MUD
/muhd/ [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User
Dimension] 1. n. A class of
virtual reality experiments
accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with
structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game,
and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic
system, and the capability for characters to build more structure
onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To
play a MUD (see
hack-and-slay). The acronym MUD is often
lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going
mudding', etc.
Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of
that game still exist today (see
BartleMUD). There is a
widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of
this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial
MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto "You haven't
*lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is
false --- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in PD in 1985. BT
was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on
some maps and posters, which were released and created the
myth.
Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD).
Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social
interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they
often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This,
together with the fact that USENET feeds have been spotty and
difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish
social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and
quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large
hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom
(some observers see parallels with the growth of USENET in the
early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants)
tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative
world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over
50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which
synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems
with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater
programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly,
with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month.
There is now (early 1991) a move afoot to deprecate the term
MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of
names corresponding to the different simulation styles being
explored. See also
BartleMUD,
berserking,
bonk/oif,
brand brand brand,
FOD,
hack-and-slay,
link-dead,
mudhead,
posing,
talk mode,
tinycrud.
