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

[Mike Sellers]

At 01:59 AM 12/26/97 PST8PDT, Matt Chatterley wrote:
>On Thu, 25 Dec 1997, ##Make Nylander wrote:
>
>> [Original message sent by Mike Sellers]
>> | >| 
>> | >	For me, the idea of a graphics-only MUD has always sounded like
>> | >	"we invented video tape, now let's burn all the books!".
>> | 
>> | 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.  
>> |
>> | >	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
>
>Wishing to avoid a bout of flames, but unable to resist dashing a *little*
>magnesium powder on the fire:

I'll see your magnesium and raise you a dash of potassium:  

>> 	How am I being patronizing? I stated my opinion, I didn't claim
>> 	the original poster was wrong. 

The analogy of graphical muds == video while text muds == books is both
mistaken and more than a little odiously self-congratulatory.  Also, I read
in your above comments the all-too common and self-defensive insinuation
that people who do not prefer text muds do not have the same highly
developed imagination that confirmed text mudders do and/or have too short
an attention span to really appreciate the subtleties of text games (having
grown up on Nintendos).  If such narrow-minded and patronizing implications
were not your intent, I apologize.  

>>    In his post, Greg Munt implied that
>> 	most people play text MUDs because they don't know anything better,
>
>I agree with Greg almost unconditionally (there is really no other option
><vbg>), but particularly on this - a lot of people prefer text interfaces
>to gui, and I would wager a slightly larger portion actually prefer gui.

I'd love to see some numbers on this that are not predicated on a parochial
view of muds.  Everything I've seen (starting with the success of graphical
adventure games vs. the old Infocom text ones) tells me that *many* more
people prefer graphics to text.

FWIW, the first time I heard the argument that many people prefer text to
graphics was in 1983, when a mid-level manager at Tektronix was defending
his decision to kill a graphical terminal project that others had been
trying to get funded.  "No one really needs more than text, and all those
colors are just confusing to people."  I still wonder if he had ever
watched TV.  


>> 	I like GUIs, I like pretty graphics, and IMO if you're planning to make
>> 	a career out of coding MUDs, graphics are the only way to go. BUT,
>> 	producing a graphical MUD takes a lot of time and money, and 
>> 	until someone can run something akin to Ultima Online free of charge,
>> 	there'll be aplenty of people who'll be quite happy to suffer the
>> 	limitations of text-only interface just to be able to play for free.

Actually, as I said earlier, I think this group will shrink quickly, at
least as a proportion of the overall group of people playing online.  

However, I don't think text-muds will vanish.  They are still the best
method for people to *create* their own content for free, and that has a
powerful attraction.  OTOH, we'll have to wait and see what people can do
for free with software like the stuff Electric Communities is working on --
that alone could conceivably change everything you know about mudding.  

--

Mike Sellers   Chief Alchemist -- Online Alchemy   mike at online-alchemy.com

"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others 
may despise it, is the invention of good games.  And it cannot be done 
by men out of touch with their instinctive values."  - Carl Jung