“You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?” said he.

“You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?” said he.

“Never.”

“Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” he cried. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime.”

Of course, it’s not true that no one has heard of Brian Moriarty — this sort of slipped under the radar as far as I can tell, but Moriarty recently appeared at a M*U*S*H event and gave a little /rant on the state of text games.

Andrew Plotkin, Jota (I’m assuming Admiral Jota of Lost Pig), and Emily Short (again an assumption but I think the Emily in the transcript is the same) were there too — it’s an interesting read all around.

The log is typical of mush transcripts so I’ve liberally edited the thing into a more readable presentation — however keep in mind you lose out by not taking in the transcript in its unadulterated form.

Also note that this is an IF-heavy conversation taking place on a mush, with about equal representation from the IF and mush sides — so sometimes people are talking past each other with respect to what text games mean to them.

By the way, there’s a surprise appearance halfway through the log that I’m not including in my transcript — so check out the link above.

My edited transcript after the cut:

off the mud wire: MiniBoa and playing Maiden Desmodus

MiniBoa, a minimal Python socket and telnet package

Jim Storch, author of the in development BogBoa, has kindly packaged his socket and telnet modules into a minimal, Python, single-threaded asynchronous telnet server called MiniBoa (think SocketMUD), much to my own delight! The cool thing is, as far as I’ve found, MiniBoa is the first such package to be made available in Python. Up to now your choices were to strip out something from an existing codebase, or use something like Twisted — which is great, but for learning purposes not the best for people like me. Not only is this a good learning tool but if you want to start writing a mud in Python for fun this is a great solution for the networking side.

Maiden Desmodus

For the last few weeks I’ve been playing Maiden Desmodus with my first character — the first time in a couple years probably that I’ve done more than just login to a mud to chat or check a place out. As I’ve found MD suits my casual drop-in play very well, aided in no small part by its Flash client, but also by the somewhat episodic nature of the gameplay. Every other day or so I can drop in and complete a task (a quest in other words, usually a fetch or kill task but sometimes something more involved). Skill progression is time-based on a decreasing power curve so this also encourages playing at the front of the curve if you don’t have a lot of time (or money, as MD allows you to buy skill progression blessings). Anyway, my physician is level 5!

The game itself is quite fun, and as a pleasant surprise does most of the things that I personally like in a mud. The world is well done and not filled with generic races or silly fantasy names. Its setting is a refreshing mix of dark medievalish fantasy and more Elizabethan to Victorian era stuff (quite a broad cut I know but I like that sort of thing). The skill and guild system is interesting, and the combat is on the shorter and less spammy side thank God. The players also seem to be a good group on the whole. So while I don’t see myself putting a whole lot of time or money into the game right now (maybe if I had started playing ten years ago), it’s definitely worth it to keep playing my character (give Caturige a shout if you see him!).

the social space of mudders

I don’t write much about muds anymore as I haven’t been playing muds. Nearly all of them are far less suited to casual play that I would like. Nevertheless I still read the various forums, and right now there’s a long thread over at Mudbytes about a new moderation system the admins there are considering implementing. Read on if you’re curious, but fair warning that this may be interesting only to a very few people.

If you don’t follow muds, there are three main sites with forums: The Mud Connector, Top Mud Sites, and Mudbytes. Mudbytes is a relative newcomer, in some sense taking the role that MudMagic used to fill (a site which is now closed), indeed, as is often the case with community sites, it got its start partly due to people leaving MudMagic. All things considered I’d say that Mudbytes is the most vibrant discussion forum currently going. Particularly in the last few months it seems to have gained some new members, and while in my opinion it used to be focused on DIKU-derived codebases, lately it’s seen a more interesting range of discussion from programming to design.

All of this is a long preamble of context to frame why I’m posting this. I would have posted in the thread linked above but I felt it wouldn’t have served much purpose really, and what I’m trying to do here is get some thoughts out there to figure something out. For the record my nick on Mudbytes is Idealiad.

So what the Mudbytes admin are proposing is a system of moderation with a dedicated forum to contain ‘moderation threads’ — basically reference threads created when any disciplinary action takes place. The basic idea is to create a transparent system so that threads aren’t derailed with moderation disputes, and make it easier to reference moderation actions without digging up threads all over the forum. Also new moderators would be put in place to do the actual work of modding. The idea for this is derived from another forum with a similar system.

This is all in response to some recent issues with people getting suspensions and threads getting locked over some troll threads and responses that apparently are against various Mudbytes rules. People were crying foul over what they saw as heavy-handed moderation and wanted more transparency and accountability in how the modding went down.

So the proposal thread has developed in an interesting way. First of all my response was against the idea of a moderation sub-forum, but for the idea of new mods. My main beef with the separate sub-forum is that I think it creates an atmosphere of antagonism rather than cooperation. I’ll try to explain my reasons for thinking that.

I think the ‘community energy’ of a site is relatively fixed. How the community chooses to spend that energy influences the tone and direction of the site, how its members will treat each other and how new members will integrate into the established community. So when the community spends its energy in creating an infrastructure to deal with infractions, it is taking away energy from other things.

I have to admit my main influence on this thinking is the time I spend on TIGSource. TIGS is not without moderation of course. People there have been banned and threads locked. In general though, I get the sense that the atmosphere of TIGS is much, much different than that of Mudbytes (to be fair it’s also a much larger site, and so personal disputes don’t tend to involve the whole community like they do at Mudbytes, so their impact is somewhat diluted in the grand scheme of things). In essence TIGS spends its community energy on, for lack of a better word, ‘positive infrastructure’. An effort is made to keep things moving in a positive direction. When people trend the other way there is an effort by others to steer the ship to its original course.

As a result of this comparison, I got frustrated with Mudbytes. What I’d like to see is a similar focus on positive infrastructure, and less on what is in effect an infrastructure for litigation.

What could be the reasons for this difference? My first thought was that it has to do with the nature of mudding itself. Muds are games that primarily are social spaces. Unlike the majority of games on TIGS, a mud is in itself a social space. You certainly can have a community based around a game on TIGS, but this idea of a social space is quite different. There is a long tradition of large hierarchies running muds, with all the rules, sometimes formal and sometimes informal, you would expect in any community. By their nature then, mudders are used to all sorts of frameworks for maintaining this social space, and these frameworks are going to mirror what we see in society at large — judicial and political systems — and when the time comes to moderate another social space which they are a member of, like Mudbytes, they’re going to turn to these same rules and frameworks as the tools they’re comfortable with.

It’s not surprising then that in that Mudbytes thread people are not really arguing about the need for such a system of moderation (with one or two exceptions), but instead debating what seems to me more and more elaborate systems of moderation and their finer points of implementation. In essence the die already is cast.

The thing here though is that I think people like this. Whether there is a sub-forum for moderation or not it doesn’t really matter — the community at Mudbytes already is oriented toward this way of being. They like going back and forth over who’s trolling who, what should be modded or shouldn’t, and all the finer political points in between, and will continue to do so no matter what kind of system is set up. It’s kind of like people who go for student government or model UN. In that case a system with more transparency is probably better than a system with less, don’t you think?

So in the end I guess I have to accept this community for what it is if I want to participate in it. I don’t know if it’s possible for it to be different, more like TIGS or something like it. In effect its social space already is dictated by the social habits of the mudders themselves, and I don’t see in the near future those habits changing very much at all.

more MUDs

I admit I don’t play many muds anymore for lack of time, but there are a couple of new muds in development that I keep my eye on and play when I can. It’s rare to find well-made new muds these days, but here are two:

Archons of Avenshar

Avenshar is a solo effort by Sean Lucas’ RuneFire Studios. Rare for the mud genre it’s played solely in a Flash client, with accessible gameplay and a great UI in my opinion. Sean is doing some interesting things here and it’s well worth checking out.

Maiden Desmodus

Developed primarily by Wade Gustafson and Matt Adcock of The Binary Forge Ltd, Maiden is a very promising new mud. You can create a character currently and join the forums and so on, but it’s not yet open for regular play.

If I had to pick one mud to play that combines roleplay and goal-oriented play, it would be this one. A few months back I had a go at building for Wade and Matt but unfortunately I flaked out due to an overload of commitments. I’m hoping that once it opens though I’ll be able to drop in for some casual play and perhaps some building if it works out.

where are the mud developers?

While cleaning up the sidebar a little I kind of got down on the fact that there just isn’t a whole lot of mud design discussion happening in a public forum these days.

MudLab is quiet as can be, with it seems like one or two posts, maybe, a month. The Mud Connector and Top Mud Sites have the usual smattering of design discussion, but nothing really sustained or that diverse. Raesanos (or anyone else, really, you can’t put the weight on just one person’s shoulders) hasn’t posted to mudreading.com in six months, and so when I was trimming the sidebar I deleted the link.

So what you end up with are a few scattered posts among blogs and so on. Matt Adcock’s bc-dev.net has had some good stuff lately, but you can hardly expect a critical mass of people to migrate to one blog all of a sudden.

I know that the mud developers are out there; I’m consistently surprised to run across people developing muds from scratch. So I don’t think that there isn’t enough people to have a discussion. Writing a mud is still an attractive, challenging project for designers and programmers (and the iconic programmer-designer). I don’t know if it’s that the existing mud discussion forums simply are unattractive, or under-publicized, or too fragmented among different sites, or that people writing muds are more focused on the mud and just not interested in discussion (not an uncommon characteristic I’ve noted among programmers in general). I wonder if learning about mud design is now in its archaeological period, where its students are more akin to alchemists re-reading ancient texts in solitary towers than philosophers lounging around the forum debating contemporary, as well as ancient, theories. There’s no lack of discussion for games being made now with the technologies of the last five years. For muds, a 30 year old genre essentially unchanged in its basic characteristics, has the design discussion gone on so long that this lack of a prolific current discussion is the natural state of affairs?

I feel that the time is ripe for mud design to take advantage of synergies with new platforms and genres; the latest post at PlayThisThing on the game Elven Blood highlighted that feeling for me this morning. Here is a game whose features wouldn’t look that out of place in a mud. Indeed there has been talk at MudLab about this kind of design, and some brightness on the horizon for possible implementations are out there too with some new muds in development.

In my mind muds shouldn’t lose their essential nature of live writing and reading. But maybe there is a new design discussion poised to flower, based on the possibilities found between the pure text of muds and the quasi-text of browser-based games and mobile games. Not to say that browser-based games and mobile games can’t or won’t stand on their own two feet as genres of their own. But I’d be curious to find out what a new kind of mud would look like alongside its brothers of old.

the social space of muds

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?.

Silver Sky, second go

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.

mud player types survey

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.

progress

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.

hot muds

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.