Games - MUD

	Games - MUD

In computer gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Domain or Dimension) 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. Players usually 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 or fantasy-based beings with players being able to take on any number of classes, including warriors, mages, priests, thieves, druids, etc., in order to gain specific skills or powers. The object of the game is to slay monsters, explore a rich fantasy world, to complete quests, go on adventures and create a story by roleplaying. MUDs are typically fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) series of games .

MUDs often have a fantasy setting, while many others are set in science fiction-based universe or themed on popular books, movies, animations, history, etc. Still others, especially those which are often referred to as 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. There are also quite a few professionally developed MUDs which charge a monthly subscription fee.

History

Prehistory

The first games we might call MUDs today 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.

MUD the game

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 . 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for MUD ]

Games - MUD

History

Prehistory

MUD the game

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