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Comment by lokl | Hacker News Reader

I was an admin (wiz) on various MUDs and MUSHs many, many years ago, and of course an avid user. The mix of programming, creativity, and camaraderie was sometimes very special. Maybe my recollections are clouded by nostalgia, but it sometimes felt like a hacker fantasy, coding, role-playing, and working together for good (fun). I wish I could recapture that feeling, I wish there were time for it, and I wish there were some way it would do good in real life.

I can't contribute anything directly about this bot, but I'm glad to see MUDs are still being studied. I feel like I never saw the full potential of what they could do for society. Some of the social interactions were much more rewarding than anything I have experienced on so-called "social" media.

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Agreed! I am quite nostalgic about my time in MUDs and MUCKs. I recently came across a dot-matrix realtime-printout of some shenanigans (complete with type-over when I hit backspace). Brought a smile to my face.

The realtime, collaborative, communal, asynchronous improvisation that could occur was so, so satisfying.

> The mix of programming, creativity, and camaraderie was sometimes very special. Maybe my recollections are clouded by nostalgia, but it sometimes felt like a hacker fantasy, coding, role-playing, and working together for good (fun).

I agree! I got into MUDs when I was 13-14 and they introduced me to good programming practices early on with things like CVS, checking patches in a group, and running dev environments for testing with various playtest groups.

The dev cycle was great too, with to-do lists based on long-term goals and player input, with coders/admins breaking up tasks for planning to get things done.

It's really hard to overstate how important that was in instilling good practices and a feel of "this is how things should be" in me as a kid, and it's definitely carried over to my professional life now, some 20 years later. I even wrote about it in my college entrance essays (something my mother mocked me for), but it was such a good experience that I don't regret it at all.

I actually found a split-off branch of a MUD I used to frequent/code for and after logging in and asking about people I remembered for a while, someone started a global in-MUD game -- one that /I'D/ made over a decade ago. That was an incredibly gratifying experience, knowing that some of my oldest, most amateur code was still out there and people were still getting some fun out of it. :)

Edit: If anyone out there was on some Wheel of Time MUDs, I was on The Weave/The True Source and As The Wheel Weaves.

If it were marketed correctly ("literary gaming" or something), I could see a modern variation of a MUD gaining some traction if it were browser based and styled up in way that's a little more accessible, with some other modern conveniences.

Kind of like how Discord and Slack are just a coat of contemporary Web-isms on top of the same old idea as IRC.

This seems to be the end goal of https://writtenrealms.com/. A lot of time was spent making the UI responsive and work well on mobile resolutions!

It's been done: https://www.skotos.net/

hey John :)

I feel the same way - I have a lot of great memories associated with those times, and some fantastic life and development skills picked up because of it (I wrote my first virtual memory subsystem for a mud to work around me not having enough ram to load the world). I feel very nostalgic about text based adventures, and really feel like a lot of gameplay is really missing the imagination and experiences that were able to be captured by such a "primitive" interface.

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