More than MUDs
Jan 30, 10:08 PM by Raesanos regarding Community
I ended up reading this fine blog due to a link from a commenter on this site, and from there started exploring various other types of “Interactive Fiction” (IF), that being a general term for the type of games that includes MUDs.
Its interesting just how isolated the MUD community is. Really, I have had almost no experience with the other types of IF.
For example, I didn’t even know what a roguelike is until I started playing Legerdemain, which was a fantasticly novel experience for me. To a MUDder, this is a graphical, single-player MUD. Graphical only in that there is a colorful ascii representation of your world, and MUD-like only in the similiar set of text-based commands. The biggest draw was the way exploration works, and I only stopped playing when the difficulty started wearing me down. I doubt this will be my last run-in with roguelikes.
Of course, the type of IF that everyone is familiar with is games like Zork (basically a single-player, turn-based MUD), which I did enjoy greatly at some time long past. What’s interesting is that there is still a community for this and new games that are released. And I, someone who has dedicated years of my free time to games that are effectively the same thing, have played none of them.
Assuming I’m not simply daft and that the separation of these communities extends beyond my own personal ignorance, my first response to it is that this is a problem. I want to see communities for lovers of all forms of interactive fiction. If there are any, I want to see what they’re like and why I haven’t heard of them. If there are not, I want to take a shot at creating one.
Getting my feet wet in the roguelike world seems like a good start. I’m thinking about writing my experience on this site, but I don’t have a good feel for if my readers would be interested in hearing about it, since its not MUD-related. But I do think you should be interested! Are you?
|
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
Categories
Administration (2)Community (3)
Game Design (7)
General Topics (3)
News (1)
Past Experiences (4)
Resources (1)
Roleplaying (3)
I’d say yes, but I’m biased, as you might imagine. A cross-over article every so often would be pretty cool though.
As far as I can tell there isn’t a community site for just ‘interactive fiction’. It’s also hard to say what such a site would encompass in the first place. A good focus might be to keep it to hobby, indie, and small studio games (all sort of problematic as terms, but oh well), and my first pass at what you would include would be muds, IF, roguelikes, graphical adventure games, hypertext fiction, other things like visual novels, choose-your-own adventure…the list gets big!
To be honest I’m not sure what value there would be to add to such a site that isn’t out there already (just more distributed). Distributed isn’t really a bad thing, right? The key is cross-over and public awareness, like you’re saying.
I do admit that in my dream world I’ve already started an all-inclusive IF magazine ;).
The PlayThisThing.com site has a good thing going with regular reviews of all type of lesser-known games. A similar site for all kinds of interactive fiction could be cool.
— george · Jan 31, 11:06 PM · #
Multi-player roleplaying games fall within the same genere as MUDs. Single-player games styled after roleplaying games do not. They’re missing the MU part of MUDs.
MUD players are kind of isoalted and exclusive because we’re not just into computer games in general, but into the roleplaying community aspect that inherently follows with any MUD.
I suppose there’s something of a spectrum. On one end, we have single-player computer games, where we take on the role of a character in a world (which could describe nearly any computer game out there without too much of a stretch). Put the single-player game on the internet and include a forum for discussing the game, and you can build something of a community.
Then you have MUDs.
Then you have more freeform MUSHes, or even forum-based or chat-room based storytelling/roleplaying locales, that rely almost entirely on the community aspect to function, with few if any game elements.
Any game that provides a player with some kind of interactive response is “interactive fiction.” I believe it’s the community—the MU part—that makes MUDs a little more than games.
— NW-PR · Feb 1, 01:25 PM · #
> Any game that provides a player with some kind of interactive response is “interactive fiction.”
> I believe it’s the community—the MU part—that makes MUDs a little more than games.
But as you said, a whole genre of games (forum fiction, using the term games loosely) relies on the community aspect just as muds do.
Then you have single-player games — but the content of a single-player game is in many ways similar to a mud.
What I’m getting at is I don’t think of it as a spectrum, but more of a circle, or something like a Venn diagram. In the center is the spot where you could bring all these games to the attention of people who normally wouldn’t see them. I know that if I didn’t follow a lot of the various community sites, I would miss out on a lot of great games. Not everyone is interested in playing something different, but NW, do you think there is a ‘cross-over gap’ that could be filled?
— george · Feb 1, 09:24 PM · #