Multi-user dungeon

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

In computer gaming, a MUD (multi-user dungeon, dimension, or sometimes domain) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games, and social instant messaging 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. They may 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, and other mythical beings with players being able to take on any number of classes, including warriors, mages, priests, thieves, druids, etc. The object of the game is to slay monsters, explore a world rich in fantasy and with adventure, and to complete quests. MUDs are typically fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) series of games.

MUDs typically have a fantasy setting, while others are set in science fiction-based universe. Still others, especially those which are based on 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.

History

File:Mud logon.png

A MUD logon screen.

The first games we might today call 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" 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.

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 [1]. They chose the acronym MUD to stand for Multi-User Dungeon, 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. 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.

'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. Whilst '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 and 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 far more accessible to the public.

Another early MUD was Avatar, written in 1979 by Bruce Maggs and Andrew Shapira, both 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.

In the early 1980s 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"). Goth supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem. Scepter of Goth 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.

A version of MUD is still running at www.british-legends.com and versions of its descendant MUD2 run at www.mud2.com and www.mudii.co.uk. Two versions of Avatar, one from ~1979 and one from 1984, are still running at www.cyber1.org. Moria and Oubliette are also available.

These text-adventure games (both single and multi-player) drew inspiration from the paper-and-pencil based role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons 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 (i.e. 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 (or MERP).

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. Monster was disk-based and modifications to the game were immediate. "Monster allows players to do something that very few, if any, other games allow: the players themselves create the fantasy world as part of the game. Players can create objects, make locations, and set up puzzles for other players to solve. Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD.

In 1989, TinyMUD introduced the ability for the 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. (MUCK 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."

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 code bases as well, including CircleMUD, Merc, ROM, NiMUD and SMAUG.

In 1993, authors of NiMUD OLC changed popular codebase Merc (MUD) by writing a multi-user online editor and released NiMUD as a competing package. In 1994, Herb Gilliland and Chris Woodward (authors of NiMUD) authorized a release of a port to Jason Dinkel, who adapted NiMUD's OLC to be packaged as a Merc add-on called ILAB/OLC. The code added Monster-like online creation functionality to Merc (MUD) derivatives, solidified the mudding community around a standard online editor, and increased the standards by which OLC was developed, providing access to much-needed editing features across many different styles of Merc (MUD). It was by far the most popular OLC, the evidence for which is apparent in the large number of Merc (MUD) distributions which include ILAB/OLC, ROMolc, EnvyOLC or Ivan's OLC, which are all derived from NiMUD OLC.

In 1994 Peterson had again rewritten his game to be compatible with 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.

Though seeing some decline in the past few years due to the advent of graphical MUDs (MMORPGs)and other networked games, the MUD scene is still very much alive on the Internet, and can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients that give a more pleasant user experience. These games are still listed at various web portals (see external links).

Variations on MUDs

Graphical MUDs

A graphical MUD is a MUD that uses computer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors. A prominent 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 code bases. The early talkers were essentially MUDs, with most of the complex bits of code stripped away, leaving just the communication level commands -- hence the name talker. People who use these tend to be called spods.

The spod tends to be something of a long-term fanatic. Where many mudders may move on after a year or two, people who use talkers typically have been doing so for a decade or more. Talkers are significantly easier to run than an average MUD, since they don't incorporate very much artificial intelligence, and they are usually much more user friendly, since there is not often much fighting as a focus. In other words, whole families of husbands, wives, children, and siblings have been known to spod in certain circles.

They also use very little network traffic, and use simple protocols, making them ideal for setting up quietly at work. Talker applications predate MUDs by many years, although some of the early ones were used to play Dungeons & Dragons over computer networks. Talkers and some other MUDs use InterMUD to chat with users on completely separate MUDs.

The spod has earned a place in the Jargon File.

RPIMUDs

A lesser known type of MUDs are RPIMUDs, Role-Play Intensive Multi-User Dungeons. RPIMUDs gear toward realistic enforced roleplay which is often blended in 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, as well as role-playing against the world or environment, often going as far as to request their players to 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 community portal dedicated to RPIMUDs can be found at http://www.rpimud.com.

Complex Combat MUDs

The term Complex Combat MUDs covers a wide variety of games. Generally, it means that a game does not have an automated 'kill' system - rather, there is a system of balances which require user input. When coupled with an 'affliction' or 'stancing' system or some sort of tactical fighting mechanism, this is a very engaging and exciting way of doing combat.

Another distinguishing factor of Complex Combat MUDs is that they sometimes allow client-side triggers and scripting (often considered an unfair advantage in other games), since the 'balance' system ensures that writing a script to handle fighting would be extremely difficult, but some more basic scripts make fighting more exciting for both participants, and add an extra dimension to combat.

See also

• Category:MU* servers
• Category:MU* games
• MUD client
• MUD trees
• Mobile (MUD)
• MMORPG – Massive Multiplayer Online RPG
• MUSH
• MOO
• Talker - historically based on MUDs
• Online Creation
• OTBRPG
• For an academic look at MUDs, see Sherry Turkle's writings

External links

• Most Popular MUDS: Ranking of the most popular MUDS
• mudlists.com: Large selection of available online RPGs
• Mud Connector.com: Extensive list of available MUDs and related resources
• Top Mud Sites: Ranking of the most popular MUDs
• Some history and reviews from Richard Bartle's "Interactive Multi-User Computer Games" report
• Confessions of an Arch-Wizard Mud History: Michael Lawrie's account of the early years of MUD and MIST
• Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO
• Intermud.org: Information about the I3 and IMC2 intermud communication protocols
• Mud Magic.com: MUD software downloads, discussion, game listings, and documentations.
• ftp.game.org: Hierarchal archive of MUD source code
• The MUDline: A timeline of MUD history.
• Mapping MUDs: 3-Dimensional modelling of a MUD
• The Gaming Center: one of the largest free gaming based bulletin board systems in existence today.
• Early MUD history
• A Classification of MUDs by Martin Keegan, Grandmaster Data Services Ltd, Cambridge, U.K.
• Erwin S. Andreasen: Home of the MUD Personality Test, 16k MUD competition, and other resources.
• Taiwan Mud List: A watch list about informations, status of Taiwan Muds.