Kooneiform

is an oxymoron, right? Maybe I should call this the social space of text games, but…I don’t know.

I’m bringing this up after reading a Matthew Stadler essay at the new Rosa B. (thanks to if:book for the link), a French/English magazine whose layout seems at first quite psychotic — no, perhaps psychedelic, but I grew to like it.

Later in the night after reading the Stadler I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s recent piece in Harper’s. Both this interview of Stadler and LeGuin’s essay rest in part on the social space of art — reading, and discussion.

Looking at muds, here you have a somewhat unique phenomena — people reading collectively, synchronously. And talking about it, maybe not directly, but around it, through it. The pre-existing text is not a novel or a single story, it is a series of points on this graph of experience. Why call it a narrative? For that matter why call it an experience? Is this a fundamental difference between text muds and graphical muds — the social space of reading occurs simultaneously with the text itself. How is this different from the social space of play occurring simultaneously with play in WoW? Is someone who plays WoW out there?

Digressing a bit, I am constantly amazed to discover these new continents of text gaming — does Jove, Digichat, or SEAchat ring a bell for anyone? They didn’t for me until a day ago. And the constant refrain in the mudding community — are text games dead? How can you tell if you never knew who were the living?.

I’ve been re-reading Spirit of the Century, thinking about Road to Amber, and looking at the sketch for Silver Sky I have here.

I’m sure at this point that I want to ditch the homebrew rules for SS and replace them with SotC.

SotC is not a rules-light system but what would be seriously cool would be to code a SotC engine for MUX and just let the players go at it. Every player is a potential GM. Minimum of staff judges. The world grid is not one city, but in true pulp spirit players can globe trot from crazy location to location. If Dirk Danger is in Istanbul but his friends are in the Congo, he just grabs a plane and he’s there. It’s all for color. Players can either fully customize their character at startup or go with the quick start and stat them as they play. Throw in some Thrilling Tales of Adventure-esque plot hook chain building for players to grab onto and discover, but all character sheets are public. All help files are in Mediawiki and all BB stuff is on a SMF forum linked to the wiki. Just forget about how things have been done.

Last year Richard Van Meurs conducted a mud player types survey, as part of his Masters at Tilburg University. The results are in — he’s made an interesting revision of Bartle’s old model of player types. Read them as PDFs:

The summary.

The full thesis.

I haven’t had time to compare this with a study done by Nick Yee of MMORPG players but the two studies seem to share some conclusions.

I know I tend to go on and on about how great God Wars II is. Well, if you needed another example:

The developer of GW2, Richard Woolcock (aka KaVir), has been posting weekly updates of progress on the game in this thread at the GW2 forums.

Weekly updates.

For five years.

Not only is it pretty inspiring, it’s a kind of fascinating look at how a game is developed.

It does seem like it’s getting harder to find muds that instantly impress me these days. It’s just a theory but I think most muds develop by accreting features onto the ‘outside’ of the mud, the edge that long-time players inhabit as they’ve exhausted the content on the ‘inside’. The content immediately apparent to the new player, like the look and feel of the mud, and major systems that new players interact with from the get go, don’t change that much. If no one is improving them, and they weren’t good to begin with, there’s a problem — without something or someone telling me to stick around, I’m just not likely to put time into a mud to see cool systems when most of the time the look, feel, and content is stale, not interesting, confusing, or plain ugly.

Many new muds don’t seem to offer anything new or exciting either, just retreading old ideas and not making it look very nice either.

A few muds buck the trend. In no particular order they are:

God Wars II: if I was a hardcore PvPer or achiever I would play this mud to death. It’s without question one of the most interesting and nice looking muds out there.

Legends of Karinth: lots of cool features, big world. The best ROMy ROM I’ve seen.

Aeonian Dreams: many interesting features to recommend this mud. Unfortunately the UI isn’t that great and that makes it hard to get into.

Blood Dusk: just found this mud. Highly recommend this for something different.

I’m getting more into the idea of some Noah’s Ark of text gaming. It would work something like this.

You run a mush server as a back-end for the persistent world. Players connect with a Flash or equivalent client on the web site, where you have forums, help files, player wiki and player character pages. So people are playing on the web site in something that looks like a mush — room descriptions, poses, and so on. If the player wants to they can connect to the game with their normal client. I guess it would be somewhat trivial to mirror help files and bboard between the web and the mush server — but this would be for advanced players who are coming in with their own clients and some mushing history. The Flash client lets you log, quote in, and configure the display.

In the forums you have PbP games running — it would be possible for these games to affect the mush world, but a little more difficult I think. On the site you have a library of IF the player can play solo with a Flash client as well — these could affect the mush game. Meanwhile there’s some strategy-based persistent browser-based game also running. This affects properties in the mush game in which people are RPing.

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Anyway, I’d like to see a site that covers all the playable text and text-based games — IF, muds, browser-based games, playable text, text-art, something that has commercial advertising and forums. Like GTxA on a 48 hour coke-fueled rampage through the streets of some anonymous city.

There are always new games, right? Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t something of a problem. I’m always getting sucked into playing new games, leaving less and less time for the games that I left in my wake. Nevertheless I find it difficult to focus on just one game to the exclusion of others. Like a friend said in a conversation the other day, I’m something of a generalist.

There are a couple of new mush games that look interesting;

Road to Amber

An Amber themed game, with lots of story gamish mechanics. This looks cool enough that I’m reading the first two Amber novels for the first time.

Outremer (outremermux.org port 4321)

Using the FATE system for mechanics.

Here’s the latest tinytalk episode, with two of the big names in MUSH history talking about how Amberyl got started, her new game, indie RPGs, Ayn Rand, and the future of MUSH. Worth checking out.

Another good episode and a link to a log from 1999 on Organizational Analysis in MUSH, including folks like Javelin, Amberyl and Trispis:

http://community.pennmush.org/node/409