The impact of the web on muds

[Greg Munt]

[Please ignore historical inaccuracies]

In 1990, the Internet was a significantly different beast from what it is 
today. It was largely unknown outside of academic circles, and was 
entirely a textually-based medium. You had your hacked-up telnet programs, 
your ftp and mail programs, and you had lynx and gopher. The World Wide Web 
wasn't even a dream. All of this was running from a unix operating system of 
some kind.

It is little wonder that The Big Three (DIKU, LP and Tiny) were all 
text-based games which all supported the TELNET protocol. These three 
still dominate the mudding field, although the Internet itself has 
changed drastically: gopher is little more than a memory now, lynx 
surviving through sheer strength of will, of the unix die-hards. The 
Internet has become a graphical medium. The text-based tools, such as 
mail, ftp and telnet, these are still around - albeit with a GUI bolted 
on top of them. 

What happened to MS-DOS has happened to the Internet. A GUI makes 
applications more accessible to Joe Public - look at the popularity of 
DOS, in comparison to something like Windows 95. With more accessibility, 
comes more potential customers. ISPs like AOL have made their fortunes on the 
wave (forgive the pun) of their graphical interfaces.

So what does all of this mean for muds?

If you look at the mainstream, not too much; the old text-based games are 
still popular - and the majority of people use what they know, rather 
than what might be better, or of a higher quality, or easier to use. What 
I am saying, is that the medium is stuck in the eighties.

Many of us are writing scratch muds. This, then, is an ideal opportunity 
to explore the new interface. This is an opportunity to lead muds into 
the arena of the GUI, where the rest of the Internet has been for years.

It would be hard to disagree with the assertion that The Mud Connector 
(www.mudconnect.com) would not have become as popular as it is, within a 
text-based medium. Count the number of Internet users on a global scale, 
and compare that figure to the number of mud users. I would be surprised 
if there was not a massive difference. The simple fact is that the 
majority of Internet users do not know what a mud is - and if they know 
of a talker, it will probably be something web-based, like PowWow. A 
large proportion of people sign up with an ISP considering the Internet 
and the Web to be synonymous. This attitude will not be changed - so it 
must be taken advantage of, by us.

Take another look at the mud connector. Many muds now have web sites. 
Some even have a web interface to the game - Cold (ice.cold.org) is one such 
site, I believe. This is a step in the right direction - a web presence 
means greater exposure to the game and, indirectly, to the medium. 
However, many web interfaces are simply a pretty decoration overlaying 
the TELNET protocol, which is old, and text-based. These interfaces do 
nothing more than plant a telnet program into a web browser.

Now take a look at the sites themselves. Most were written and designed 
by the coder of the mud - and it shows. Some sites say no more than 
"StockMUD exists, come and play!!!" - whilst others go into considerable 
technical detail. Web surfers do not care about the quality of the 
implementation, in itself - they care about attractive, interesting 
sites; they don't really care to read through a carefully maintain 
version history of the code. They want to know what there is to do, and 
how to do it. They also want it WELL PRESENTED. Mud coders rarely make 
master web designers. It would follow, therefore, that mud coders are not 
masters of HCI and GUI design, either. But neither are they always the 
best game designers. Traditionally, the solution to this problem has been 
to expand the development team from a single coder, to encompass game 
designers too. I would suggest that there is room for another area, that 
of web design. Increasingly, a good web site is something that potential 
players view, even before attempting to connect to the game itself.

So let us now turn our attentions to the GUI. Ignoring the initial 
problem of creating an attractive and intuitive interface, we have the 
problem of increased ease of use resulting in decreased functionality. 
Having an icon for each of 60 verbs would definitely result in 
unwieldiness. We need to consider the extent of the conversion from text 
to graphics. At one end of the scale we have text I/O planted onto a web 
page - at the other, we have removed text altogether, and are left with - 
perhaps - something which looks a little like Doom, with extensions.

Can we really remove the interface for text input? Or would doing so 
decrease the possible functionality too much? Perhaps those involved on a 
professional level could shed some light on this issue.

Is TELNET dead? Is the text interface to muds dead? Will muds catch up 
with the rest of the now-graphical Internet? Should they? Will new 
JavaScript clients evolve, to ease the transition? Which of us here have 
been involved with mud GUIs? Perhaps you can give your opinion on this. 

Would a move towards more graphically-orientated muds mean the decay of 
samey stock muds? Would people put up with muds that literally look the 
same? Would having a graphical interface enable people to more easily 
comprehend that we need to innovate, not imitate? Or would we see 
graphical code snippets being released?

I believe that moving muds into a graphical medium would allow greater 
popularity to be achieved. For many people, the Web *is* the Internet. So 
let's bring muds to the web.

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