Hail!

Since I have been out of Muds for a few years now I was wondering if anyone would care to fill me in on the current trends and new developments in MU*s?

I would like to start some new Threads here since I have a special fondness for this particular Forum, those who have been around a while know why. But I feel I do not know enough, yet, about how things have been going to know what the future may hold or what even would today qualify as an 'Advanced Mud Concept'.

If anyone would care to fill me in a bit we could proceed from there to what the future might bring.

Of particular interest to me is what sort of players live in MudLand these days. When I left the graphic pay-to-play places were drawing most of the old hands away from Muds and the quality of potential Staff and Players had dropped quite a bit. What sort of people play Muds these days and what types of concepts are drawing the most people are a couple of the questions I have.



A.T
(-)

Hey AT...

You're question is one that we IMPs over at Aabahran, the Forsaken Lands MUD have been asking ourselves for months...namely, in this new era of MMPORGS and graphic interfaces, where do MUDs go from here? Can they survive?

I think what will continue to be the draw for MUDs, beyond simple replayability and many of them being free to play like ours, is the imagination it takes to play a text-based game. Many won't get it. Many never have. But I find that what keeps me playing morts, even in a world that I help create, is the pictures I see when I play. I know what the cities "look like"...I know what my armor does when I swing my sword. I can "see" it in my head. Those who only play games with graphics don't know the freedom and incredible power your mind has to take you to a place that you imagine in a text based world. I think you get so much more deeply immersed.

Thoughts?

I believe that once a certain 'critical mass' has been reached on something it never really goes away. Technology can sometimes conspire to take away the ability to play a certain game, but the type goes on.

With Muds of course they are designed to work with some of the most basic of Internet tech so they are in no danger of vanishing.

What makes a MU* has changed over the years, I am not entirely certain that the game I am now working on will end up being thought of as a Mud at all. If as we intend to do we create it so that it is played on the Web it will really be something a little different. All the character-driven style of play of a Mud, but with a very different look.



A.T
(-)

i have seen this, on the secret of atlas, over the last few years too. people are drawn to the giant muds with all the graffics. but sooner or later they find their way back home , and bring a few new players back with them.

True enough Sparky but I think that more people simply move on and never return. There is the relentless push of technology that drags many people forever forward.

There are of course so many types of games to play out there beyond Muds and MMORPGs. My wife was addicted to the simple world of Neopets for quite a long time.

I guess I really have moved up a notch on the technology ladder with what I am working on now. LPC via DGD Mud base, but feed through a variety of Web-based displays. Hopefully a fair amount of panels and other graphic toys to play with.

A mix of old and new since many effects and displays will come through the text feed at the bottom of each page.

Just another new layer on what Mud means.



A.T
(-)

I would say that's a good step, and a direction that probably more and more muds will take eventually, perhaps not by abolishing the telnet interface entirely, but either by designing custom clients or by making more features accessible through browser interface. It is definitely something we have in mind for GW2.

It could even be argued that Windows XP telnet has been a bigger blow to muds than graphical MMORPGs - nobody will ever know how many potential players we have lost to that monster. It presents a huge obstacle to introducing completely new people to muds. Text games have a lot of appeal, even today, but we should strive to lower the entry barrier or we will end up cannibalising one another's playerbases.

Good points Angie.

I think one of the great strengths of the MU* concept is the unique vision that each new game can represent. Every Mud is a new chance for someone to find just the right balance of features and content to capture people's imaginations. My feeling is that one of the things that has kept MU*s alive even as technology passed them by was this potential for expression.

I know for myself that the world that a Mud represents is something I love to craft and guide. My games always have GameMasters and I am one of them. It is that combination of Stage and Live GameBoard that is so appealing. I could create some other type of game but nothing else has the same scope that a Mud can have.



A.T
(-)

Just provide an experience players can't get on the big graphical MUDs like WoW and you'll be fine. Creating a text MUD primarily oriented around monster-bashing, for instance, is probably not such a good idea, given that that game mechanic is what all the big graphical MUDs are all about, and regardless of how well you do it, they have fancy 3d graphics, and you don't.

We just had, in August and then in October, our best and 2nd best months ever, respectively, for instance, and I chalk it up partly to the fact that our gameplay style is not replicated in the big graphical MUDs. Or rather, I should say that I chalk up the fact that we have grown and not shrunk over the last year to the fact that people can't get the same styles of gameplay our MUDs offer that they can in MUDs like WoW or Runescape or whatnot, and so the release of the juggernaught that is WoW hasn't affected us all that much.

--matt

I look at the change more pessimistic. After a short amount time, like three to five years, there will free and well-made MMORPGs around.. even building them will be much easier and cheaper. I doubt MU* will able to find new players to survive, and they will turn into Virtual ones. There is a second scenario; Muds may turn into more chat rooms then games as they are now. OR vise versa, mud style games can be added to IMs.. but that's a far possibility.

Actually I only see chance for RPIs. IMHO many H&S mud styles can be dublicated, replaced and virtualized, but RPIs are not profitable and very (staff) demanding so they will keep their playerbase for a long time.

I don't believe that Mu* will ever "go away" they will simply evolve. I believe at some point many of them will be turned into graphical games using NWN like modules.

As far as the state of muds today. I've played
Muds since late 1999 and I've noticed a definite decline in the amount of players on all of my favorite muds. I'm not sure if that is because there are so many Muds out there that the proverbial waters have been diluted down to nothing, or because there simply aren't as many players as there once were.

The mud I'm an immortal on has been struggling with the issue of player retention for about 3.5 - 4 years now. It went from a fairly active playerbase of 15-30 during peak hours to being lucky to have 2 or 3 on at any one time. It is not stagnant because new areas, guilds, "stuff" is being added and tweaked all the time but the players are simply not there.

Granted I'm far from an expert but I've noticed dwindling numbers on other muds as well. Many people shrug their shoulders and say "Muds aren't going anywhere, stop worrying" and I agree with, but maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe there are simply to many muds?

Well there you go, then - players don't like change.

It's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" things: if you never change anything the mud will stagnate, players will get bored, and leave - but if you do change it, people will hate it...and leave. You have to try and find the right balance, and it sounds as if your mud didn't do that.

Perhaps it turned into a "better" mud in your opinion, but many of the old players will have been there because they liked the original mud, so you'll have to go through the whole process again of building up a playerbase.

That's very true. I know for a fact, because some players have said this, that they stay because they "know the lay of the land", how combat works, what their powers are, where things are like equipment, potions, etc. When we introduce new areas or replace old/stock ones, we do it piecemeal, one area at a time. I would bet that a portion of your MIA playerbase is playing a MUD with a similar codebase as your MUD that hasn't been as customized as yours.

Also, you have to listen to how you're being interpreted by your playerbase. Too often disgruntled players, and unfortunately IMMs also, can foster what I call the US vs. THEM syndrome. "The IMMs are out to get us" "The players are all cheaters" are just a couple of the ways things get out of hand quickly. But if you handle it the right way, which I like to think for the most part our staff has, you can retain your solid players through many trials and tribulations. For example, the current staff of Aabahran is the third administration in its 5 year life. Certain IMMs were always present but the main creators of the world are now gone. Due to this, we have lost players. During the first few years of our life, we had 50-60 online at any given time. Now the average is lower. It is improving from the last administration though, and we look for even better things to come. And if the players have any complaints now, many will say it's not our staff.

I'm not saying you and your staff caused the drop off directly, but I think, at least in some small way, the drastic changes, perhaps unwanted by the players, were seen as something negative. You probably have a really tight MUD now. Advertise the heck out of it and you might find yourself knee deep in quality players very soon.

The two biggest changes I have been seeing as I have been looking around has been more commercial influences and a broadening of what Mu* means.

The success of the big MMORPGs has obviously impressed people with the idea that money can be made these days and some people are taking advantage of it. A pay to play Mud was considered obscene not too many years ago. I have even been bitten by the bug, if the game I am working on should ever reach the point at which it seems it could generate 100,000 per year in subscriptions I will probably go commercial myself. Unlikely, but at least it is something I am considering which I never had the chance to do in the past.

I think eventually, and this may still be years away, but the very best text-based traditional Muds will be commercial ventures.

I agree with whoever said that eventually many private-run games will be graphic. Things like NWN have spawned large communities of their own and we can expect more and more of them as time passes.

The broadening of the concept of what a Mud is will meet a lot of resistance, perhaps even a new name will be needed for people to rally behind. This sort of thing always makes life interesting. Does a place like TMS stay focused on what we currently call Muds, or does it accept the new generation?


A.T
(-)

The commercial muds have become particularly active in terms of promotions and advertising in the last couple of years, which is part of the reason why a number of non-commercial mud developers have moved elsewhere - but that's really more of a TMS thing. I'm not really sure what you mean by broading of the definition of a mud, though...some people always try to change its meaning (then try to introduce redundant acronyms such as 'mu*'), however that's not really anything new.

Well not really - I mean, the original MUD (aka "MUD1") went commercial in 1984. Then there was MUD2 in 1986, Gemstone in 1987, Gemstone II in 1988, etc. By 1990, when the first TinyMUDs (MUCK, MUSH, MOO, etc), LPmuds and DikuMUDs started appearing, there was already a small selection of commercial muds, such as Federation II, Avalon, Dragon's Gate, etc.

I don't think that will happen - or not completely. The decision whether to make a mud commercial or not does not have much to do with the quality of the mud or the effort that went into it. At the present moment, you can find free muds that are equally good or better than the commercial ones. It's becoming more and more demanding to make a competitive mud as player expectations rise, true, but there'll always be obsessive fools willing to do it all for free. (Even some commercial muds don't pay their staff, which is a concept that boggles my mind.)

The number of commercial muds is not rising that fast either. Diku (and derivatives) remains the codebase of choice for the vast majority of muds, the codebases that allow commercial use are nowhere near as popular, and not many people are willing to invest real money (*gasp*) into having a custom codebase made the way IRE did, or have the skill to make their own.

Unless we see an unexpected rise in popularity of publicly available codebases that can be used for profit, I don't see it happening.

"Best" is very much a matter of perspective. The claim to being "best" doesn't really have any meaning unless you fairly arbitrarily define 'best' in some way such that the attribute(s) that contribute to 'best' status are objectively measurable. For instance, if 'best' means most players, then Dragonrealms and Gemstone win, hands down.

Angie wrote:
I think this is pretty accurate, though I think there's a caveat. The caveat is that the easier the codebase makes it to create a playable MUD, the more decisions it has made for you, and the more similar your game is going to be to other games that are using that codebase.

For instance, on our in-progress MUD, Midkemia Online, we made the decision to just throw away Achaea's codebase almost entirely, keeping only some common backend systems that we maintain for cross-mud capabiliity (so we can talk to each other across MUDs and whatnot in-game) or for financial stuff (credit sales and related) and then some basic utilities that just make coding easier. It was a huge decision, and very costly in terms of time, since it means redoing everything from what a mob is on up. But, it was also the only way to make a game whose similarities to Achaea, for instance, are only by design, never by accident and never resulting from something implicit in the codebase.

--matt

Traditional version is text-only via telnet feed. But if you run it through a Web interface can it still be a Mud? Are graphics the dividing line? I personally see games like EQ as fully graphic commercial Muds but I know that most consider MMORPGs as their own catagory.


I guess I have just had the mantras of 'Always free' and 'Available to all via pure telnet' chanted at me a few more times than you have. I doubt they are still around and of the same opinon today, but I used to know people who spat at the mere mention of a pay to play Mud.


Never completely, but the scales will slowly tip in that direction forever.


Everything is a matter of perspective. When I say 'best' I mean it in the general sense of the word, an overall top rating.


A.T
(-)

Well, the people who would say that are not very aware of the history of the field they are in then. The most popular text MUDs have been commercial since MUD I went commercial in 1984, as Kavir mentioned.

MUDs accessible via telnet were an invention part-way through the history of MUDs. Many text MUDs were available only via services like CompuServe or the pre-internet AOL. No telnetting there. Heck, I was the first internet customer of a commercial text MUD called Avalon (started in 1989) in 1994, as they had been dial-up only (in England) up until that point.

You're right about Everquest, WoW, etc just being a graphical MUD though. No real fundamental difference.

--matt

There are always some people who consider their game to be its own category - look back over the years and you'll see people claiming that their mud is no longer a mud, that it's now a 'MURPE' or a 'MRPG' or an 'MMO' or a 'MOO' or a 'MUSH'...

However I think most reasonably informed people recognise that MMORPGs are in fact graphical muds - indeed, even many of the MMORPG developers refer to their games as such.

I'm not aware of any muds which are fully graphical though - even the larger commercial ones such as EQ use text for communication. Equally, many of the muds which are typically considered 'text-based' also include ASCII graphics (sometimes more, if they have custom clients).

Generally I find that to be true of every field of human activity. Strange that it does not stop them from having opinions anyway.

But today the tide certainly has shifted quite a bit. I guess we have just all gotten used to paying for what we get, even when it is on the wild Internet.


True enough, although voice communication is becomming more and more popular and will eventually pretty much replace text.



A.T
(-)

Personally I think that a lot of the reason muds appear to be declining is because muds as a whole don't advertise themselves very well at all.

I spend a lot of time promoting my mud, and what I notice is that there seems to be a lot of mud marketing that's directed at taking players from other muds rather than the big pool of potential players who don't even know what muds are. For example, I've seen a mud use a google adwords campaign directly against our url (wotmud), ie if people searched on that in google their ad would come up.

Even disregarding the ethics of doing this (it's illegal I think in Google, I could bust them for this) I think this approach doesn't help muds as a whole, it's an inward-looking approach which doesn't grow the totals.

There are millions of kids looking for online games to play, but most just don't know about us. All they know is that when they type in . at for example msn they get poker site spam.

Here's an offer, I'll help out on some sort of gaming portal that would actually target the players of those commercial games and turn them onto games like ours if someone wants to fund it. Fwiw, I do all the web development and promotion for my mud so I have an idea or two I can contribute

I do not think there is any real doubt that the heyday of Muds was quite a while ago, but that does not mean that new technologies or radical approaches cannot bring new life to the genre.

You are certainly correct Nass that most games do not make full use of the advertising possibilities as they should. But there is a small stumbling block or two that tend to get in people's way. First, if you are trying to advertise something that people know little in the way of basic facts about you have to supply a lot of information for the ads to work. It is not possible in a simple Banner to explain what a Mud is, how you connect to one, and what playing on one is like.

So most people find it easier to just stick to Mud-related Sites when they are attempting to get the word out.

Second I think the need for a telnet connection has really become a significant problem to Muds everywhere. So many things have found a home on the Web that the need for some sort of terminal program or other special app gets in the way for people who are on the bottom half of the technological skill ladder. This is of course the vast majority of the people.

I think that my use of a Web interface instead of telnet terminals as the main way to play my game will really make it a lot easier to build a playerbase. Half the time I will not be advertising it as a 'Mud' though but will instead use the more generic 'Online RolePlaying Game' label.


A.T
(-)

Yes, browser-based games have typically larger audiences than muds. However, this is not only caused by the interface. Other factors that contribute to the popularity of browser-based games:

-- You can play them at work, and keep the appearance of being occupied (same goes for MUDs, at more lenient offices).
-- You can play them from behind a firewall (at the less lenient offices).
-- They don't require large chunks of time - you can spread your time into smaller sessions and still be efficient.
-- They don't require as much involvement - this is a result of less direct contact with other players.

It is a design issue as much as an interface issue. You sacrifice a lot of direct involvement and real-time interaction, also due to the limitations of your interface. It's a personal choice. To me the sacrifice would seem too huge, so I'd be leaning towards a hybrid approach, such as letting players access one or more of the mud's subgames through web interface.

Example: Player-run shops

You could manage the stock from a web browser, buy goods from other shops or from trading posts (where players who do play the game but are not interested in running their own shop could place them for sale). What you couldn't do, however, would be acquire special items (since you are not logged into the game and cannot fight for them) and perhaps deliver items from other areas (you could only buy from shops in the same area as you are). For these tasks, however, you would be able to hire players who are logged on, by posting an ad through the web interface, thus giving the players additional content. The web players form ties with in-game players, although at a slower rate than if they were logged on, and who knows, might be tempted to log into the game when they come back from work - to spend their riches, to chat, or even to play. You have a fetch-and-deliver system similar to what many MUDs call quests. In-game players have more activities to choose from. Both sides win.

When you say Browser-based you mean without normal command line input and a big text window I assume?

I personally am thinking more about a mix of text box and screen gadgets. I agree that without the normal sorts of displays and inputs you use on a Mud it would not have the same sense of 'Place' to it.

Just begun to look at the current crop of Clients for Mudding, I expect there are a few Java and other types of interfaces of that sort. Those would be an intermediate step.


A.T
(-)

Yes, I had the feeling from your posts that you wanted to do away with the telnet interface completely. If you just want a custom client integrated into a web browser, there's some muds around that already took that route (as an optional choice for the largest part, you can still play them using your favourite client).

Voice and Sound will eventually mostly replace the text displays, but even then we will want them for those who cannot hear the sounds. Not only do we need voice communications, but voice to text translations as well.

But I think the sense of 'Place' and of being somewhere with other people has got to be a central part of anything that calls itself Mud.

I find myself looking at doing something that will not perhaps have to be played on the Web, but will be something much, much less if you do not. I own and love my Zmud, but I still think I will end up using it only for Immortal work.



A.T
(-)

It's not illegal. You're thinking of a lawsuit brought by Geico against Google, which they settled. Geico was upset that Google was selling adwords that was Geico's trademark. It wouldn't apply to you because you can't trademark WoT stuff, and because you're not suffering any loss to sue for.

Yes, there are millions of people looking for online games to play, but very few of them will play text games. I know: I've spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising to non-text-MUDers. It's very expensive to acquire a new non-text-MUDer customer when compared to acquiring a new customer who already likes text MUDs. It's about 10x as expensive, in fact, and that's with our pretty Nexus client giving a good first impression to people used to graphical games. Most text MUDs require that people play either with a horridly ugly java client, download a piece of third party software (like Zmud) or use Windows telnet (*shudder*). That creates an even bigger barrier to entry for these potential customers.

In summary, depending on your situation, it may be worth advertising outside the text MUD market, but expect it to be -very- expensive in terms of customer acquisition as compared to acquiring existing text MUD players as customers.

--matt

Yeah, apparently Google will allow anyone to have someone else's trademark in their keyword phrase in AdWords so long as the trademark does not show up in the ad copy.

Yes and no. Yes, it's certainly hard convincing people with graphical MMORPG expectations to stick with a text game with a geeky client/telnet interface. In terms of expense though, since I have no marketing budget anyway, any players we get through the non-mud routes have to be 'free' anyway, ie game banner exchanges etc. Not that the click-through ratio is high at all, but 200,000 impressions does get you a few people in the door, espcially if you can target them at sectors with low technology & high fantasy expectations.

It's interesting though that the successful guys like Med etc tend to throw a lot of their ad spend at game magazines (I forgot the name of the one that they take DPSs in). But, I note they're here agin too, and several other lists I know of, maybe they've drawn the same conclusion as you.

Your time is an expense and there's always opportunity cost too. If you have X banner impressions, for instance, you could either use them on a very text MUD-oriented banner exchange or a very general games exchange, for instance. It's a finite resource that you have to choose how to allocate, and the cost for doing it inefficiently is whatever the value of your best other opportunity was.

We've never advertised in print magazines so I can't really comment on the efficacy of doing that. My reasoning for not doing so is that I feel like with a web/internet-only game, your best bet is to reach people via the net so that they can go straight into playing your game. Having to get them to walk to the computer and log in or remember your web address for next time they're online seems like it'd be less efficient to me, though again, that's purely an educated guess on my part.

We definitely don't intend to stop advertising to non-text MUDers, mainly because we're already promoted pretty well to text players, and there aren't that many text players in the world. It's expensive to reach out, but it sort of has to be done.

Incidentally, despite spending a fair amount each month on advertising, word of mouth is still BY FAR our biggest player attractor. It's bigger than Mudconnector, TMS, Zmud, and all our other ads combined in terms of results. One lesson to be drawn from that, I suppose, is that the best way to get get players is to ensure you have a decent proportion of very happy players who will act as evangelists for your game when talking to their friends. It's ok to have very unhappy players (though I'm sure everyone would prefer not to), but you really need those super happy players who will preach the virtues of your game.

--matt

To me, what is interesting is the idea of where text based MUDs will go.

I've always thought that by having an engine where the world was defined in a processable way, would enable a deeper more interesting world.  What I mean is a 3D world, room-less, where the description for the current position is generated automatically based on a generated world.  Then procedurally generated life, cities, towns, villages and entities that populate these going through an abstract simulation of life.

Doing a 3D world is doable, even for a text based world.  Procedurally generating content in that world is doable.  To me, the hardest bit is defining the materials, resources, processes of manufacturing, what an entity of a given profession does for a living.  But once you have, you have a flow of resources.  A simulated economy.  A base world where the entities are the normal people and the players can be the heroes.  Players could organise businesses and employ entities or other players interchangeably.

There is one company making a graphical game where the world is defined in such a way that players can take any part in the world, bringing in the harvest, etc..  I believe it is called .  Personally it sounds like drudgery, but to me when I read about it I just see the potential for middleware where you can buy the logic to define the contents of a medieval world and the processes which involve these materials.

Because the world is defined in a way that is abstract and code can reason over it, the builders place would be to take the generated base and to tweak it and paint over it.  Giving it colour, perhaps even editing the generation parameters to build in that colour at an ever lower level.  In a way, it reminds me of the way Star Wars Galaxies did their terrain generation, they generated the planet randomly, then had artists tweak it and colour it building on top of the base.

Anyway, thats the vision I have had for a long time, and not all of it (if any of it) is unique, I have seen similar things in some of the aspects out there.  But not a text based MUD based on a generated 3D world, maybe PhysMUD by Nathan Yospe qualified as an implementation (but has anyone ever seen PhysMUD and does it really exist seems to be a common thought).  There are things out there which implement parts of this, more likely in the graphical approach, but I see no reason that it could not be done by someone with the motivation and the skill.  And while I may not have explained what I see the potential to be well enough here, I think it would be a next level in text mudding.

(snip)

Such an approach is much more difficult and time consuming to implement than a room-based model, and there is very little in the way of precedent - so we're effectively talking about a subset of the developers who are capable of writing a mud from scratch. Such a mud is also going to be sufficiently different at a fundamental level that it'll alienate the majority of potential players - so the mud developer would need to be someone who didn't place too much value on having a popular mud. In my experience, most mud developers who fulfill those requirements tend to quickly tire of their projects, abandoning them so that they can move on to something even more interesting and cutting-edge...

Why are players alienated by different approaches to MUDs? Your MUD is somewhat unique, are you basing this on your experiences, or something else?

Because, while many players may ask for something new and original, the fact is that most of them can't really be bothered to learn a new system. They want something familiar - something very similar to what they're used to, but with a few extra bells and whistles. Show them something completely different, and they're not interested (this is why you'll rarely see people who play both LPmuds and Dikus, for example, or Dikus and MUSHes - most players tend to stick with what they find familiar).

It's based on my own experiences, yes - but not just from my own mud (although there are certain a lot of players who quit when they realise that there are no rooms).

Kavir is definitely correct, and it applies to games generally, not just MUDs. In MUDs generally (text and graphical both), the overwhelming success of WoW is attributable largely to giving people a very familiar and relatively simple experience, just with more polish.

Look at the best-seller lists for games sometime. The top 10 is usually 70-80% sequels and licensed games with completely generic gameplay. It's just what people want.

However, the exceptions can be HUGE. When a game does break out of the standard molds, it breaks out in a very big way. Doom and the Sims are good examples of games that at least seemed new at the time and managed to be phenomenally successful.

The first instinct of many people is to bemoan this and to wish that people would play "innovative" games. I'm part of a little indie game developer mailing list/community, and Marc LeBlanc (worked on System Shock and Thief at Looking Glass Studios back in the day), whose indie game won the 2004 Independent Games Festival's top prize, posted something during a discussion we were having over the state of the games industry and innovation. I think he's spot on.

-------------
Marc wrote:

This whole innovation argument seems like it's all a matter of semantics. It seems like people use the term "innovation" to imply some sort of vast quantum leap from games that are "merely evolutionary" to games that are "truly evolutionary." In my opinion, *innovation* is a red herring; that kind of distinction doesn't really exist in practice.

I heard a story about how Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday." He told his friends that he had a tune stuck in his head, and he couldn't identify what song it was or where he had heard it. When he played it for his friends, they told him that he must have made this tune up, it wasn't any tune they had heard. He added lyrics and it became "Yesterday."

So was "Yesterday" a new song, or an old one? Did McCartney make it up, or did he regurgitate some long lost cousin of "greensleeves" that most people had forgotten? More importantly, does it matter? Would it make a difference as to whether "Yesterday" was "innovative" or not?

Was Tetris innovative? It started a whole genre of "action puzzle" games. But really, there were games before it where you caught falling objects, and other games where you had to pack polyominos tightly in a space. Couldn't Tetris be fairly described as a hybrid of those games? Isn't hybridization the opposite of innovation?

Look at board games. Surely, the input devices haven't changed since the industrial revolution. Yet, somehow new games keep coming out. But aren't they just syntheses of old mechanics? By and large, yes. But that doesn't stop them from contributing something new and unique to the genre. One of my current favorite board games, LotR: The Confrontation, contains no mechanics that can't be found in Stratego or Magic or Poker, but the resulting mix is something unique, something worthy of study, something that can entertain for hours. But is it Innovative? Who the hell cares?

If there is a sickness in the game industry, it's not the lack of innovation, it's the obsession *with* innovation, the notion that there's this vast chasm between "trite" and "fresh," between "old" and "new." It's a lie. Get over it. All games are syntheses. All games are old. All games are new. Sim City is just Hammurabi, and yet not. Katamari Damacy is just Pac-Man, and yet not. There are no great innovators in our industry, only great synthesists.
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--matt

There is one important difference though; (most) muds evolve, while 'normal' computer games do not (other than patches, bugfixes, and the rare expansion pack). The major exception to this is mods, but you don't see those on the best-seller lists anyway (because you don't usually need to buy them).

If you played and enjoyed Diablo, you'll probably also have bought Diablo II - because it's a 'better' version of a game you already enjoyed. Equally, if you enjoyed Diablo II you'll probably also have bought the expansion pack for the same reason. You'll also see people who enjoyed Diablo II moving on to other games which are similar, but with some feature or other they consider 'better'. The same logic applies to other computer games - people like the game, but they want some new toys to play with as well, because the existing gameplay is starting to feel a bit stale.

A well-run mud has no need for sequals or expansion packs, though, because it is being constantly updated anyway. A player may look somewhere else if they don't like the direction their favourite mud is taking (and some players may even start their own spinoffs), but there's no need to move elsewhere just to find some new toys for your favourite gaming environment.

A regular computer game can make its own niche just by adding a handful of 'cool' features that will appeal to players from similar games that lack those features. A mud cannot do this anywhere near as effectively, because if those features are really worth having the older muds can simply replicate them themselves. I remember the days when things like "ANSI colour" and "OLC" were selling points - these days they're so common that they're not even worth mentioning as features. For normal computer games, each such feature has to wait until the next generation before it appears, so that the newer the game the more advanced it tends to be - but for muds, the reverse is true, with such features being applied retroactively so that the older a mud is the more advanced it tends to be (unless it stagnates).





Marc LeBlanc seems to have fallen into the same semantics trap he's arguing against (indeed he almost seems to be making a straw man argument). Innovation and originality doesn't have to mean something utterly different - indeed, as he points out, that's not even possible. You cannot develop in a vacuum - everything draws ideas and inspiration from elsewhere. However you can certainly innovate in terms of evolving and combining old ideas into new concepts, and I think that's what most people mean when they speak of innovation. There's a big difference between taking existing game features to the 'next level', and copying the gameplay entirely and just relying on eye candy to sell the product.

In mud terms, 'originality' tends to have three different meanings. The first is similar to that used in copyright law - an original world or codebase being one that you created yourself, rather than downloading from an ftp server. The second meaning refers to ideas and concepts drawn from outside the mudding community - for example there's a mud which is heavily based on RTS games such as C&C and Warcraft, yet the concept is fairly original when applied to a mud environment. The third meaning is similar to the innovation argument detailed previously, with 'originality' meaning something that significantly expands on an existing idea or set of ideas - a "combat system" may be an old idea, but with sufficient effort you can certainly create a very original spin on it.

A natural aspect of providing a service rather than releasing a standalone product.

In any case, I think what I take from this discussion with regard to what I put out there as a possible 'next level' for MUDs, is what I have taken from all MUD discussions on new ideas or directions I have been involved in.  To do anything requires an amount of work, and until you have done it and shown that it can be done, all you are going to get is speculation about how it can be done badly or why it might not work.  Which is perfectly justified, given that there is nothing of substance to show otherwise.

But I was more interested in any other parties who might have gone someways similar, or be heading there, than doing it myself.  Like Medieval Kingdoms; it is a pity they are not more open about their efforts.  I agree 100% with the comments about the only people likely to do it being people who have fleeting interest and the only way I could see myself working on something like it, is if I were employed to do so.

Well I'm certainly doing some of the things you describe - a room-less world with automatically generated descriptions (much inspired by Nathan Yospe's PhysMUD, which you also mentioned in your post). I'll probably add generated settlements in the future as well, but I'm not interested in taking the "simulation of life" approach, or adding an economy or such.

My comments were really in response to your statement "...but I see no reason that it could not be done by someone with the motivation and the skill", as I can see a number of reasons why people would choose not to go that route, even if they had the motivation and skill to do so. I'm not saying it can't be done (because obviously it can - I've done part of it myself), only that many people wouldn't consider it worth doing.

I have to say Noodles that some of the things you would like to see have always been passions of mine as well. I like games where there are interlocking layers of simulation for the players to push and pull against.

But I also agree with KaVir that many times people who try to really take new ideas to the extremes quite often never finish what they start. My approach to this problem is to work with existing code to a degree, but then extend it as far as I reasonably can.

So in my new game it is quite likely there will be 'Rooms' but since they will also have coordinates. So instead of just typeing the exit name and leaving the room, it will start you walking. When you reach the exit it will preform it's normal function and move you to the next location.

For outside areas however I plan to bypass the exit system completely and do exit transitions on the fly based on coordinates.

I like the overall simulations model because it naturally creates systems that react to player actions without the need for a lot of specific code. If supply and demand controls the prices of resources then when someone starts to buy a lot of something the price will go up. I see it as providing the tools of the real world so that players, and GameMasters, can spin stories that have a real impact on the Universe.

If a Colony, or Village, makes money on a daily basis because of specific actions of the NPCs that live there you create such a system. If someone can kill, or just get in the way of whatever the Villagers have to do, they have a way to put pressure on the Colony/Village/City/Castle. The Village in turn must try to protect it's citizens. If a single NPC can become really important, say the one person who really keeps something vital going, then all sorts of things can just naturally happen.

It does not require the help of a GameMaster for someone to consider, and attempt, a kidnapping of this important NPC. The players of a Colony will have to attempt to get this NPC back. Not a Gamemaster set-up, a natural part of the environment.



A.T
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