[MUD-Dev2] [REPOST] DGN: Text MUDs; in need of an (r)evolution?

[Steve "Bloo" Daniels]

willow reed wrote:
> On 7/11/06, MUD-Dev2 Admin <admin at mud-dev.com> wrote:
> 
> Yeah but that arcane quality is one of the things that I enjoy about
> the genre.  There are so many "easy" (not easy to play but easy to
> get into playing immediately) games that having that one last bastion
> of geekiness is, to me, a great thing.
> 
> I was online in the days of old, before the word "internet"
> immediately meant only the web and its been an irritant to me that
> everybody and their mother is now online.  The online experience has
> been dumbed down to the point of idiocy.
> 
> Long time ago, I came into contact with really intelligent people in
> the online world. I miss that..henceforth my being on this list :)
> 
> I guess I have a mean exclusionary streak in me.....

To paraphrase Marcellus,

"...you may feel a slight sting.  That's nostalgia, f***ing wit' ya.
F*** nostalgia!  Nostalgia only hurts, it never helps.
Fight through that s**t. 'Cause a year from now, when you're kickin' it
in the Caribbean you're gonna say, 'Marcellus Warcraft was right'"

I've recently been playing MUD1 just a little bit.  I blame my coworker,
KFS1 (who may be known to some in this circle).  And I've searched in
vain for whatever Rogue/Moira/ADOM style game that was on the VAX of my
college around 1989-1990, with it's ASCII city (ADOM looks pretty close,
but it looks more recent than the one I'm thinking of, but a lot of
things are extremely similar).

And I find myself very annoyed at the interface.  The nostalgia for zork
and planetfall and other games nips at my heels, and I want to scratch
it between the ears and rub its belly, but I don't want to feed it, or
clean up after it, or have its shedding hair on everything I own.

I understand much of the why MUD1 is the way it is from lots of 
conversations with KFS1, and maybe I'm just too cheap to pay for MUD2.
But it is still painful. I consider mucking about in MUD1 an educational
process more than lots of fun.  There is some entertainment value in
the puzzles, I admit, but I don't tend to play things twice.  Once
solved, I'm done (though I'm staying out of the damned swamp maze -
I know when I'm beat).

Actually, the most surprising thing to me in looking at MUD1 is how well
puzzle solutions, spoilers, are not easily found in the days Post
Google.  If they're out there, they are well hidden.  That is a very
respectable accomplishment of the community of MUD1 players.

-bloo
http://bloo.playnet.com/blogger.html