi-User Galaxy Game as a Science Fiction alternative to MUD1 which ran on their system at the time. When one of the two programmers left CompuNet, the remaining programmer, Alan Lenton, decided to rewrite the game from scratch and named it Federation II (there never was a Federation I). The MUD was officially launched in 1989.
In 1978, around the same time Roy Trubshaw wrote MUD, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game called Milieu using Multi-Pascal on a CDC Cyber 6600 series mainframe which was operated by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Klietz ported Milieu to an IBM XT in 1983, naming the new port Scepter of Goth. Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. It was one of the first commercial MUDs; franchises were sold to a number of locations. Scepter was first owned and run by GamBit (of Minneapolis, Minnesota), founded by Bob Alberti. GamBit's assets were later sold to InterPlay (of Fairfax, Virginia). InterPlay eventually went bankrupt.
In 1984, Mark Peterson wrote The Realm of Angmar, beginning as a clone of Scepter of Goth. In 1994, Peterson rewrote The Realm of Angmar, adapting it to MS-DOS (the basis for many dial-in BBS systems), and renamed it Swords of Chaos. For a few years this was a very popular form of MUD, hosted on a number of BBS systems, until widespread Internet access eliminated most BBSes.
In 1984, Mark Jacobs created and deployed a commercial gaming site, Gamers World. The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD called Aradath (which was later renamed, upgraded and ported to GEnie as Dragon's Gate) and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was also ported to GEnie. At its peak, the site had about 100 monthly subscribers to both Aradath and Galaxy. GEnie was shut down in the late 1980s, although Dragon's Gate was later brought to America Online before it was finally released on its own. Dragon's Gate was closed on February 10, 2007.
In the summer of 1980 University of Virginia classmates John Taylor and Dr. Kelton Flinn wrote Dungeons of Kesmai, a six player game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons which used Roguelike ASCII graphics. They founded the Kesmai company in 1982 and in 1985 an enhanced version of Dungeons of Kesmai, Island of Kesmai, was launched on CompuServe. Later, its 2-D graphical descendant Legends of Kesmai was launched on AOL in 1996. The games were retired commercially in 2000.
The popularity of MUDs of the Essex University tradition escalated in the USA during the late 1980s when affordable personal computers with 300 to 2400 bit/s modems enabled role-players to log into multi-line Bulletin Board Systems and online service providers such as CompuServe. During this time it was sometimes said that MUD stands for "Multi Undergraduate Destroyer" due to their popularity among college students and the amount of time devoted to them.
Spread
The first popular MUD codebase was AberMUD, written in 1987 by Alan Cox, named after the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Alan Cox had played the original University of Essex MUD, and the gameplay was heavily influenced by it. AberMUD was initially written in B for a Honeywell L66 mainframe under GCOS3/TSS. In late 1988 it was ported to C, which enabled it to spread rapidly to many Unix platforms upon its release in 1989. AberMUD's popularity resulted in several inspired works, the most notable of which were TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.
TinyMUD
was a multi-user adventure game created by Richard Skrenta for the VAX and written in VMS Pascal. It was publicly released in November 1988. Monster was disk-based and modifications to the game were immediate. Monster pioneered the approach of allowing players to build the game world, setting new puzzles or creating dungeons for other players to explore. Monster, which comprised about 60.000 lines of code, had a lot of features which appeared to be designed to allow Colossal Cave Adventure to work in it. Though there never were many network-accessible Monster servers, it inspired James Aspnes to create a stripped down version of Monster which he called TinyMUD.
TinyMUD, written in C and released in late 1989, spawned a number of descendants, including TinyMUCK and TinyMUSH. TinyMUCK versions 2 contained a full programming language named MUF (Multi-User Forth), while MUSH greatly expanded the command interface. Some use the term MU* to refer to TinyMUD, MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, MUX, and their kin. UberMUD, UnterMUD, and MOO were inspired by TinyMUD but are not direct descendants.
LPMud
In 1989 LPMud was developed by Lars Pensjö (hence the LP in LPMud). Pensjö had been an avid player of TinyMUD and AberMUD and wanted to create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the power of AberMUD. In order to accomplish this he wrote what is nowadays known as a virtual machine which he called the LPMud driver as well as the C-like LPC programming language used to create the game world. Pensjö's interest in LPMud eventually waned and development was carried on by others. During the early 1990s, LPMud was one of the most popular MUD codebases.
DikuMUD
In 1991, the release of DikuMUD, which was inspired by AberMUD, led to a virtual explosion of hack-n-slash MUDs based upon its code. DikuMUD inspired several derivative codebases too, including CircleMUD, Merc, SillyMUD, ROM, SMAUG, and GodWars.
Simutronics
In 1987 David Whatley, who in previous years had played Sceptre of Goth and Island of Kesmai, founded Simutronics with Tom and Susan Zelinski. In the same year they demonstrate a prototype of GemStone to GEnie. After a short-lived instance of GemStone II, GemStone III was officially launched in February 1990. GemStone III became available on AOL in September 1995, followed by the release of DragonRealms in February 1996. By the end of 1997 GemStone III and DragonRealms had become the first and second most played games on AOL.
Graphical MUDs
A graphical MUD is a MUD that uses computer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors. A prominent early graphical MUD was Habitat, written by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar for Lucasfilm in 1985. Graphical MUDs require players to download a special client and the game's artwork. They range from simply enhancing the user interface to simulating 3D worlds with visual spatial relationships and customized avatar appearances.
After the increase in computing power and Internet connectivity during the late nineties, graphical MUDs became better known as MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.
Gameplay
While there have been many variations in gameplay and features in MUDs, some distinct sub-groups have formed that can be used to help categorize different game mechanics and game genres.
Hack and Slash MUDs
Due to the room based nature of traditional MUDs ranged combat is difficult to implement, as a result most MUDs equip characters with close-ranged weapons and usually takes place in a medieval fantasy setting. MUDs that restrict player killing and primarily focus on combat and questing are labeled Hack and Slash MUDs.
Player versus player MUDs
Most MUDs restrict player versus player combat, often abbreviated as PK (Player Killing). This is accomplished through hard coded restrictions and various forms of social intervention. MUDs without these restrictions are known as PK MUDs.
Roleplaying MUDs
Roleplaying MUDs, generally abbreviated as RP MUDs, encourage or enforce that players act out the role of their playing characters at all times. Some RP MUDs provide an immersive gaming environment, while others only provide a virtual world with no game elements. MUDs that are heavily roleplay-enforced and have a cohesive game world are also known as RPI (Roleplay Intensive) MUDs.
Talkers
A less-known MUD variant is the talker, typically based on ew-too or NUTS, with plenty of derived codebases. The early talkers were essentially MUDs with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication commands. Talkers create very little network traffic, making them ideal for setting up quietly at work. People who are long time users of ew-too talkers are called spods.
Psychology and playing style
Dr. Sherry Turkle, Ph.D. of Sociology of Science at MIT, developed a theory in her book "Life on the Screen" that the constant use (and in many cases, overuse) of MUDs allows users to develop different personalities in their environments. She uses examples, which date back to the text-based MUDs of the mid-1990s, showing college students who simultaneously live different lives through characters in separate MUDs, up to three at a time, all while doing schoolwork. The students claimed that it was a way to "shut off" their own lives for a while and become part of another reality. Turkle claims that this could present a psychological problem of identity for today's youths.
A Story About A Tree, a short essay written by Raph Koster regarding the death of a LegendMUD player named Karyn, raising the subject of inter-human relationships in virtual worlds.
Observations of MUD-play show styles of play that can be roughly categorized. Achievers focus on the difficulties of the game, difficult quests, fearsome monsters, and hard to obtain equipment; others explore every nook and cranny of the game, and try out all the guilds and races; some devote most of their energy to interacting with other players; then there are the killers who focus on interacting negatively with other players, if permitted, killing their characters or otherwise thwarting their play. Few players play only one way, or play one way all the time; most exhibit a diverse style. According to Richard Bartle, a longtime coder and observer of MUD-play, responding to a question posed by Keith Stuart, an interviewer for The Guardian, "People go there as part of a hero's journey - a means of self-discovery"
See also
External links
MUD history, analysis
- from Richard Bartle's "Interactive Multi-User Computer Games" report
- : A timeline of MUD history up to 1995.
- by Martin Keegan, Grandmaster Data Services Ltd, Cambridge, UK
- - Raph Koster's timeline of significant events for the development of virtual worlds.
- A comprehensive history of the internet, including MUDs.
- Long-running test to classify MUD/MMORPG personality, based on Bartle's research.
- - A thesis on cultural and social interaction on muds.
- : Formerly the Journal of Mud Research. A currently inactive peer-reviewed academic journal.
MUD source code repositories
- : Home of the 16k MUD competition, and other resources.
- : Hierarchal archive of MUD source code
- : MUD code repository and discussion.
MUD resources
- : Extensive mud portal with hundreds of mud listings
- : MUD listings, reviews, discussion forum and rankings by category.
- : Google custom search engine indexing MUD and MUD-related web sites.
- : MUD listings and codebase downloads.
- : MUD statistics.
- : Site devoted to Role-Play MUDs.
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