[MUD-Dev] The impact of the web on muds

[Mike Sellers]

At 10:52 AM 12/25/97 PST8PDT, ##Make Nylander wrote:
>[Original message sent by Greg Munt]
>| 
>| 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.
>| 
>	For me, the idea of a graphics-only MUD has always sounded like
>	"we invented video tape, now let's burn all the books!".

Please, please -- let's not do this.  Let's not repeat the endless flame
wars of r.g.m.* on graphical vs. text muds, complete with frothing rhetoric
and lame analogies.  Let's not have the graphical people telling the text
people they're geek-dinosaurs and the text people accusing the graphical
people of having no imagination or making other patronizing comments.  

Graphical muds (with at least some text input) are a fact, and they're here
to stay.  I'm not sure what the original poster wanted in terms of
feedback, but graphical muds are not a lofty goal -- they're a commercial
reality.  

>	There's plenty of room on the net for graphical MUDs, and they're
>	probably a lot more appealing to the Nintendo generation than 
>	traditional text-based MUDs. But for people like me, who've grown
>	up playing RPGs, the representation of the game world is of no
>	importance, since we've already got the best medium of all available:
>	our imagination.

Okay, ignoring the patronizing nature of this paragraph, let me just point
out that it is entirely possible that there are now more people playing
graphical MUDs than text ones; and if there aren't now, there will be in a
year.  Unbelievable?  Far fewer people play text muds than you probably
think... and I'll go out on a sturdy limb and predict that there will be at
least 250,000 people playing graphical ones within a year.  Of course, many
of these people have never played an RPG before, but that doesn't make them
second-class or imply that they have a short attention span or anything
like that.  MUDs are just evolving from a narrow niche to a wider base of
players.  


   Mike Sellers                   mike at online-alchemy.com         
   Online Alchemy                 Part of The Big Network

"...the state of the Web today is like 10 milliseconds after the 
Big Bang. The laws of physics are in place, but no one knows exactly 
how this universe will expand. We do know its going to be a very big 
deal, for a long time."
      -- John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB)