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47 lines
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>MUD</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../M.html" title="M"/><link rel="previous" href="mu.html" title="mu"/><link rel="next" href="muddie.html" title="muddie"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">MUD</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="mu.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">M</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="muddie.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="MUD"/><dt xmlns="" id="MUD"><b>MUD</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/muhd/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension] </p></dd><dd><p> 1. A class of <a href="../V/virtual-reality.html"><i class="glossterm">virtual reality</i></a> experiments
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accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with
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structure; they have multiple ‘locations’ like an adventure
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game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic
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system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the
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database that represents the existing world. </p></dd><dd><p> 2. <span class="grammar">vi.</span> To play a MUD. The
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acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of
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<span class="firstterm">going mudding</span>, etc.</p></dd><dd><p>Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
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form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
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University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game
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still exist today and are sometimes generically called
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<span class="emphasis"><em>BartleMUD</em></span>s. There is a widespread myth (repeated,
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unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was
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trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the
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motto: “<span class="quote">You haven't <span class="emphasis"><em>lived</em></span> 'til you've
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<span class="emphasis"><em>died</em></span> on MUD!</span>”); however, this is false —
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Richard Bartle explicitly placed ‘MUD’ in the public domain in
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1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims
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on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.</p><p>Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the
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MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of
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these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction.
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Because these had an image as ‘research’ they often survived
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administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact
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that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made
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the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.</p><p>AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and
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quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker
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communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers
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see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second
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wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction,
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puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and
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competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as
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‘MU*’, with ‘MUD’ implicitly reserved for the more
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game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major
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variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and
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older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge
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of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a
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built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater
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programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.</p><p>The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with
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new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991
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there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term
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<a href="MUD.html"><i class="glossterm">MUD</i></a> itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding
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variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being
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explored. It survived. See also <a href="../B/bonk-oif.html"><i class="glossterm">bonk/oif</i></a>,
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<a href="../F/FOD.html"><i class="glossterm">FOD</i></a>, <a href="../L/link-dead.html"><i class="glossterm">link-dead</i></a>,
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<a href="mudhead.html"><i class="glossterm">mudhead</i></a>, <a href="../T/talk-mode.html"><i class="glossterm">talk mode</i></a>.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="mu.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../M.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="muddie.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">mu </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> muddie</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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