MUDdy ing the Waters

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, a MUD is a Multi-User Domain (originally a Multi-User Dungeon, but that has always sounded a bit dodgy to people).

It allows many people to log into the same game, as assumed characters, and to interact with each other and the environment.

It has a long history, blending ideas from the paper and pencil board game Dungeons and Dragons® invented by Gary Gygax (probably with influences from Tolkien), and the original single-user Colossal Cave Adventure game written by Will Crowther. There's now a book out by Richard Bartle on the subject, which I intend to read sometime, and which no doubt will prove to be excellent.

Players in these games originally looked for treasure and fought monsters, and in the multi-user version, fought each other sometimes as well. Offshoots from this idea have led to "gentler" games where participants cooperate to solve quests, or chat with each other, and you can find MUSHes, MOOs and all sorts of variants on the networks nowadays, including graphics version such as Everquest®.

The features provided in MUDs are useful and popular. You can have several personae, and join different guilds, such as thief, wizard, fighter and so on, which give you various skills and powers. You can pick up and drop objects, buy and sell them in shops, and trade the with other players.

Chatting and conversation is versatile: you can talk in various locations such as pubs, while sipping fake drinks (?), and the game allows you to display conversational cues on demand, such as smile, shrug, snore, etc to liven up the chat.

Some areas are safe, while in others you can be attacked by other players (if the game allows that sort of thing). The most addictive feature of all is that by performing tasks and quests, and exercising your skills, you can acquire new powers and ratings in the game.

Although the graphics versions have gained great popularity recently, the old-style purely text-based MUDs still abound, and their attraction is easy to see: a skillfully written game is rich in detail and description, and allows the player to envisage their own version of the world that they inhabit. It's like the difference between radio and television: television hands you the author's view, but radion lets you populate your imagination. (I've always thought that good radion comedy can be better than good TV comedy, Eccles). The text-based ones also tend to be free of charge.

I may rant about all this at some other time, and describe some of the (now defunct) MUDs that have given me great pleasure, but if you can't wait, a very good one at the moment can be found on the Nanvaent site.

Why am I gibbering on about this? Well, for one thing, I'm keen on both the technical and the social parts of the game: it's fascinating to see how people behave and interact in these surroundings. Also, I'm in the process of developing a game engine myself. It's written in Java, and will be freely available when it's ready (don't keep asking - it won't make it happen any faster). The purpose is to produce an engine which will then let people build there own MUDs on top of it.

However, I won't be able to resist setting up my own running MUD, just to test it thoroughly!

At the moment, we can handle locations, characters and objects, and the interaction between these is being debugged (and yes, there are bugs at present). When that's all cleaned up, development will move on to setting up a fighting mechanism (very difficult) and a mechanism that will allow guilds such as thief, wizard etc. One of the problems that has recently been solved is to list the contents of locations in a sensible way: that is, instead of "a sword, a orc, a sword" to say "two swords and an orc". It's been a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.

I'll keep you posted.