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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..."
is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story
Because you can check out the book for free from the library (MUD) while the movie costs money (EverQuest).
Duh!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
For those looking to get interested into the lost art of MUDDING (and the secret art of MUDSEX), take a look at these sites for finding a game to play on:
The Mud Connector: http://www.mudconnector.com/
TopMudSites.com: http://www.topmudsites.com/
And for those that wish to become admins of their own online MU* world and seeking cheap, reliable MU* hosting services, check out:
MURPE Online Game Hosting Services: http://www.murpe.com/hosting/
-- M
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
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?
This sig intentionally left justified.
muds are user/volunteer driven, not corporate driven, so you can have a lot more freedom and variety in your environments and gameplay styles.
hack-n-slash exists for those who like it, but so does role-playing-ONLY muds. you won't see one of those from a company trying to sell you pretty visuals and/or high-end, overly-priced graphics hardware.
MUDs don't demand other high-end, expensive hardware like super-fast CPUs and 256MB+ of RAM.
not to mention 1-2GB of HDD space. they're also dialup friendly, not requiring one to find the non-ubiquitous broadband service in one's area, and pay as much or more per month for the internet connection as the game itself, like you would for mmorpgs.
playing text muds actually teaches you typing a lot better than most commercial or free typing tutor software.
playing a mud also tends to teach you the very basics of computer logic, due to the command line format/style.
And of course, MUDs tend to be free...
Wasn't it really: "Men played Zork and MUDs and MOOs. Some of the men playing MUDs and MOOs said they were women."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's almost a universal snobbery that inhabits the world...where people will always say "the book was better than the movie". Why can't the two artforms exist on an even keel?
There exist movies that are better as a visual form than any book. Movies that convey emotion and character that no book, no matter how eloquent the author, could never approach. Stanley Kubrick once said "If it can be written or thought; it can be filmed". This is true.
Yes, there are many many examples of books turned into movies that were disasters. But there are some that transend mere words. I of course could give you a list of films that I feel truly reach these hights, but it can often be personal. So I ask that you think for yourself if you've found a movie that exceeds the printed word. If not, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist, mearly that you haven't found it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I started playing back in '95, I was bored and at a friends house and doing random searches for games on webcrawler.com and I stumbled across a mud (what i dont remember anymore) I rushed to get home so I can try it out, and proceeded to play for hours every day for the next 7 or 8 years! Theres always something new to do, and Muds are never hampered by what you can do like their graphical counterparts.. Your only limited by your imagination.
My personal preference over the years was GodWars (http://www.mindcloud.com/) Does anyone know any good servers? and Realms of Despair (www.game.org)
Anyone interested in starting up to play, I would go check out Realms of Despair, and go download zmud over at www.zuggsoft.com..
Please. This is hardly a valid metaphor. Unless of course you really want to compare literature with hoary flavour text and:
The orc hits you for 9 damage!
You hit the orc for 4 damage!
The orc missed you!
You hit the orc for 14 damage!
The orc hits you for 3 damage!
You hit the orc for 8 damage!
You kill the orc!
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.
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/
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
I think the reason the two are still unequal has to do with the amount of control players have. In MUD's, players can often obtain much more realm influencing roles than in MMORPG's. Not to mention, MMORPG's are a money maker, designed to be a time sink. More time = more money. MUD's on the other hand, are community driven, but simply lack the visual side. I also think that if anyone COULD pull off a free expansive world like an MMORPG they would have. Saying MUDs are better because they are like books though is ridiculous. MUD's have the added advantage of not being corporate controlled, and THAT is what makes them more enjoyable to players.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
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.
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