Multi user dungeon

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A multi-user dungeon (abbreviation: MUD, rarely also multi-user dimension or multi-user dialogue ) is a text-based role-playing game that runs on a central computer ( server ) on which several players ( Mudder or MudHead ) log in at the same time can.

features

As with text adventures , the game world is usually presented exclusively through a textual description of the player's environment. By entering written commands, the player can interact with his environment. The three main differences to text adventures are a combat system, the involvement of other players and the course of the game in real time. The advantage of being text-based are the low requirements: To play you only need a Telnet program and an Internet connection, the bandwidth of which is not subject to any special requirements. In addition, extensions to the game are quite easy to implement.

As a character in a MUD, the player has various options for interacting with other players and with the objects in the MUD. So there are a variety of communication options between the players. Most MUDs have spaces that the player can move between. These rooms are described textually and can therefore take the form of landscapes, houses or z. B. also accept vehicles. In the rooms there are objects (e.g. bags or pouches, weapons, armor, food, ...) and "living beings" (other players and computer-generated non-player characters / NPCs ) with which the player can interact.

Example of a scene in a MUD.

history

"ADVENT" or "Colossal Cave Adventure" on a VT100 terminal .

MUDs are derived from text adventures. The first text adventure was developed in the early 1970s by Will Crowther based on his experience as a cave explorer and expanded by Donald Woods with fantastic elements from the world of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings . The player moved through a mostly underground world in which he could fight monsters or find treasure. Crowther and Woods named the game ADVENT or Adventure , which then gave its name to the genre of adventure games .

Roy Trubshaw obtained the source code of ADVENT from Donald Woods and, in 1979/1980, together with his fellow student Richard Bartle at the University of Essex in England, based on this and written in BCPL , a multi-user adventure that ran in real time. With the name of this new game M Ultimatum U ser- D ungeon (following the one-player adventure DUNGEON) she coined the term MUD. Initially, the game was only played on university networks; In 1984 Trubshaw and Bartle were able to place it under the name MUD1 at CompuServe USA and CompuNet Great Britain, where it received enormous popularity and in 1985 it was also available via British Telecom as MUD2. The tremendous success was largely due to Roger Harazim with his then company The Wizards' Guild , who oversaw the licenses, developed the game and headed The Dragon as Archwizzard . MUD1 / 2 is considered the original MUD, which by the way can still be played today.

theme

Most of the MUDs are thematically located in the fantasy area (a large part of which is at least roughly based on the literature by JRR Tolkien ), but there are also MUDs with a science fiction storyline that use other templates (e.g. Fairy tales, legends, novels, ...) or those based on the real world (in different epochs). There are also attempts to use MUDs as a virtual learning or research environment.

MUDs offer many ways to play:

  • Solving sometimes complex and time-consuming puzzles (also called quests in some MUDs ) in which the player has to complete tasks, e.g. B. the freeing of a princess, the recovery of a sacred object or the expulsion of one or more evil monsters. Depending on the puzzle, you can use civil or combative means to reach the goal, often both variants are possible and can be used depending on the player's taste. Some puzzles can only be solved by groups of players in terms of difficulty or layout.
  • Playing games such as B. chess , checkers , skat against other players or computer opponents.
  • Joining and living in a guild. This can e.g. B. be thieves, magicians, witches, druids. Guilds offer their own special skills, other skills may be restricted.
  • Many players also like to use MUDs as a chat medium.
  • Exploration and mapping of the sometimes very extensive areas.
  • There are other creative ways to play. B. by skills of guilds or the procurement of items, you can z. B. play the role of a healer who supports players with healing spells and medicinal herbs in battles against monsters. Some players also play special dealers, buyers and sellers or moneylenders.
  • Gaining experience (e.g. through puzzles, games, exploration, combat), which bring the players additional functionality and capabilities of their player characters.

Depending on the orientation, the virtual killing of fellow players (player kill) is prohibited, tolerated or specifically requested. Player kill can be sanctioned, e.g. B. through the loss of money, labeling as a murderer etc.

The level of role play required also differs. While many MUDs do not take this very seriously, there are also distinctive role-playing MUDs in which, for example, non-game-related conversations are reluctant to see or have to be specially marked.

Social components

Player meeting

MUDs also have a strong social component, which is expressed for example through the player meetings. Many MUDs organize more or less regular meetings, parties, round tables , excursions or the like in which the players in real life (real-life) can get to know. Very often the core of the players, or at least groups of players who live in the same area, know each other personally.

Addictive potential

The text-based game is structured in such a way that a player can determine for himself how long or how often he wants to play. Logging out of the game does not have any disadvantages in many MUDs, since the game character keeps the possessions it has acquired there. A player can continue the game at any point in time as all possible actions of the game are repeatable. Skills that have been learned are retained and computer-generated characters can be fought as often as desired, so that a player does not miss anything in his absence. However, there are also MUDs in which the player's inventory is not or not fully backed up when the player logs out, or in which there are one-off group puzzles ("live quests") that are supervised by a human game master. There may also be situations in which interrupting the game would mean that lengthy preparations would have to be repeated, for example in order to solve a puzzle.

People at risk of addiction are at risk of falling into the game if, for example, they want to achieve and secure the highest position on the high score lists or always want to be the first to explore newly added areas. Here, however, it is not the structure of the game that is the cause of a gambling addiction, but the psychological disposition of the player. Another addicting factor is the experience of the game as a substitute world.

To prevent gambling addiction, some MUDs also have a game break function that can be set by a game supervisor (programmer) or by the player himself. If a player uses this function, he has no possibility of logging into the game with his character for the duration of the game break. In order to continue playing, he would have to create a new piece. However, since most players identify with their main character, it is seldom that the self-set game break is bypassed with a new character.

If a game supervisor takes a break from the game, this usually happens when a player appears addicted to games and has become conspicuous due to his behavior or his online times.

layout

The design and expansion of the game world is very easy thanks to the simple text interface. While in a MUD a comparatively short editing of text messages can give a room or an object a completely different "look", comparable changes in graphic (especially 3D) games usually require complex adjustments to object modeling , textures , etc. like necessary. In return, however, with the MUD, the players have to muster much more imagination in order to be able to empathize with the described scenery. This is precisely what is valued by many players as an advantage, as everyone can create their own version of the MUD and is not guided in predetermined paths by graphics.

For example, a "scary monster" in text form is always a scary monster for the player who has taken the hurdle to move into the game world, while in a graphic game it tends to represent what appears to the graphic designer to be scary (and his ideas sometimes hardly coincide with those of the players).

The text interface is also disadvantageous in other aspects. For example, it is hardly possible to stage mass battles or the like in a MUD, since in such scenarios the players are flooded with a myriad of messages ( scrolling ) and can no longer follow the course of action.

developer

In most MUDs, the developers also take part in the game themselves and thus have direct contact with the players, who can respond quickly to their requests and suggestions. In many MUDs, participants have the opportunity to move up from being a normal player to becoming a co-programmer of the MUD. Depending on the topic, programmers usually receive a special title such as Magier, Q or God, which makes them recognizable for players.

Within the programmer, there are often clearly defined responsibilities and / or hierarchies, which are expressed in access restrictions to certain parts of the program code (for example, a novice programmer is not allowed to change the program code of other programmers). Belonging to a certain hierarchy level is usually accompanied by a corresponding title (e.g. Archmage - Demigod - God or the like)

Other names

For the purpose of differentiation, there are a number of other names for MUDs or MUD-like games, but these are not uniform. The most common are MOO (Multi User Dungeon, Object Oriented), MUCK, MUSE, MUSH (Multi User Shared Hallucination), MUX (Multi User eXperience), as well as additions to the MUD acronym, which indicate the technology or code base used .

More recently, graphic MUDs have emerged; many of them are commercial. An intermediate level are BSX-MUDs, text-oriented MUDs, in which graphics can also be transmitted as resource-saving vector codes.

Differentiation from other game types

In the case of mainly graphic online games, one generally speaks of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). Closely related to this are massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). As a distinguishing feature to the MUD, it should be emphasized that in these genres the game is never controlled by text input alone, but (apart from any chat functionality) practically exclusively by mouse or arrow keys. Furthermore, these games are either implemented using special, proprietary software on the client side (which e.g. takes on the graphic representation of the game environment) or as a browser game . However, an exact delimitation is not always possible.

software

MUD clients

In principle, an Internet connection and a Telnet client are sufficient to participate in a MUD , but this is not particularly convenient. Some MUDs, such as For the separate display of inventory, maps, or statistics, multiple Telnet connections for the same character are possible.

Special auxiliary programs for MUDs, so-called MUD clients, provide a structured surface (e.g. a large output area and a separate input line) as well as further typing aids or react automatically to events in the game using so-called triggers . With more extensive programming, they can even show an apparently intelligent, interactive behavior.

In many MUDs, however, the use of scripts (fully programmed behaviors, for example “if you are 60% thirsty, you drink automatically”) is prohibited, while aliases (= input abbreviations, e.g. tf = drink water from a bottle) are tolerated or even offered in the game become.

MUD server

The game itself is made available by a server program running on a central host - often referred to as a game driver . The software accepts the inputs of the individual players, calculates the reactions of the "world" and the objects in it and delivers them back to the players in text form. Depending on the game driver used, the programmer's scope ranges from adapting descriptions in a pre-structured database to largely free programming. Most of the more complex MUD servers provide an interpreter for this purpose, so that changes or extensions to the game are possible during runtime . A frequently used programming language is, for example, LPC .

It is also usual to structure the MUD in (repeatedly used) basic functions - the so-called MUD-Lib - and the actual simulation of the game environment (areas, guilds, etc., often also called domains ) based on this. Since the development of a complete MUD-Lib requires a great deal of programming effort, new MUDs are mostly based on an existing MUD-Lib and develop it successively, or the MUD-Lib is retained and only the domains are reprogrammed. Many of the MUD-Libs used in the German-speaking area are based on the MUD-Lib of Dawn or that of UNItopia , the original versions of which were created independently of each other and around the same time in the early 1990s.

Others

MUDs are mostly operated on a non-commercial basis by volunteers, with a few exceptions being MUD2 and the MUDs operated by the US companies Skotos and Simutronics.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Multi-user dimension  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://bl.mud.at/features/