Subject: A Dino Speaks out

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1993 16:23:50 -0700

First off, lemme get out my cane and bifocals (and a couple of
asbestos suits).

I've mudded for a long long time.  TinyMUD, actually.  Back in those days
a MUD was a wonderful game you played.  You had to do it in secret, or
else the network people would turn off routing to your site.  It wasn't
quite arpanet I don't think.  I was naive in those days, so I don't
rememeber.

There was only one mud in those days, and telnet.  I used emacs myself
(M-x shell and a telnet command) just so I could use real editing
commands.  You couldn't page people.  If you wanted to see someone you
had to sit in a popular room with a 'say' typed and wait for them to
walk through.  There was no posing either (I came right after thepose
command was added).  You had to lock yourself against yourself, and
put your pose into the fail message then rob yourself.

On muds you strove for creativity.  Muds had a very limited command
scope.  People learned to do great things in mud.  Exits that went
nowhere, but were described so that you could look at things in a
room.  Exits named 'look flowers' that were locked, and showed you and
the rest of the room a cute message.  Lots of beautiful building.
Wonderful, fantastic creations spread across a torrent of telnet
connections.

It was like a competition.  You had to build the most wonderfully
described and 'exit'ed area's to attract people.  The more people who
saw (and liked) what you built the better you felt.  Several names
stand out in history, TinyMUD, Islandia, TinyWORLD, MbongoMUD, PoohMUD
(the greatest of them all), and others.

Soon, Lachesis added programming to mud.  Forth was hacked in.  There
was a flurry of activity as people sought to make the most wonderful
programs.  TinySex had also been disocvered, and people realized they
could use those program to view those escapades.  Spying came in, and
MUF traps to imprison people.  Brigadoon mud came, and there was a
place just for cool programming.  People went there for techinical
reasons, and to make the best program that everyone else would want (a
CUSP?  AYEWBF?).

There had been other varients, combat muds, and I don't know their
history, but I think they are as old, or older than TinyMUDs.

When I first went to a MOO it was a long time ago.  I distinctly
remember two moos.  One was a true ghondmoo, and the other was
LambdaMOO.  My character from Lambda is gone (I have a new one).  I
don't know what happened to it.  I can date the time I came to Lambda
by a post from Haakon about a conversation he logged in a room (The
hot tub?) about how the 'ps' listing looked malformed right before a
server crash.  Perhaps Haakon can remember when this was.

LambdaMOO was a lot of fun then.  People were all still wide eyed at
the wonder of it all.  There was a lot of beautiful building, and some
fantastic coding.  IT was fast then, too.  No lag.  I don't go there
much anymore because of the lag.  I digress.  I went to LambdaMOO and
explored.  I looked at all the wonderful things, and every so often I
saw another mudder, wandering through the house exploring the same
things I had explored (or would soon explore).

I was away from the house for a while.  On a trip, I suppose you could
say.  I spent time at other muds, some of which still had the innocent
wonder of mudding (like OpusMUD, Pegasus, TinyWORLD), and others were
cesspools of spying, hate, tinysex, and power struggles.

When I came back to the house, I found a lot of new people there.  I
found a lot of sex, and spying, and hate.  I don't know about the
power struggles.  Haakon seems to have choosen well, and I don't think
there have ever been any.  The people who visited the house were
different than the people I used to know.

The most noticable thing was that the people I used to know were
intelligent.  I had seen this on a lot of other muds in my trip.  I
had seen many muds that were successful, with a small, close group of
players suddenly be overrun by new people.  People who knew nothing
about what the mud was, or how it worked, or even how they had gotten
there.  People who thought it was just a cool place to talk to other
poeple.  People who didn't care for the other people whose home they
were invading , people there because they had heard that you could
have sex on a mud, people who just liked to ruin the fun for other
people.  It's a self-perpetuating process, unfortunately.  Once a mud
has fallen, the climb back to greatness is near impossible.

When I came back to LambdaMOO I found that everywhere I went were
people engaged in 'small talk'.  There isn't a lot of sex visible on
LambdaMOO, but that could only be because the lag is prohibitive.
There are a lot of clueless people there, who don't really understand
what is going on, and just want to talk to someone on the giant chat
line they think the internet is.

I don't see any more building there that even holds a light to what
had come before.  On muds, when programming came out people learned to
program before they learned to build.  The result was a poorly built
area with some snazzy program in it.  The program might have been
useful, or interesting, but the location was bad.  A well written love
note delivered on paper that your cat puked on just invoke the right
feelings.

Lately people here have been discussing if a MOO is a MUD or vice
versa.  A MOO is a mud.  In these modern days, most muds are nothing
more than a glorified talk link with a little atmosphere.

That was my point.  If you don't understand it, then you probably have
never been on a good MUD before.

I have 56 meg free in /usr/spool/mail, and my internet-standard
asbestos suit is ready.

-- void *(*(*schlake())[])(void *);

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 14:30:58 -0700

I'm another TinyMUD relic.  Last did anything serious on Lambda in
summer of 1991.  The dog ate my avatar not long ago.  I, too, haven't
found much joy in MUDville lately, for many of the reasons schlake
describes so eloquently.  Thanks for that post and for bringing back
memories.  I still remember the two lessons I learned from TinyMUD:
  ``it's amazing how much can be done with four strings''
and
  ``we all get the game we deserve''
Both are still true today (even though my hat is off to Frand and a few
others who went well beyond four strings).

Norman