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Multi-user dungeon

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This article is about a type of online computer game. For other uses of the word "mud", see Mud (disambiguation).

In computer gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain or Dimension) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games and social chat rooms. Typically running on a bulletin board system or Internet server, the game is usually text driven, where players read descriptions of rooms, objects, events, other characters, and computer-controlled creatures or non-player characters (NPCs) in a virtual world. Players usually interact with each other and the surroundings by typing commands that resemble a natural language, usually English.

Traditional MUDs implement a fantasy world populated by elves, goblins, dwarves, halflings and other mythical or fantasy-based races with players being able to take on any number of classes, including warriors, mages, priests, thieves, druids, etc., in order to gain specific skills or powers. The object of the game is to slay monsters, explore a rich fantasy world, to complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and/or advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) series of games.

MUDs often have a fantasy setting, while many others are set in a science fiction-based universe or themed on popular books, movies, animations, history, etc. Still others, especially those which are often referred to as MOOs, are used in distance education or to allow for virtual conferences. MUDs have also 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" in-game items. There are also many professionally developed MUDs which charge a monthly subscription fee.

History

File:Mud1.gif
A MUD logon screen.

Prehistory

The first games which were recognisably MUDs appeared in 1977 on the PLATO system. In Europe at around the same time, MUD development was centered around academic networks, particularly at the University of Essex where they were played by many people, both internal and external to the University. In this context, it has been said that MUD stands for "Multi-Undergrad Destroyer" or "Multiple Undergraduate Destroyer" due to their popularity among college students and the amount of time devoted to the MUD by the student. The popularity of MUDs of the Essex University tradition escalated in the USA during the 1980s, when — relatively speaking — cheap, home personal computers with 300 to 2400 baud modems enabled role players to log into multi-line BBSes and online service providers such as Compuserve.

MUD the game

The first known MUD was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University on a DEC PDP-10 in the UK, using initially MACRO-10 (an assembly language) and, later, rewritten in BCPL; also used was a database description language, MUDDL.[1] They chose the acronym MUD to stand for Multi-User Dungeon,[2] in reference to another PDP-10 game called Dungeon (or DUNGEN due to the six character filename limit), which was later commercially released by Infocom under the original development code name Zork[citation needed]. Zork in turn was inspired by an older text-adventure game known as Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT. The classic game MIST (also part of Essex University MUD) which could be played from any computer connected to JANET (a European academic network predating the internet), became one of the first of its kind to attain broad popularity.[3]

Oubliette, written by Jim Schwaiger, and published on the PLATO system predated MUD1 by about a year. It was so difficult that one could not play it alone: in order for players to survive, they had to run in groups. While Oubliette was a multi-player game, there was no persistence to the game world. Following it, also on PLATO, was a game called Moria written in 1977, copyright 1978. Again, players could run in parties but in this game it was also possible to effectively play while only running one character. They were graphical in nature and very advanced for their time, but were proprietary programs that were unable to spread beyond PLATO. Textual worlds, which typically ran on Unix, VMS, or DOS, were now far more accessible to the public.

Another early MUD was Avatar, began around 1977 and opened in 1979, written by Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, and Dave Sides, all high school students using the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. This MUD was 2.5-D game running on 512x512 plasma panels of the PLATO system, and groups of up to 15 players could enter the dungeon simultaneously and fight monsters as a team. Avatar, with by far the most hours played of any PLATO game, is still vital and running, playable by anyone, on the emulated mainframe at www.cyber1.org and via the NovaNET NPT service.

In the late 1970s there were numerous other PLATO games which were MUD-like, in various stages of development, some open, some never opened. Some were essentially single-player games but had some multi-player interaction such as communication and shared halls of fame. These games influenced the development of more well known PLATO MUDs such as Avatar and Oubliette. Then, these games were referred to as 'dungeon games'. Around this time, at least 10 people, and probably many times this number of people, quite possibly 100, were actively working on MUD games on PLATO. There was a sizeable community developing these games. It was common to see two to five people sitting side by side and working on different MUD games in room 165 or the author room of University of Illinois's CERL building. Many non-MUD games also came from this environment, such as empire and airfight.

Commercialisation and spread

In 1978, Alan E. Klietz wrote a game called Milieu using Multi-Pascal on a CDC Cyber, which was used by high school students in Minnesota for educational purposes. Klietz ported Milieu to an IBM XT in 1983, naming the new port Scepter of Goth (also spelled Sceptre of Goth). Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. It was one of the first commercial MUDs, as franchises were sold to a number of locations. Scepter (as well as unfinished advanced MUD by Klietz called ScreenPlay) was first owned and run by GamBit (of Minneapolis, Minnesota), founded by Bob Alberti. GamBit's assets, including Scepter and ScreenPlay, were then sold to InterPlay (of Fairfax, Virginia). InterPlay eventually went bankrupt, making Scepter no longer available. In 1984, Mark Peterson wrote The Realm of Angmar, beginning as a clone of Sceptre of Goth.

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 sci-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 and it was shut down in the late 80s.

These text-adventure games (both single and multi-player) drew inspiration from the paper-and-pencil based role-playing games (RPGs) which were approaching their peak popularity at this time, especially with the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1977.

This strong bond between RPGs and MUDs continued through the years with the release of dozens of AD&D modules and series of related books and stories (e.g., Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance). Influences also came from the gamebooks such as Fighting Fantasy, Choose Your Own Adventure, and Lone Wolf; and also other RPGs such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Middle-Earth Role Playing.

Other MUDs that appeared around 1985 included Mirrorworld, run by Pip Cordrey and developed and written by Tim Rogers, Lorenzo Wood and Nathaniel Billington; and SHADES. SHADES was a commercial MUD accessible in the UK via the Prestel system. Mirrorworld was the first MUD to feature rolling resets.

Another popular MUD was AberMUD written in 1988 by Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy, named after the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Avalon, the Legend Lives, started in 1989, was the first MUD to combine a consistent fantasy story-line with a commercial venture.

Monster 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.[4] 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.[5] Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD.[6]

TinyMUD and diversification

In 1989, TinyMUD began to allow players to easily participate in creating the online environment, as well as playing in it. The TinyMUD code spawned a number of descendants, including TinyMUCK and TinyMUSH, which added more sophisticated programmability. (TinyMUCK versions 2 and higher contain a full programming language named MUF, or Multi-User Forth, while MUSH greatly expanded the variety of commands and functions available and allowed them to apply to all objects.) Some use the term MU* to refer to TinyMUD, MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, MUX, and their kin; others simply allow the term MUD to apply universally. MUVE is a recent coinage, intended to stand for Multi-User Virtual Environment. UberMUD, UnterMUD, and MOO are some other MUD servers that were at least partially inspired by TinyMUD but are not direct descendants.

Also in 1989, and inspired by TinyMUD and AberMUD, LPMud was developed as a more game-oriented MUD that allowed participants to program the behavior of its "monsters". 1989 also saw the development of Avalon, using its own code base run through the Hourglass compiler. Developed in complete isolation of all other MUDs, Avalon adopted an object oriented approach using the powerful British Acorn Archimedes computer technology. In Europe it was very popular for MUD writers to write in isolation. The three largest commercial examples would be Avalon, Shades and the Terris/Cosrin Engine.

In 1991, the release of DikuMUD, which was inspired by AberMUD, lead to a virtual explosion of hack-n-slash MUDs based upon its code. DikuMUD inspired several derivative codebases as well, including CircleMUD, Merc, ROM and SMAUG. Meanwhile Avalon had become a commercial game operating in the UK on up to 16 connections at once over a dial-up system using a front end with double Moxa eight port serial cards and 2400bps modems and boasting the first ever blow-by-blow combat system.

In 1992 a second Avalon site was opened in the north of England, Sheffield, to give local users cheaper phone call access.

In 1993 Avalon attempted to circumvent the expense of online connections in the UK with the Hostplay concept; providing access via terminals in Avalon's own offices in central London as well as the continued use of 16 possible modem connections.

In 1994, Mark 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 BBSs.

Avalon, like other commercial MUD's went live on the internet late 1994. In doing so they closed down the local Sheffield site. It also released a specialised Windows telnet client named AvPlay; the first MUD to release such a client, although AvPlay can also be used for any other MUD. Avalon is still running and under further development today.

Curiously by closing the Sheffield site it provided one Avalon player, Paul Barnett (Now creative Director for the Warhammer Online MMO at EA Mythic), to design and write the Legends of Terris MUD engine with Doug Goldner.

AOL Europe had also opened up operations within Europe and was looking for a European MUD game to offer to the European subscribers. AOL US already ran several highly successful games including Dragons Gate (Mythic Entertainment, later to launch Dark age of Camelot), Federation (A space trading game again written by an Englishman) and Gem Stone III (Simutronics, later to launch a Heroes journey). At this time Gem Stone III. AOL Europe was a looking for a game that could meet a European audience. Legends of Terris was selected to be AOL Europe’s flagship MUD. At this time European commercial Games had around 30-50 players connected at once. Legends of Terris was launched on AOL Europe at the end of the year. The game was also translated into French and German. Within one month is had over 600 player connected to it at once.

Meanwhile Legends of Terris had become the largest commercial MUD in Europe with over 2000 simultaneous players connected at once. It was now generating over 250,000 game hours worth of revenue for AOL.

Gem Stone III continued to dominate the commercial MUD world, at its height it attracted 6000 concurrent users. In Europe Legends of Terris topped the charts with highs of 2500 concurrent users. How much of this is due to the games or access via AOL is open to speculation. It is interesting to note that Gem Stone III, Avalon and Legends of Terris are all commercially operating today.

Of the commercial engines available Avalon defined and dominated within Player vs Player design. Gem Stone III dominated with sheer game world size and installed player base and Legends of Terris championed the Player vs Environment style of game play.

MUDs can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients (which give a more pleasant user experience). These games are still listed at various web portals (see external links).

MUDs: Next Phase?

Online graphics-based games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment ) and Dark Age of Camelot (Mythic Entertainment), plus graphics-based social avatar worlds such as There (Makena Technologies, Inc.) and SecondLife (Linden Research, Inc.), are (arguably) analogous to MUDs, and are sometimes referred to as "graphical MUDs" (see next section) or "next-generation MUDs".

Similarities include the basic goals and objectives of the games (where games are present) and the sociality of the environments (the tendency to associate in or form social groups). One difference (among many) is that the majority of MMORPGs and social avatar worlds are commercial ventures. (See: The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds)

Are users leaving MUDs and migrating to the next-generation virtual worlds? Since usage statistics are typically available from the corporations running MMORPGs and social avatar worlds we know quite a bit about their populations (MMOGChart.com). But, due to the scattered and independent nature of MUDs -- independently run by individuals all over the world, hosting populations of 6 to 600, privately and publicly -- it is a challenge to study or survey levels of use of MUDs as a whole from year to year. Therefore, it is unknown whether the population of text-based MUDs has been impacted by graphics-based games and graphics-based social avatar virtual worlds.

Variations on MUDs

Graphical MUDs

Main article: MMORPG

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). Unlike earlier MUDs, most MMORPGs are commercial ventures. See list of MMORPGs for examples of this type of game.

Talkers and spods

Main article: Talker

A lesser known 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 level commands - hence the name "talker".

They also use very little network traffic, and use simple protocols, making them ideal for setting up quietly at work. Talkers and some other MUDs use InterMUD to chat with users on completely separate MUDs.

People who use these tend to be called spods, and have earned a place in the Jargon File.

Role-play intensive MUDs

A lesser known type of MUDs are Role-Play Intensive MUD (RPIMUD). RPIMUDs focus on realistic, enforced roleplay which is often blended with fantasy themes. In general, the objective of the game is not goal based hack-and-slash, but to collaborate with fellow players to create complex and multi-layered storylines in a cohesive gameworld.

The majority of RPIMUDs are levelless and classless, focusing instead on skills, crafts, and role-playing against the world or environment, often going as far as to request their players engage in role-play with inanimate creatures and objects. Such dedication to role-playing, in addition to creating a vivid experience for other players, is often rewarded by staff members who invisibly monitor the game.

Out-of-character communications are mostly restricted if present at all. This contrasts with other forms of mud role-playing styles such as storytelling and freestyle mushes in which role-play is conducted between players and OOC communications are more important.

A brief list of RPI MUDs includes Harshlands, Accursed Lands, DartMUD, and Armageddon. A community portal dedicated to RPIMUDs can be found at http://www.rpimud.com.

Player-Killing MUDs

A Player Killing MUD is a type of MUD that encourages player versus player combat. Often, there is no ultimate "goal" to the game. Competition can be driven in a number of ways: a "fame" or "infamy" style score that players can accrue via PvP combat, limited availability of powerful items or equipment that can be looted from the corpse of a defeated opponent, or via a complex combination of role-playing and an economic/social system. Competition can be quite fierce; a quick-thinking, fast-typing player with a customized MUD client can enter a staggering number of commands in a very small timeframe, and players who have been blinded (stricken with an effect that prevents the game from displaying any descriptions or prompts that allow them to determine their location) are very often able to traverse complex paths through hundreds of rooms via memory alone to escape pursuers.

The main balancing factor of the Player-Killing MUD is time. Time is counted via a system of "pulses". When a certain number of pulses pass (a number that varies widly from game to game), an event called a "tick" happens. A pulse usually takes a fraction of a second, where a tick may take up to several minutes. Status effects last for a certain number of ticks and when that amount of time passes the effect expires. When a player inputs certain commands, particularly offensive ones such as kicking or casting a spell, further commands have no effect until a certain number of pulses have passed. This effect is usually referred to as "lag", and should not be confused with network latency. Often, certain characters can even impose lag on others via means such as stunning, tripping, or ensorceling their opponents.

One of the most easily recognized Player-Killing MUD systems is the GodWars codebase.

Psychology of MUDs

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, one that Turkle claims could present a psychological problem of identity for today's youths.

Turkle also explores the ideas of the use of bots in MUDs. She references the Turing Test developed by Alan Turing, stating that bots could be considered truly intelligent if they were able to convince a human user speaking to the bot that the bot was actually human. Turkle presents the troubling ideas of sexual deviancy involved with this, that someone posing as a bot could "trick" someone into believing that they were a bot and allowing them to engage in sexual activity online. Turkle wonders aloud if this could be considered at the worst rape and at the very least an invasion of privacy.

See also

References

  1. ^ Early MUD History.
  2. ^ The Dragon Ate My Homework
  3. ^ Escape from the Dungeon
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ [2]
  6. ^ [3]

MUD History

Mud source code repositories

  • MudBytes.net: MUD code repository and discussion.
  • MudMagic.com: MUD software downloads, discussion, game listings, and documentations.
  • Game.org: Hierarchal archive of MUD source code
  • The MUD Connector: Large portal site containing 1700+ searchable listings of text-based muds as well as discussions, a social network devoted to mudding, resources, etc
  • Erwin S. Andreasen: Home of the MUD Personality Test, 16k MUD competition, and other resources.
  • Jargon File: The Jargon File's entry on MUDs.
  • Mapping MUDs: 3-Dimensional modelling of a MUD
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