[MUD-Dev] "The Artisan's Hands" - Storytelling tools

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:
 
>> I'm not trying to blow my horn, or the horn of the text medium
>> here, but the article simply ignored all sorts of MMOGs doing
>> exactly what he talked about (if NWN worlds count as massively
>> multiplayer, than lots of text MUDs certainly do too).

> I haven't read the article.  I am curious how many people really
> can claim to have tried all sorts of games, be they MUD, or FPS,
> or RTS, or CRPG, or whatever genre.  I know that as an aspiring
> game developer, I put a lot of hours into a few people's titles
> that I think might be directly relevant to my work, or just really
> good games.  The rest, I can't keep up with.  In the MUD world
> there are no advertizing campaigns, so finding MUDs that did this
> and this and that storywise sounds highly problematic.  How do you
> think you'd get the word out that such-and-such problems have been
> sovled by so-and-so?  It seems that if no one knows, and if that's
> been true for god knows how many years, then there's a failure of
> marketing here.  Given the budgets, it's the failure one might
> obviously expect.  So maybe I wouldn't be as hard on the guy as
> you would.  But like I said, I haven't read the article.

Well, I don't think it's so much that such-and-such problem has been
solved by so-and-so, because there are always degrees to which
problems have been solved, or new design patterns have been
implemented. I'm certainly not saying "Look at text MUDs, they're
perfect."

As for keeping up, it's just a matter of getting out there and
playing them. You can automatically discard about 95% of text MUDs
as being crap, but the other 5% tends to be quite good and finding
that 5% isn't that hard. Look for the most popular text MUDs. You
certainly don't need to play them all for any significant length of
time either. I tend to investigate other text MUDs only to look at
specific features, not to get addicted to them and begin playing
them regularly (which is the same way I look at graphical MUDs).

And as for "nobody" knowing about text MUDs and their failure of
marketing, it's your job to go out and find out about them! You're
not going to find advertisements for them on TV or in EGM. To me at
least (and this isn't meant offensively), if you haven't done some
serious checking out of text MUDs, and want to talk about MUDs
generally, you're a newbie with dubiously thin experience backing up
your opinions. Even if you're a graphical addict, understanding the
history of the genre is important I feel.

--matt


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