Main Index : Writings of Marie A. D'Amico, Esq.

Touch-Type Virtual Reality

MUDs and MOOs a possible market for gamers

Hordes of Hollywoodians are flocking to Silicon Valley hoping film-like visions of digital sugar plums can entrance the hearts and loosen the purse strings of PC users. After all, enchanting Disney -like animation has lured half a million Myst users to their PCs and film is even more evocative, right? Maybe, maybe not.

Approximately 10,000 users currently log onto and are active in LambdaMOO . A Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) that's object oriented (thus, MOO). It's administered by a researcher, Pavel Curtis , from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC ) and accessible via the Internet.

There's no sound, no graphics, no animation, no video, only text. No fun? No way.

Users find it so enthralling, they can participate for an average of 20 hours a week. There are over 400 MUDs or MOOs available on the Internet today and their number increases daily. If you want to research the topic, there's a surfeit of materials; at least 50 documents are posted daily to

MUD Usenet groups and the proceedings from the First Worldwide MUD Conference, held in June in Sweden, are full of fascinating answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs in Internet lingo). Or, for a 120-page synopsis, read the MUD master's thesis recently written by a student at the University of Melbourne, Australia.MUDs and MOOs don't require composers, directors, animators, a 7-digit budget , or a cast of thousands, but they inspire loyalty and awe in their users just the same. While most are free to users today, at least a couple successfully charge for their services. And, with the burgeoning population of the Internet, MUDs and MOOs may present a real opportunity for game developers.

Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My

MUDs are networked, multi-user, text-based, interactive environments. If these multi-syllabic mouthfuls are being but nothingness to you, let me provide substance user types text talk or move and reads a scrolling list of what other participants are saying and doing to understand what is happening in that particular MUD’s "world." Two-thirds of all MUDS and MOOs are adventuring programs, similar to Dungeons & Dragons , in which players have fantasy adventures in a role-playing game (RPG) format where they can explore dangerous-animal infested areas, solve puzzles, fight creatures or each other, and build objects. Some are "themed" MUDs based upon fictional, popular worlds such as Star Trek or The Dragonriders of Pern , a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey .

The overriding value is probably cooperation, as it's essential for point-scoring and survival. One-third of all MUDs and MOOs are social programs, participants spend their time chatting and building objects or areas of general enjoyment, with overriding themes of egalitarianism and pacifism. Each MUD has a unique style, AberMUDs , DikuMUDs , LPMUDs , and UnterMUDs are RPGs, Tiny and Teeny MUDs are social. There are some likenesses between MUDs, but concepts don't always translate. For example, in FurryMUDs , all characters are anthropomorphized intelligent animals, and in Tiny/Teeny MUDs, "killing" a fellow character means you're displeased with their statements; in RPG MUDs, "killing" means what it says.

When you first connect to a MUD, you're a "clueless newbie;" you must write a description of your character, female, male, neuter, or plural, and then enter a room. You can usually speak, pose/emote, or move. If I type "say hello," it would appear as "Marie says hello." "Pose laughs" would appear as "Marie laughs," and "out," will move me to a different room.

Most MUDs provide hundreds of verbs and adverbs. In a recent study, the most dominant verbs were "smile, shake, greet, grin, nod, laugh and giggle" and the most common adverbs were "happily, demonically, evilly and sadly."

MUDs are ruled by Gods, the game administrators. If a player is persistently offensive, the God can "toad" him. In RPGs, the character's description is changed into a scaly amphibian, in Tiny MUDs, the character can be expelled from the program. In some MUDs, you can score points by finding treasure or killing monsters and eventually attain Wizardhood, one step below Godhood. Wizards are granted the ability to change some of the MUD environment itself. It takes hundreds of hours of playing time to become a Wizard, but a recent survey showed 67 percent of MUD participants had already attained that level.

The Oldest Living MUDs Tell All

The origin of MUDs lie at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the early 1970s, the computer fans there were so enamored of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , they built three elven fonts for the printers. Two such fans, Donald Woods and Will Crowther, wrote a Tolkienesque, single-player game entitled ADVENT, referred to as Adventure it spread worldwide via the emerging tentacles of the Internet. One ensnared gamer, Jim Guyton, wrote a simplistic, multi-user, shoot 'em up game called Mazeware. In 1979, inspired by Adventure, Mazeware, and the intersection of virtual reality, nascent networks, and interactivity, Alan Kleitz in the US wrote a MUD, Scepter, and Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, students at the University of Essex, England, wrote one entitled Multi-User Dungeon or MUD, the acronym which now refers to the complete genre. As the Internet burgeoned, users from far-flung countries found these games popular pastimes and their devotees wrote multitudes of motley MUDs.

John and Jane's Addiction

Why have MUDs been addictive for over 15 years while most games' mean-time-to-the-closet is one Christmas season or one set of batteries? Basically, everyone desires beauty, friends, and fun, and MUDs furnish them in spades.

Here's what some real users have said via Usenet: "You get to interact with real live people, not just compiled code." "Playing against a real live intelligence is more fun than beating on zombie-like monsters." "A MUDs (sic) isn't just a game, it's an extension of real life with gamelike qualities." "It's a cross between just being able to talk to friends and actually being creative," "It's an unreal environment in which real interactions happen," and "It's a workshop for exploring issues of social hierarchy." This sounds like inner-child therapy, I know, but weren't they the motifs of your adolescent dreams?

Electronic communication, with its absence of physical cues, should allow us to circumvent cultural ideals of beauty. MUD players' descriptions, however, don't bypass the beauty myth, they buy into it. Figures are"slender yet curvaceous," hair is "golden brown with hints of red," eyes are "emerald green". The phrases seem plagiarized from Danielle Steele , but they fulfill all our fantasies of being Prom King and Queen. Positively, in a world populated by pretty people, beauty has no hierarchy; the myth is vanquished by the equalizing nature of the text.

But, even for players who are plain Johns/Janes, MUDs are friendly formats. A study found characters smile at others 18 times a day and hug them 4 times a day; indeed they invoke friendly "feeling" commands every 30 seconds. When a player enters a room, frequently she's greeted with numerous hugs, as if she were voted "most popular," instead of her likely real-life (RL ) designation, "most intelligent." Prozac pales in comparison.

This surfeit of emotions and the anonymity of text, so unlike our frigid, in-your-face world, permits players to be uninhibited and have fun. Affectionate typing can lead to flirting, marriage, and even Tinysex or "speed-writing interactive erotica". In the egalitarian chat world, it's consensual, "sometimes done with one hand on the keyboard, sometimes two". While it's similar to an audio-less 900-line experience, it's intoxicating for many, "glands do engage ... often as throbbingly as they would in real-life ...." Uninhibitedness, however, can lead to violence. In December 1993, The Village Voice reported a player on LambdaMOO had perpetrated a "netrape" on two female characters. Many participants were brought to tears in RL by the violent text scrolling on their CRTs and the offender was "toaded" from the system. Some MUDs now have a "Good Manners" guide (type "help manners") which states: "Behavior that would be rude 'face-to-face' is rude here, too. It isn't reasonable to ':kiss' or ':hug' folks you don't know."

The Feminine MOOstique

One of the most intriguing aspects of MUDs is both the social chatlines and the adventuring RPGs appeal to women. Women constitute approximately 25 percent of the participants on LambdaMOO and Jay’s HouseMOO and a whopping 40 percent of the users of the "adventuring" British Legends game on CompuServe . These numbers are far less than the population-majority women constitute, but if you're Sega or Nintendo , with 1994 profits down 40 percent and single-digit female user bases, MUDs could bring back the sparkle in shareholders' eyes.

Why the feminine appeal? If I knew with certainty, I wouldn't be writing. I can theorize, from the linguist Deborah Tannen's research demonstrating women like affirming "rapport-talk," the affectionate, chatty nature of MUDs provide this is in a safe environment. For example, at least 20 percent of the female-female and female-male MUD interactions are either affectionate (patting, highfiveing, kissing, tickling, nuzzling) or whuggling (a hug-wave mix). In a two month log, males initiated 200 hugs or whuggles; females 225; with 75 percent to 25 percent disparity between males and females, a hug/whuggle is four times as likely to be initiated by a female. For adults, this amount of affirmation and affection occurs only in never-never land. In addition to social support, MUDs "promote constructive building and efficient use of available resources." LambdaMOOers spent 57.26 percent of their time socializing and 14.14 percent building.

Casio is one company has who seen the potential of products geared to females for whom private two-way conversations are the norm on MUDs. They have sold 500,000 units in Japan, principally in the age 9 to 11 female market, of their Secret Sender 6000, an electronic diary that allows messages to be sent via infrared beam at distances up to 25 feet. Makers of slow-selling personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, such as Apple Computer Inc.' s Newton MessagePad , Sony's MagicLink, and Motorola's Marco Wireless Communicator, should heed the MUD female statistics. Why sell to the minority when you can market to the majority?

Will it Play in Peoria?

All this beauty, popularity, and fun is psychically super-duper, but can MUDs generate revenue? To access a MUD, a user needs a minimum configuration of a computer, modem, and Internet account. In a recent MUD survey, 71 percent of the users owned a computer, 89.7 percent had modems, and 92.7 percent had 24-hour Internet access. These percentages, however, far surpass the number of average households with such setups. In addition, most MUDs are currently available free for usage because participants gain Internet access via educational institutions (the average age for LambdaMOO males is 21.8, women 25.2) or corporate accounts. On LambdaMOO, 4 out of 5 of the users connect from educational sites and 1 out 5 from commercial sites.

Where's the money?

While many MUDs are gratis, MUDs have been commercialized for the past 15 years. A teenage Kleitz formed a company called GamBit, Inc. in 1979; they charged a standard connect time of $3 per hour to play his Scepter MUD. GamBit had 300 subscribers using archaic PC XT (Intel 8088-based) systems, 16 dial-up lines, and 640KB of memory. Potential MUD developers should note GamBit earned the lion's share of its revenues from royalties licensing Scepter to markets throughout the U.S. Unfortunately, a spate of negative publicity regarding the "violence" quotient in the Dungeons & Dragons genre forced GamBit to sell its assets to a company called Interplay who went bankrupt in 1988.

In the UK, MUDs have enjoyed a long-standing commercial tradition. Shades, the "most popular online multiuser adventure game in Europe" has enjoyed sweet success since its 1985 inception because it's the only MUD accessible at local call telephone rates from anywhere in the UK. British Legends , written by the original MUD author Bartle, has been available on CompuServe since 1987, at $4.80 per hour (or, for connections faster than 2400 baud, $9.60 per hour) it's the single-most played MUD in the world.

Bartle thinks MUDs are a software developer's dream because: the software isn't made public (no danger of piracy), people pay continually (no one-time payment), and larger computers act as hosts (enabling sophisticated games). The only drawback: people stop playing when telephone charges become astronomical. He advocates lower phone rates and a system of advance credit allowing players to budget their time. According to Bartle, "The first company to make a top-notch graphical [MUD] available to a large user base will clean up." With many people willing to pay $3.99 a minute for 900 calls, a MUD at 1/25th the rate, in which you're hugged/whuggled by 40 people, is a steal, for both the user and developer.

Questions? Send me email .