I loved MUDs as a kid, and really do miss the sense of immersion and depth that came from joining a long established server and just exploring.
I loved MUDs as a kid, and really do miss the sense of immersion and depth that came from joining a long established server and just exploring.
I have a love/hate relationship with my memories of the MUD era. I loved exploring different worlds and interacting with some of the brilliant people who took the time to help teach and encourage others. I was a casual who would disappear for months at a time when doing real world things, but it was comforting to be able to come back a little community of people building fun things.
The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing.
I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly.
I played some MUDs that were quite solid; PaderMUD/Xyllomer in the late 1990s (peak count connection at about 60 different people in late 1998). GEAS (similar code base) was also quite ok-ish up to 2013, though admin made too many mistakes (Asralites, aka the warclergy, were pimp-nerfed via divine codex to disallow them from starting wars, the old 'who' was stolen by PO Allalltar and PO Okkita and many more mistakes). But community wise both had many great roleplayers and your description appears to be hugely one-sided in that you never found competent roleplayers that would narrate a storyline (or usually several, if you had enough players) at the same time. Often "drama" is just roleplay and reaction by characters to in-game situations. I am aware that some players sabotage(d) MUDs and cliques rose past 1998 or so; and many older players gave up due to lack of time and what not. So the genre struggled already past 1998 and maintaining MUDs was much harder. But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem - perhaps it applies to the MUDs you frequented, but very clearly this was not the case for all MUDs, so I suspect you had a very limited set of exposure to MUDs. I mentioned two; you did not mention any MUD specifically. Can you mention which MUDs you played extensively for a while?
As for pattern collapsing MUDs, I actually agree; in particular those who held the monopoly over the game code, can really quickly ruin a game. This does not even happen deliberately all of the time; old admin stopped playing their own MUDs and after +30 years they no longer understand why some code changes ruined the MUD. It's a tragedy without a good fix, because they are old and lack time to play, so they slowly stop understanding the game they still make code changes to.
> It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly
Limited set, yes. I was never a hardcore player. I would drop in for some months, then disappear again for months as I had other things going on in my life.
Quickly, no. Some of the MUDs are still running today (as I mentioned) but my in and out nature made the dramatic changes more obvious. I would spend the summer away doing something, and come back to discover someone new had worked their way into the admin staff and was stirring the pot at every opportunity. One time I came back and the MUD was taken offline because the staff was infighting so much about it.
> But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem
I'm not pretending my experience was common to all MUDs because I didn't play a large number. However the ones I did play eventually succumbed to admin and staff drama.
Your assumption is backwards: It wasn't the people breaking rules who were causing problems. It was the people who were making rules. Some of them came up with increasingly specific things that were decided to be against an ever longer list of rules, which became the weapon which they could wield against anyone they didn't like. Temporary bans and restrictions were handed out selectively to their political adversaries.
Yeah what you’ve described a basically how I saw many forums collapse over the years as well. While they all have the basic problems of bringing in and retaining users, many stacked on top of those issues an unremovable set of hostile admins/mods driving away people from the kingdom they usurped.
The people who have the most time and energy to give for moderation, are the same ones most in love with the control for it’s own sake.
It's a pattern I see in a lot of communities now. Some of the open source projects I follow have had their communities collapse the same way: Some group comes in with all smiles and energy to help out, then they brings their friends into the upper ranks because they say they need more help, then they start pushing agendas and adding rules to give themselves more power, then finally they just exhaust everyone else who isn't interested in fighting the battles every time they log on to do something.
The few remaining forums I frequent have survived because they have no tolerance for admins who push their own agendas. They've all erred on the side of minimal rules and bans only in extreme cases. Every forum I've been on that went all-in on rules and heavy moderation has collapsed, or at least driven away the core users and left roaming packs of ingroup people who care more about picking apart everyone else than being part of the community. It's weird how many different places I've watched this happen online.
I had a blast in the late 2000s joining dead MUDs and just wandering around. It was utterly bizarre, in a good way. It also felt somewhat shocking when someone else actually signed in.
It is very strange to me when people refer generically to "MUD" and cannot even seem to qualify what type of MUD they refer to.
Since the advent of MUD gaming, there has been a wide variety of codebases, servers, and clients, with distinct genealogical lineages, that appeal to quite distinct sectors of nerd-dom, and sometimes with very little overlap in the player base.
The original big-3 "non-Tiny" MUDs were: AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPMud. These were largely unknown to me as I never played any of them, but they were mostly known as combat-based, player-programmable, and even quite distinctly European, for the most part. I could be wrong.
TinyMUD Classic began at CMU with Jim Aspnes, but quicky a lot of forks developed that resulted in MUCK, MUSH, MOO, FuzzBall and other interesting derivatives. The Tiny* class shared a lot of playerbase, because the appeal was mostly the same; all were user-extensible but only some were programmable; none were combat-based or adversarial. They mostly tended to evolve into social and chat functions, once they were established and built-up.
There are plenty of other MUD types and in the 90s, every budding programmer had ideas and forked a codebase for their own purposes. But it still baffles me, when commenters here and there wax nostalgic about those MUD days, I really have no idea what sort of game they're referring to, if they cannot be more specific.
I expect that people who mention MUDs largely do not expect anyone to know what they are talking about, since these games have nearly always been tiny and nowhere near even nerd pop culture. At least this has been my experience -- so I will prefer to say "I am playing this game called Hesperia/Achaea/Discworld/whatever, which is like a text-based RPG" and avoid even the "MUD" terminology.
Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper.
Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played
Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?
As a zillenial who grew up playing DikuMUD derivatives, LPMUDs, and MUs, I feel uniquely qualified to bridge the gap here.
What GP is referring to and complaining is that when people say MUD, they're probably referring to either:
- A MUD based on some derivative of the TinyMUD codebase, colloquially called "MUs"
- Literally any other "MUD"
These two categories of "games" are both legitimately called "MUDs" but also have almost nothing in common with each other. The union of "MU" players and "MUD" players is not that large, in my experience. MU servers tend to function somewhere between glorified Discord servers and sandbox programming environments.
Even more specifically, within the MU* space, the different forks of TinyMUD ended up adopting different subcultures, programming languages, and general vibes. Despite all being superficially similar, telling someone you play a:
- MUSH
- MUCK
- MOO
says a great deal about both you and server. MUCKs are furry subculture for the most part and use Forth for programming, while MUSHes are ... more Star Trek/Lord of the Rings coded. With other weird differences: MUSHes tend to have elaborate mail and Discord-like comm systems built in, MUCKs tend to eschew those in favor of "hanging out in the same virtual room".
IME there isn't this same feeling in "other MUDs". You don't "identify" DikuMUD or LPMUD players in the same way, so I don't think the question makes sense to anyone who isn't a MU* player.
The difference here is almost entirely cultural, since technologically, LPMUDs and MUSH/MOO/MUCKs aren't that dissimilar. But LPMUDs are almost never used the same way, at least I've never seen it.