Comment by ButlerianJihad
20 hours ago
It is very strange to me when people refer generically to "MUD" and cannot even seem to qualify what type of MUD they refer to.
Since the advent of MUD gaming, there has been a wide variety of codebases, servers, and clients, with distinct genealogical lineages, that appeal to quite distinct sectors of nerd-dom, and sometimes with very little overlap in the player base.
The original big-3 "non-Tiny" MUDs were: AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPMud. These were largely unknown to me as I never played any of them, but they were mostly known as combat-based, player-programmable, and even quite distinctly European, for the most part. I could be wrong.
TinyMUD Classic began at CMU with Jim Aspnes, but quicky a lot of forks developed that resulted in MUCK, MUSH, MOO, FuzzBall and other interesting derivatives. The Tiny* class shared a lot of playerbase, because the appeal was mostly the same; all were user-extensible but only some were programmable; none were combat-based or adversarial. They mostly tended to evolve into social and chat functions, once they were established and built-up.
There are plenty of other MUD types and in the 90s, every budding programmer had ideas and forked a codebase for their own purposes. But it still baffles me, when commenters here and there wax nostalgic about those MUD days, I really have no idea what sort of game they're referring to, if they cannot be more specific.
I expect that people who mention MUDs largely do not expect anyone to know what they are talking about, since these games have nearly always been tiny and nowhere near even nerd pop culture. At least this has been my experience -- so I will prefer to say "I am playing this game called Hesperia/Achaea/Discworld/whatever, which is like a text-based RPG" and avoid even the "MUD" terminology.
Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper.
Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played
Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?
As a zillenial who grew up playing DikuMUD derivatives, LPMUDs, and MUs, I feel uniquely qualified to bridge the gap here.
What GP is referring to and complaining is that when people say MUD, they're probably referring to either:
- A MUD based on some derivative of the TinyMUD codebase, colloquially called "MUs"
- Literally any other "MUD"
These two categories of "games" are both legitimately called "MUDs" but also have almost nothing in common with each other. The union of "MU" players and "MUD" players is not that large, in my experience. MU servers tend to function somewhere between glorified Discord servers and sandbox programming environments.
Even more specifically, within the MU* space, the different forks of TinyMUD ended up adopting different subcultures, programming languages, and general vibes. Despite all being superficially similar, telling someone you play a:
- MUSH
- MUCK
- MOO
says a great deal about both you and server. MUCKs are furry subculture for the most part and use Forth for programming, while MUSHes are ... more Star Trek/Lord of the Rings coded. With other weird differences: MUSHes tend to have elaborate mail and Discord-like comm systems built in, MUCKs tend to eschew those in favor of "hanging out in the same virtual room".
IME there isn't this same feeling in "other MUDs". You don't "identify" DikuMUD or LPMUD players in the same way, so I don't think the question makes sense to anyone who isn't a MU* player.
The difference here is almost entirely cultural, since technologically, LPMUDs and MUSH/MOO/MUCKs aren't that dissimilar. But LPMUDs are almost never used the same way, at least I've never seen it.