46 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
46 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
MUD
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/muhd/ , n. [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension] 1. A
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class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are
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real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple locations like an
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adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple
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economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure
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onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD.
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The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of
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going mudding , etc. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with
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names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on
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the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
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game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUD s.
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There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of
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this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by
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Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: You haven't lived 'til you've died on
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MUD! ); however, this is false Richard Bartle explicitly placed MUD in the
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public domain in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed
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trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created
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the myth. 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. Because
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these had an image as research they often survived administrative hostility
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to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were
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often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of
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hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the
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Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became
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nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional
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hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the
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early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to
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emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as
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opposed to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are
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sometimes referred to as 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 of
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the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a built-in
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object-oriented language. The trend toward greater programmability and
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flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is
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still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly)
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every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the
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term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names
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corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It
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survived. See also bonk/oif , FOD , link-dead , mudhead , talk mode.
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