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LambdaMOO, MUDs, and 'When the Internet Was Young' (undark.org)
Slashdot reader travers_r shares "a peek into the early days of internet culture and multiplayer gaming." (Apparently this MOO has been running continuously for 28 years.) "From the looks of it, squatters run it now..."
LambdaMOO was different from the earliest MUDs, which were Tolkienesque fantasies -- hack-and-slash games for Dungeons & Dragons types with computer access, mostly college students. LambdaMOO was one of the first social MUDs, where people convened largely to play-act society, and what might have been "one of the first MUDs to be run by an adult," [co-creator Pavel] Curtis believes... Everybody comes through the Coat Closet the first time they visit LambdaMOO, entering the Living Room through a curtain of clothes, like children into Narnia. In between the textual rooms and objects they explore, there's a faster-moving flow of words, the coursing real-time chatter of LambdaMOO's other users. This is a Multi-User Domain: a chatroom and a world at once, a place where telling takes the place of being...
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.
Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...
The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."
Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
My neckbeard just grew out from reading the summary.
Beware of the Leopard.
Cheeseplant's House was the first talker I was aware of, in 1990. Might be the first ever too. Used to hang out in Cheeseplant's House waiting for MIST to open - fantastic, and rather player v player bloodthirsty game before all the Diku and Tickle muds started taking over.
Great days. I was playing MIST one day in the spanking new University X Term labs, very expensive, when a bunch of six formers came in to look the wonders of higher education. I did a 'shout' on the game - "oh god, hordes of potential first years staring at me and I'm playing a game". Got back loads of shouts "Greetings from the Netherlands", "Hello from Germany"....etc. Bet you I did more for recruitment that day than the entire rest of the tour.
I am one of the few (and I am not proud of it, quite the contrary) who aren't affected by rosy retrospection.
When the Internet was young, it was difficult to access, difficult to use and didn't have much value outside of niche use(r)s.
MUDs were "multiplayer notepad" of sorts, and they were awesome because they were "the new thing". After a while, they stopped being that. It is debatable whether their replacement was an "improvement" or not. The best of them were very difficult to improve, even through adding multimedia files (images, audio, video,later 3D etc) - but this is valid for anything: it's difficult to improve something that is very good.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I pretty much lost my first year of college to Muddog, run out of the University of Florida. In fact, I still use my original avatar name as one of my logins all over the net. Then I moved on to Three Kingdoms once Muddog died out. Man, I loved it when they got the Portal client for windows with 3k. It was soooo much better than tinyfugue that we had been using.
They are still there if you know where to look. Connected on one know.
I think the MUSH variant really is the best explanation: Multi-User Shared Hallucination.
It is like cowriting a book, a massive tangled story that doesn't have to make sense and which only exists in the moments you are there. It is like Second Life, except you don't need to be a coding genius or rich kid to have pose balls and great graphics - the poses are anything you can think up, the graphics are in your mind's eye.
It is a freedom to move past not just reality, but the imagination of everyone else. For all the freedoms offered in Second Life, or in WoW, or in VR Chat, or anywhere else, there are constraints, things that can't be done either because no one else ever thought to do it or because the code isn't advanced enough.
On a MU* all you need is to think it and type it and then it happens because you will it into existence.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I grew up playing Zork and online text games. I was a longtime player of the World of Norrath(mud), which was the precursor to EverQuest. I was in grade school when the original D&D red box came out and I can remember the first time a group of 5 of us got together to battle the forces of darkness in the school library. I was an elf when that was a class unto itself. I still play pen and paper RPG's with a group twice a month, it is GURPS these days but little else has changed.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The article says "Multi User Domain." MUD actually was multi-user dungeon, as in online dungeons and dragons.
E
I know Batmud got into Steam greenlight before Valve discontinued submissions. As far as I know they're fairly close to completing the process.
As for graphical games and Wow, I don't recall them hurting the userbase much. The userbase on Bat was growing even after Wow had been out for a while. What precipitated a decline was a) there being tens of thousands of games that work on any hardware now, and b) logging in and being killed three rooms from the entrance by an event monster is a proud legacy of Muds, but also not a great way to attract new players.
D&D sux. AD&D FTW
I remember playing Medievia a lot. Color graphics (er, text)!
And being on DyrtDev; learning how to create your OWN worlds that others could play in.
Good times.
RealmsMUD was the best MUD. EVER!
Tsunami and Highlands were also really good. I remember back in '99 I logged into Tsunami after 5+ years of being gone (I had joined the Marine Corps) and my character was still there!
Good times.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Yes, I was going by what the person who introduced me to muds told me. Wikipedia clearly says they were actually based on...teaching software. Kind of odd, but ok.
It sure does bring back memories. I was on LambdaMOO for a while, also worked with Pavel Curtis much later at a different job. Did my years on MUCKs and MUSHes, too. It's amazing how much this stuff is both ancient history and recent history all at the same time.
Back when I was young (and there was still snow THIS high, i.e. before global warming, and before the invention of boots) internet access in my country was pretty much something that you either had when you were rich or when you went to a technically inclined university. Now, transporting graphics on an internet link was pretty much unheard of or at the very least frowned upon (the university had a lightning fast 2mbit connection... still pretty impressive when you were used to 9.6kbit), so text it was.
This was also the time when I started playing a new kind of RPG, unfortunately one nobody else wanted to play, so when I found a MU* that did, my life was complete.
And my university progress took a sharp decline...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
After the sad demise of Cheeseplant's house, I went looking for a new home.. And came across Igormud.. It's still going (igormud.org 1701).
I met a load of people on there that I became friendly with, and that got me to start travelling the world. Been round Europe and the States visiting people I'd met there. A good many of them have stayed friends with me, nigh on 30 years later!
It was before the days of MMORPGs and the Graphical stuff they have now.
All the things that plague those now, used to be prevalent on the MUD: PKing, cyber bullying, code/glitch abuse, VAPEing of offenders, multi-logging, ALT characters, "illegal Trade" of EQ, "Twinking", etc.
All in all, they were training grounds for the admin staff of the new environs.
Ah, the good old days...
Still, I made a handful of friends there, and ticked off more than a few offenders, too.
Gonna have to start my server back up. Love scripting!
Star Trek MUSHes were my thing. Lord I loved those. Built in starship combat systems in them that, while text based, hands down beat for authenticity any ST game ever made. Multiple people at multiple "consoles", handling navigation, helm, weapons, engineering, shield control. What course do I need to go to put three different ships on three different shields? Any smart game company would have taken those systems, wrapped a GUI around it, and kept that game play. It's what STO should have been.
I was an administrator at PixieMUD (same handle). Yes, it was fantasy adventure themed. But the features that drove player attention was not the combat and treasure, but rather the range of "emotes" supported and the social chat lines and the ability to emote over them.
The internal coding of the MUD environment meant that players who earned write permissions ("wizards") could code areas and objects. Many people got their first exposure to coding through this. (A C-like language, LPC). That's important because the games were not played only by comp-sci students, in fact mostly by people from other majors.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
Only if that user has somehow never heard of MMORPGs. A MUD is just a text-based non-massive version of that. LambdaMOO itself was more like Second Life or VRChat than a traditional MMO, but the analogy still stands.
Rob
When I was half my current age I used to spend quite a lot of time playing on MUDs over a dial-up connection, and after some time of playing a lot of that, I started dreaming in text. That was quite a surreal experience, because it was like I was there inside the world, except somehow it was all text, the conversation, the location, everything was there at the same time the text was being parsed in that dream state. Seems like my mind was processing it as if it was some kind of reality and certainly with that I think it really does fulfil the virtual reality description.
Please direct all bug reports to
Hmm that is a tough call...
Avatar, on the NovaNET system. moved from the MAINEI system to the USM system to now Cyber1. It's been played since the early 80s, or before, on the UICU PLATO systems.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.