[MUD-Dev] Declaration of the Rights of Avatars

[Justin Rogers]

[Matthew Mihaly]
> ?? I find that I'm far more attached to my characters in text games than
> games with graphics.
> --matt

Actually this makes perfect sense.  Your less likely to spend as much time
in the graphical environment because they are programmed for fairly rapid
advancement.  In a text based adventure your going to spend more time
reading, learning and developing your character.

I certainly got attached to my several characters at moongate.net (until
they changed the game format in their 4.0 revision) and played close to
4 hours a day, every day for several months.  However I think I might
have read about 2 pages worth of text for UO and dropped the game after
a few weeks.  I could have never dropped my moongate characters after
this amount of time.  By then I was completely entranced and I was only
about 1/100th of the way to becoming any sort of Hero in their game.
Yet 2 weeks in UO and I felt I hadn't accomplished anything or picked up
on the plot.  And I'm a die hard Ultima fan from the NES.

There is something about the entrancment in reading and adhering to a plot
that keeps people attached.  No matter how much people talk up hating the
somewhat overwhelming IC rules on various MUDs, that is still the reason
they are there.  After spending 3 weeks being IC amongst other IC people
you get a feeling of accomplishment.  The graphical MUDs are almost never
based around maintaining relationships with any large amount of the online
society.  After many months in a text mud this would be all that people do.
They come on and chat up a storm not bothering to use the game for its
adventure purposes.

Well, many reasons that others may or may not adhere to.  But I'm with Matt
on this one.  Text MUDs are certainly more engrossing even if they may not
be as *exciting*.


<BEGINPLUG>
	Is anyone interested in programming a somewhat simple MUD for the
.NET world?  We already have a C# and JScript.NET web server (nobody
bothered to port this to VB.NET).  I'd like to see something more
advanced come off of the entire project, and it would be a great perf
test in the long run.
</BEGINPLUG>

Justin Rogers



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