The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword

Wired has an article up which harkens back to the days of yore, when men played Zork and women congregated in MUDs and MOOs. The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword takes a look at the still extant realms of the text-based virtual space. From the article: "For me, asking why I play a MU (multi-user text game) when I could play EverQuest is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story..."

Comments

TinyCWRU

[cei]

Any of the old TinyCWRU crew around on slashdot? I'm guessing Crocker. Any others? I'm sorry to see that tinymush.org seems to be gone. It was a blast to login to TinyCWRU as recently as a couple of years back and still be able to use characters created ~1990... Anyone know if somebody has inherited the database?

Roleplaying, depth, and so on

[MattW]

There is a richness you can give a game when you don't need art assets to deal with everything. In 1998, some friends and I completed the first phase of a mud, Avendar - the Crucible of Legends, now to become a pen & paper RPG project by a fledgling gaming company as well. We were all players coming from the venerable Carrion Fields, which remains popular to this day. We came to pursue our vision - with technological enhancements, an entirely original world, that remained high fantasy but got away from both Tolkienesque and the Arthurian sorts of settings. There are hundreds of areas, thousands of monsters, tens of thousands of distinct rooms, and an original history and lore that players add to as time goes by.

We had a vision, and it evolved as time went by, but as avid students and participants in both the fantasy genre and gaming in general, MUDs were powerful mediums both for Roleplay, and later storytelling. It was also a way to dig deeply into our bag of tricks and realize all sorts of things that are ludicrous to even imagine still in an MMORPG like everquest. Text gives you an amazing freedom to do a lot of things that would be difficult still to handle in a graphical sense - whether it is instantly whisking a pair of players into a pocket dimension for a duel, or having the city catch fire from invading bandits, both of which are things that can and do happen in Avendar, just to name a couple.

The only thing I've enjoyed nearly as much as my work on Avendar - and I wrote 100,000 lines of C code to lay the technological I-beams for its ceration - was using the NWN toolset. While it was far more limited, it did have an enormous power and the ability for fans to add to its base of art by creating monsters, placeables, portraits, and so on gave it a flexibility that an MMO simply cannot have, which is probably why tens of thousands of people are still playing it. The persistent world I worked on, City of Arabel, still to this day is packed to the gills - the 55 slots on the server are nearly constantly filled.

Then again, for all the amateurs, it is easy to see why it is hard for it to flourish. There are so many incredibly *bad* gaming creations out there. They pursue some single-minded vision without considering the playing experience it introduces, and end up utterly devoid of fun. I've always liked Raph Koster for that reason - not so much his expertise, because his actually creations I haven't liked much - but for his focus.

I'd have to say that Jack Emmert is probably the new bearer of that standard, as he's taken "original story and vision" and mixed it with "fun play" remarkably well. I just hope his creation stays viable long enough for him to add all the other things he clearly wants to add.

In the mean time, if you've never tried a MUD, I strongly recommend you do.

A MUD that is a book- T2T- The Two Towers

[Tanmi-Daiow]

I personally play this one from time to time. its based off the lord of the rings. Its very cool. Check it out if you like LOTR. it is here: http://www.t2tmud.org/

Bah. GUIs make things more fun

[The Evil Couch]

Likening a GUIed persistant world to a movie isn't a very valid comparison.

When you type in "kill orc" 15 times in a row, you're not thinking "And this one is a devasting overhead swing, then I parry, dodge to the side and thrust my blade into his ribcage". You're typing in "kill orc" 15 times. or pushing the up arrow and enter 14 times. either way, there's no immersion.

You're not letting your creativity have full reign of the situation. You are sitting there, numbly hitting an orc because you want its stuff. You're only really paying attention to two things. His HP and your HP. If you hit "are severly wounded and bleeding from orifices you didn't know you had" before he does, you type in "flee" or an arbitrary cardinal direction.

compared that to a persistant world game with a GUI. you're swinging your blade and seeing other things that don't pertain to your fight. maybe it's a buddy racing to help you. maybe it's a baddy racing to help your orc. it adds excitment and drama to a fight other than staring at text prompts for levels of damage. attack animations have variety. attacking a selected target is often automatic, leaving my hands free to do something else that might be useful. calling for help, insulting a monster's mother and questioning her source of income, using some special ability, spell or other, or just moving around, whether or not it actually gives me a tactical advantage. I can imagine that it does and move accordingly. no such middle ground for movement occurs in a MUD. either you go N or you don't. When you flee combat, either the monster follows you or he doesn't. in a game with a GUI, you're in a frantic race to dodge around level architecture to get away from it. it's a good deal more exciting because the your input into the game and it's feedback to you is a lot less binary.

There's quite of few other reasons that I feel that having a GUI for a game is a giant plus, but it really boils down to "am I having enough fun playing the game this way?". For me, MUDs just aren't enough.