Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs (1996)

mud.co.uk

50 pointskens39 comments

It may surprise some HNers to learn that there are still thousands of MUDs online today in many different settings: fantasy, sci-fi, absurdist, and more, some of them with hundreds of players on concurrently. And not just MUDs, but MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes, which can have wildly different playing styles.

I played WoW for years and I'm not sure it ever matched the depth of experience I've somehow extracted from lines of scrolling text. MUDs will be around long after the last gnome leaves Ironforge.

MUDs are also the subject of my first indie iOS app - MUDRammer, a Modern MUD Client for iPhone and iPad. I'm hoping to build a client that's helpful for new mudders but powerful enough for the mudding veteran on the go.

Behold, a free copy! http://tokn.co/s4g2u64j

EDIT: Someone here has super fast fingers :) Here's one more: http://tokn.co/gxrswk67

We've been building a modern MUD platform over at [RolePlayGateway](http://www.roleplaygateway.com) for the past eight years and now have a sustained 5% _per month_ growth curve. The core market is there, and there's continuing hunger for what MUDs provide, even among teens and young adults today -- a majority of our users are teenagers and college students.

Easy community? I used to play MUDs as a teenager, but I don't really remember why.

I just bought your app. Really well done. I love the idea of gestures for movement in a MUD.

Thanks! I'm also looking to do gestures for Aliases, commands, and assisted key entry. MUSHes in particular use characters %@&*= that are just awful on the iOS keyboard.

I'm assuming you've seen the $1 gesture recogniser; but on the slight chance that you have not, I think you'd be interested. You might be able to let users define their own gestures.

Did you create that gesture joystick control yourself? It reminds me of the virtual joysticks some ported games use (Doom, Sonic, etc).

It is my own MUD-specific implementation for cardinal directions. Next up is a gesture for up/down. :)

What an interesting niche, neat implementation, and you screenshot the Discworld MUD so we know you're cool :) If you're willing to share, I'd love to know what your sales are like.

Do you have any screenshots? Your clients sounds innovative (going off the other comments in this thread), but I don't have any iDevices and don't plan on getting any.

On the server side, I made a lua-scripted server to use as a barebones base for a new MUD. Lua's threading model worked really well. It's at http://github.com/endgame/MudCore , but I never did get around to building a game on it.

The first screen on the app store shows the movement control: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mudrammer-a-modern-mud-clien...

Also here: http://splinesoft.net

FWIW, this has been heartily debunked by more modern research by Nick Yee, which is easily summed up as "Just because you like pizza, doesn't mean you don't like ice cream." People move into different modes at different times, and are not mutually exclusive as the Bartle model.

Here's a copy of the paper: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/3-2.pdf

Interesting counter-point. But I don't think the two papers really attempt to describe/model the same reality - the world(s) of MUD is not quite the same as the modern world(s) of MMORPGS.

I've always seen Bartle's paper more as a guide for (MUD) game/world designers -- and I find the simplification of boxing player types is a useful model for that. By his own admission it isn't meant to be an academic paper -- and seeing more academic research is this area is welcome.

Bartle's paper matches up with my memory of playing the original MUD, though it was rather a long time ago.

Bartle explicitly states that the types are derived from the observation of MUD forum participants, rather than being a larger survey: even Yee's surveys have a better sampling since the data comes from a website catering to multiple games.

Right, it can still be a useful design lens to think in terms of these basic types of interactions players will have in a shared world.

Bartle goes into how his types actually progress between each other in his book. I'd transcribe it for you guys, but I loaned my copy to a friend who doesn't live in the same state anymore.

I played a lot of MUDs back around the time this was written. I was also the original programmer for a MUD called Exodus MUD, which I had almost nothing to do with after the late 90s but was still up and running as recently as 2010 or so. Seems to be gone now though :(

There's like this whole crazy history of this MUD that I'm only vaguely familiar with beyond the first couple of years:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980122051559/http://www.mischie...

https://sites.google.com/site/exoduspages/

http://exodusinfo.tripod.com/

http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/mudinfo-exodusmud.html

I used to log in there with my old "IMM" account every few years to see if the account still worked (it always did) and to see how confused the current "IMMs" would be by some guy they probably never heard of (unless they were touching the code) popping on with IMM status.

I've thought about how well the categories from this article map onto Hacker News. A lot of HN users could be "Socializers". "Achievers" would obviously be those trying to maximize their karma score. "Explorers" would be people reading HN to learn stuff and share knowledge. Out-and-out "Killers" are fairly rare on HN since they usually end up marked [dead] (coincidence?), but this category could also include heavy downvoters and people who sidetrack everything into arguments.

It's interesting to consider how the design of HN influences these four categories. The scoring of HN allows "Achievers" but rewards "Socializers" (since to first approximation the more you post and the better known your are the higher your karma), and heavily punish "Killers". HN discussions somewhat penalizes "Explorers" since even the most knowledgeable responses disappear into the void of old threads after a couple days. Removing visible karma scores from comments was a blow to "Achievers" but made "Socializers" happier.

Thanks to derefr for mentioning this article yesterday.

Used to play Gemstone from Simutronics in the late 90s, great game and a very large user base at its height: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone_IV

It's still around. :)

DragonRealms here. I spent more hours on that game than any since. Scripting ZMud was a strong early motivation to learn programming.

I used MUSHclient, which you can script with Python, Lua, JScript, VBscript, etc. It's how I started learning Python.

Reposting my comment from the other thread:

Bartle actually expands on this paradigm in the book Designing Virtual Worlds, where he introduces another axis for the four types (bringing it to eight) and also specifies two progressions between the types as players grow.

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Virtual-Worlds-Richard-Bartl...

"Are MUDs sports? Like huntin', shootin', fishin'?"

What a peculiar list.

It is the canonical list of sports.

I wasted way too much time over at Discworld MUD, also one I I used to play called Realms of the Dragon just shut down today after 21 years (RIP).

Wow I played realms of the dragon for many years as a kid. Looked it back up a few years ago an enjoyed some romps around the territory. It's a sad pang of nostalgia to see that it's gone.

Interesting paper. It pretty much applies to MMORPGs as well, them being the natural evolution of MUDs.

In modern MMORPGs, PvP is often disabled and Exploers are replaced by a wiki.

Not in all of them. MMORPGs like PlaneShift have tons of obscure information which is intentionally not published, so players could discover it through roleplaying and interactions within the game. In the end it depends on the game design and approach.

Eh who writes that wiki? Generally there are still groups of explorers they are just now called theorycrafters. They are the ones who figure out that if you get an eye of Dalmatia and a sword of truth you have no attack delay or whatever.

Because there are no real permanent consequences in most MMOs it has become mostly a matter of optimizing for speed.

Mostly explorers, but my point is that explorers are no longer valued by other players.

From the article:

  > To increase the number of explorers:
  >    increase the number of explorers.

Thank you, that's helpful...

I really wish the links to his sources weren't dead.

Many of them are either still around (try using http instead of ftp, e.g. http://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/ethnography.txt), or available on the Wayback Machine (e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19970509140131/http://www.actlab....)

Thanks!

Somehow, the MUD I grew up playing (MUME -- Multi Users in Middle Earth) is still alive and has a good amount of players. The game itself has served as inspiration for other worthy games (Ultima Online for example) and the PvP aspect is second to none. It is also an enormous world, covering Middle Earth from the dwarf fortresses of the Blue Mountains all the way east to the Misty Mountains, Lorien, and Fangorn.

www (dot) mume (dot) org

I don't think its that surprising to find active communities on MUDs. AVATAR, Discworld, Aardwolf, and BatMUD regularly sport 50-100+ players. I've been playing MUDs for over a decade now and there is something to them I still can't quite explain. The abstraction provided by text allows for some unique gaming experiences -- I also believe there is something to be said for the smaller communities that build up around the games.

I am currently writing a WebSockets (nodejs, socket.io) engine (a present to my sixteen year old self), you can have a look here: https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD. It aims to increase the 'functionality' of a MUD by taking advantage of the browser.

MUME is a great MUD!

I'm glad to hear you enjoy MUME! If you didn't know, there is a huge OOC community called ElvenRunes (elvenrunes.com) that is where a huge number of us congregate outside the game. I've been playing MUME since '95, and I went to a MUME-meet in Stockholm in 2009 where I met my wife at a traditional Swedish dance class. You're absolutely right about that special "je ne sais quoi" that MUDs have. And it's definitely something that extends beyond simple nostalgia.

I'll be a lifer when it comes to MUDs (though damn it all to hell if things like Eve Online and Skyrim don't carve out a lot of my self-rationed game time). Perhaps on that subject, I should mention that (for me) MUDs are great for keeping open if I'm spending a lot of time compiling.

I will definitely take a look at your MUD engine. Thanks for the link! :)

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