= [ G A M E S P H E R E ] =

Introduction

In many ways, muds are the epitome of what you can do with a large, worldwide computer network. When you connect to a mud, you enter a world that exists only in the minds of other people. There are many different kinds of muds, but what they all have in common is a degree of sophistication, creativity and imagination that exists nowhere else on the Net.

Muds provide environments that are unlike anything ever created in the history of mankind. All around the world, right now, there are thousands of people sitting at their computers, typing commands and messages, and looking at nothing more than words on a computer screen. These people are participating in a world that exists in the minds of other people - people whom they may never see in "real life", but whom they know as intimately as anyone they will ever meet. Moreover, it is a world that cannot exist on its own. It requires not only the participation of people, but the services of a powerful computer to create and support the imaginary infrastructure. Using a mud requires you to develop and refine skills that other people cannot even imagine. To learn how to use a mud competently can take weeks or months. To master a mud may take years. At first a mud may seem like nothing more than a complex computer program. But it won't take you long to realize that thriving on a mud requires you to grow socially and culturally more than it requires mastering technical details.

What is a mud?

A mud is an elaborate computer-mediated, imaginary environment. To use a mud, you connect over the Internet to a special computer program. Once you connect, you log in by typing a user name and password. You then assume the role of a particular character.

As a character, you participate in whatever activities are available on the mud. These may include talking to other people, playing games, solving puzzles, exploring, fighting, having adventures, and so on. From time to time, you may even take part in a group event, such as a wedding.

Each time you return to a particular mud, you will be the same character. Although it is possible to change, many people will develop a character and maintain it for months or even years. If you join more than one mud, you can use similar characters, perhaps with the same name, or you can adopt a completely different persona for each mud. The interface to a mud is text-based, which means that most everything is done with words. In essence, your experience will be one of typing and reading. You participate in a mud by typing commands and messages. At the same time, you read words typed by another person (greetings, messages, and so on) or generated by the mud program itself (descriptions of places or events).

All muds have geography: a planned layout that describes an imaginary environment. One mud might have different rooms to explore; another mud might look like a village with roads, houses, stores, and so on. Some muds are modeled after real places. For example, there is a mud that looks like part of London; another mud looks like Harvard University; others are modeled after well-known imaginary places, such as King Arthur's Camelot or the world of Alice in Wonderland.

Although all muds include lots of talking with other people, some are designed primarily for talk while others are designed for action. Most muds are designed around a general theme, for example, fantasy, medieval, sci-fi, cyperpunk, gothic or post-apocalypse. Some muds have a specific theme. For instance, there are muds based on Pern, Star Trek, Star Wars, Snow Crash and other well-known settings.

As a character in a mud, you use commands to travel from one place to another. The mud program interprets your commands and keeps track of your current location. When you move, the program will tell you where you are and describe your surroundings. You can travel through a mud by yourself or with other people. All muds - even those designed primarily for talking - have some type of geography. You are always somewhere, and there is always somewhere to go. Muds are enduring because people log in regularly. The people in the mud form a large extended family that, over a period of time, come to know each other well. It is common for people to spend a lot of time on their favorite mud, returning every day, sometimes for years. (For example, a college student who is a regular mud user would probably talk to his mud friends more often than he phones his mother.)

What is the mud culture like? Here is an actual message sent from one mud person to another. Don't worry if you can't understand what they are talking about. By the time you finish reading this guide, it will all make sense.

Aside from meeting your friends, there is another reason to return to the same mud repeatedly. You can explore the environment and learn more about that particular mud. On some muds, as you get better and better, you achieve a higher status and are given more privileges.

As I mentioned, your time on a mud is spent as a character, not as yourself. This is true even on a mud devoted to talking. For example, you would never refer to someone by his or her real name, even if you knew the person in real life.

On a mud devoted to action and adventure, your character becomes an avatar: a surrogate whom you control as you travel around, talking with others and interacting with the environment. For example, you may need to fight a giant or avoid a monster who hides in a cave. When you do, you use your skill as best you can, so your character is not killed. On such muds, who and what you are is of prime importance. At all times, the mud program, as well as the other people, will recognize your identity, description, skills, possessions and experience, and will react accordingly. For instance, if you are an evil female elf warrior, your life will be different than if you are a male human magician who uses his powers for good.

It is important to understand that muds are not based on organized role playing in the traditional Dungeons and Dragons sense. There is no one person who rolls the dice, or asks people to make decisions, or invents a story within the bounds of a make-believe universe. Some muds, however, do have people who work actively behind the scenes, expanding the mud and creating new theme areas.

In addition, all muds have one or more administrators. After all, somebody has to set up the computer and the mud itself, and somebody has to see to all the administrative tasks. However, within the mud, everyone is a character. Although some characters may be more experienced and have significantly more privileges, no one leads you on a day-by-day basis. You are free to explore and talk to people in your own way. Muds do have rules and customs that you are expected to follow, but on a well-run mud, there are no insecure authority figures who will tell you what to do whenever they feel like it, as you might find at school, on the job, or in your family. HINT: To learn how to mud well, you have to be smart. However, you do not have to know a lot about computers.

What Does the Name "Mud" Mean?

The first mud was developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. At the time, the name "MUD" was chosen to stand for "Multi-User Dungeons" (as in Dungeons and Dragons). Within a few years, muds had evolved to the point where the original name was too confining, and people started to say that "MUD" stood for the more generic "Multi-User Dimension" or "Multi-User Domain".

Today, muds are well established with a highly developed culture of their own. The name "mud" is meaningful in its own right and is no longer an acronym (which is why I write "mud" in lowercase letters).

You will find all kinds of muds on the Internet, and there are many different names used to describe the variations. Some of these names begin with the letter "M" and look like acronyms, for example, MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, MAGE, MUG, MOO, and so on. All of these things are muds, but you don't really need to know the technical details. The best way to think of such terms is to consider them as specialized words, not acronyms. From time to time you may see an explanation as to what one of these words "means". For instance, you may read that MUSH stands for "Multi-User Shared Hallucination". My advice is to forget the acronyms. Consider all of these strange things to be types of muds and leave it at that.

The word "mud" is also used as a verb. For example, you might hear someone say, "I like to mud more than I like to sleep," or "I am a bit tired, as I was up all night mudding, so maybe you better go to class without me."

Mud Clients

All Internet services are based on what is called a client/server system. In order to access an Internet service, you run a client program on your computer. Your client contacts a server program on a remote computer in order to request the service. For example, to access a Web page, you use a browser (your client) to contact a Web server (the server). To check your mail, you use a mail program (your client) to contact your mail server (the server).

When a client contacts a server, they communicate by sending information back and forth. That information is sent according to a particular protocol. Each type of Internet service has its own protocol.

On the Web, the most common protocol is called HTTP or "Hypertext Transfer Protocol". (This is why Web addresses start with the prefix "http".) With email, the most common protocol is called POP or "Post Office Protocol".

Why am I explaining all of this? Because, in order to access a mud, you use a client/server system, so I want you to understand it. The client you use is called a mud client, while the server is the mud itself: a complex program that runs on a remote computer. The protocol used by a mud client to communicate with a mud is called telnet. When the Internet was developed, telnet was the very first protocol. The original purpose of telnet was to allow researchers at one university to work with remote computers at another university. In order to use a remote computer, a researcher with an Internet facility would use telnet to connect to the computer. He would then enter a user name and password. Once this was processed, the researcher would be able to work with that computer remotely.

Today, you will see some similarities when you use a mud. You start by having your mud client connect to the remote computer on which the mud resides. You then enter a user name and password. Once these are verified, you use the telnet connection to interact with the mud. You type commands, and the mud sends messages back to your computer, where they are displayed on your screen by your mud client.

Thus, the first step in using a mud is to get yourself a mud client and learn how to use it. There are good mud clients available for free on the Net, and you will find information about them at the end of this guide in the section entitled "Mud Resources on the Internet".

The following picture shows a mud client. Notice the separate typing area at the bottom of the window. As you type, the characters are displayed in this typing area, and nothing is sent until you press the Enter key. The output from the mud is displayed separately in the larger area above.

Social Muds and Action Muds

Broadly speaking, there are two types of muds. Social muds are for talking. Adventure muds are for game playing as well as talking. (By the way, I am using these names informally; they are not strict technical terms.)

The main purpose of a social mud is to provide a place for people to meet and talk. Although you participate as a character of some type, you spend most of your time walking around, meeting other people. Many social muds are organized around a particular theme or area of interest. Some involve role-playing; others are less concerned with staying in character.

Over time, social muds attract a core of regulars who develop their own culture and traditions. Although you will sometimes find quests and puzzles, social muds are primarily for people who want to socialize. Some social muds are devoted to utilitarian pursuits. For example, there are a number of educational muds (without role playing) where people gather to learn, teach or have serious technical discussions. You will sometimes see social muds referred to as "talkers" or "chat lines" (although not all talkers and chat lines are real muds).

You may be familiar with the 1980s American television program Cheers. The setting was a bar in which a group of regular customers would gather to talk, philosophize and discuss the issues of the day (including personal problems). If you ever thought it would be nice to be a regular in such a place - where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came - a social mud is for you.

Adventure muds offer more than socializing. There will be some type of overall activity in which you participate actively (in the role of your character). Adventure muds are complex environments, usually designed around a single main theme, where you will find many places to visit and things to do. As you travel throughout the mud, you will talk, interact, plot, fight, kill, explore, gather materials, meet people, go on quests, encounter obstacles, form alliances, and so on. On a typical adventure mud, you will get equipment and weapons. As you travel around, you will find monsters (and sometimes other people) to kill.

One of the appealing features of an adventure mud is that you can return again and again, playing with more and more skill as you gain experience. With most adventure muds, you can move from one level to another as you achieve certain goals. Moving to a higher level will increase your privileges and improve your status.

There are a large variety of adventure muds with no clear-cut groupings. However, it is possible to loosely categorize adventure muds into three main types. First, some muds involve a lot of strategy and are based on a complex set of rules and interactions. These muds are heavy on thinking and planning. If you like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, you will like this type of mud.

Other muds have more action and are less obsessed with elaborate scenarios and characterizations. These muds are sometimes referred to as hack-n-slash muds (although the term is somewhat derogatory). Hack-n-slash muds are satisfying because they have a nice mixture of culture, planning, learning, achievement and killing.

Finally, player killing muds are devoted to killing other players. On other muds, you devote the bulk of your aggressive instincts to killing monsters. On a player killing mud, you spend all of your time trying to kill everyone else. When you die, you are automatically reincarnated, at which time you go back for more. ("Please sir, may I have another?")

LPMuds, DikuMuds and TinyMuds

Most muds are based on one of three principal technologies. You certainly don't have to know the details of how they work, but I do want you to recognize the names, as you will see them a lot. The names of the three main mud-building technologies are LPMuds, DikuMuds and TinyMuds.

LPMuds are based on a computer language called LPC. LPC is designed to be easy to use by someone who understands programming, and LPMuds are readily customized. In fact, it is possible to add new features to an LPMud while it is running. For these reasons, it is common to find LPMuds that are constantly being enhanced. With some LPMuds, there are two well-defined groups of people involved in a symbiotic relationship. One group spends time using the mud, while another group (who are not players) works on enlarging and modifying the mud. On an LPMud, anyone with permission can add new features to the mud. Indeed, in one sense, an LPMud can be thought of as an ongoing software project. On a well-run LPMud, the head administrator will coordinate the efforts of the individual creators to make sure that new features are in harmony with the overall mud environment.

The original LPC language was designed to create hack-n-slash muds. If you heard that a particular mud was an LPMud, you could guess what type of mud it was. In recent years, though, LPC has been redesigned into a general-purpose mud-creation language and, nowadays, virtually any type of mud might be an LPMud.

Dikumuds are adventure muds that involve a great deal of strategy and elaborate characterization (like you might find with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons). DikuMuds are usually written in the C programming language, not LPC, and, as such, are more difficult to customize. With many DikuMuds, you play the same game each time you log in. The idea, of course, is to master the game and all its intricacies.

TinyMuds are social muds. Although they offer an imaginary environment and make-believe characters, TinyMuds are almost always oriented toward talking and socializing. New TinyMuds are not programmed in a computer language. Rather, they are generated from a database system. The mud designer configures the database according to his or her preferences, and then uses a special program to read the specifications and generate the mud.

There are many different types of LPMuds, DikuMuds and TinyMuds, all with strange names. In most cases, the names don't tell you much. However, many types of TinyMuds have names that are short words beginning with the letter "M". So if you see a mud described as a MUCK, MUSH, MUSE, MAGE, MUG or MOO, you can guess it is a TinyMud, oriented toward socializing rather than action.

As a general rule, although there are exceptions: -

LP Muds

LP Muds can be any type of mud and are often expandable. LP Muds are named after Lars Pensjö, who created the original LPMud in 1989.

Diku Muds

These are elaborate adventure muds that tend to stay the same. DikuMuds are named after the Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet (Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen), where Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer created the original Diku Mud in 1990.

Tiny Muds

These are social muds. TinyMuds were named by Jim Aspnes, who wrote the first such mud in 1989. He chose the name "Tiny" because his program was smaller and more manageable than other mud programs.

Illusion and Reality

In one sense, muds are not real. After all, they are just programs running on some computer on the Internet. Moreover, the characters that people choose are also imaginary, as are the settings, the rules and the interactions.

However, you must remember that, even if it all looks like make-believe, the people who use the mud are real, with real feelings and real needs. Human beings have an amazing capacity for using their imaginations, and once you mud for a while, you can't help but identify with your character and your particular mud.

It may seem strange to a beginner, but on a mud, a person's character is an important part of his life and must be treated with the same respect you would show for the person himself. The character a person chooses to build for himself is, to a large extent, a manifestation of his personality and his unconscious desires. People who use a mud regularly come to look upon it as a real place, and they expect you to be as respectful on the mud as you would be if you were visiting them in their home.

The people you meet on a mud are well aware of the difference between the mud reality and the outside world. However, for many of them, the mud is an expression of how they would like the world to be, and it behooves you to respect that.

Moving Around

All muds have a definite geography, and you can move from one place to another by issuing certain commands. There are many such commands, but they fall into patterns. On an adventure mud, the basic commands are directional: north, south, east and west. For convenience, you can abbreviate these commands as n, s, e and w.

You can also use combinations - northwest (nw), northeast (ne), southeast (se) and southwest (sw) - as well as up and down.

Social muds tend to use more keywords, such as out, upstairs, hallway, basement, and so on. On a social mud, you can wander with impunity. Eventually you will find your way around, but there is no hurry.

On an adventure mud, however, you must be more careful. If you are being chased by monsters in an unfamiliar area and you get lost, you might be killed.

If you use an adventure mud, I suggest you take some time to make a map for yourself. A good map will go a long way toward keeping you out of trouble. In addition, having a map is a good way to keep track of your favorite places and to remember where to find hidden treasures.

Player Killing

On an adventure mud, you spend a lot of time looking for things to kill (and trying to avoid being killed yourself). Most of the time, you will be killing monsters that are part of the mud itself. However, it is possible to kill another player.

Player killing, or PK, is the general term used to refer to the killing of one player by another. When a player is killed, what happens depends on how the mud is organized and on the experience level of the player. As a general rule, being killed is bad and will lead to the loss of accumulated points, skills and possessions.

The policy on player killing varies from one mud to another. Some muds prohibit the practice absolutely. Other muds allow player killing, but only for a good reason or only in specific areas of the mud.

A number of muds have a PK setting which you can control. If the setting is on, you can kill other players and they can kill you. Otherwise, you cannot be killed by another player. (You can, of course, be killed by a monster.)

Finally, some muds are devoted to player killing. On such muds, killing is considered to be an art form and you will spend all of your time either creating art or avoiding it.

HINT: Whenever you join a new adventure mud, take a moment to find out the policy on player killing.

On a social mud, it is possible to kill someone, but the consequences are benign. In most cases, killing a person will send him out of the room and back to his "home". Thus, killing is usually reserved for those times when someone is irritating you beyond what you can tolerate, and you want to get rid of him temporarily.

have at least tried mud sex at one time or another. I won't go into a lot of dos and don'ts, because, with some thoughtful practice, I'm sure you can figure them out for yourself. However, I do want to mention three important points that might take you a while to figure out on your own.

First, do not confuse mud sex with real-life sex. If you ever meet a mud sex partner in real life, you must appreciate that there is no correlation between what you have done on the mud and what you might do in person. Any personal expectations during such a meeting are probably unrealistic and will most likely lead to disappointment.

Second, it is possible to use your mud client program to record a transcript of your mud session. (This is called a log.) There have been a number of cases in which someone has logged a session in which he has induced another person to have mud sex. Later, the first person has shown the log to other people, sometimes even posting it to a Usenet discussion group. For this reason, some people will not have mud sex with anyone they do not know well.

Finally, don't forget that the characters on a mud will not correspond exactly to the people in real life. In particular, what looks like a woman may really be a man.