[MUD-Dev] Java and Javascript

[Travis Casey]

On Thursday, 26 February 98, Caliban wrote:

> What I see in most MUDs is an entirely incorrect
> assumption that the interface which makes sense to the programmer is the
> interface which makes sense. The climate of the internet, as many people
> have noted recently, is very different; when MUSHes and MUDs were first
> getting to be popular on the net, you could assume with reasonable accuracy
> that anyone on the internet was a programmer or at least a college student
> with some programming aspirations and ability.

A side note -- many people who aren't programmers liked the atmosphere
back then.  I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who
isn't a programmer, and indeed is proud to consider himself "computer
illiterate" -- and he was lamenting the fact that anyone can get on a
mud these days.  In the old days, he said, you could usually be
assured of a minimum degree of intelligence among the players, since
one needed to at least be able to follow instructions fairly well to
log on, and most people with accounts and time to mud were college
students in CS or the hard sciences.

> You could further assume
> that the user who was logging onto a MUD was not only familiar with but
> probably *expert* at Dungeons and Dragons, which was pretty much the only
> game in town (no pun intended) at the time. So even if your game system
> bore no resemblance whatsoever to D&D, you could explain it in D&D style
> terms and reasonably expect to be understood.

Unfortunately, far too many of them *did* resemble D&D...

> Nowadays, there are hundreds of game systems, many of which are nothing
> like D&D.

Even when muds where first starting, there were dozens (if not
hundreds) of RPG systems, many of which were nothing like D&D.  Muds
really started to build up in the mid-80's, by which time Top Secret,
Runequest, Traveller, Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne,
The Fantasy Trip, and DragonQuest all existed -- to name just some of
the more well-known systems.  A quick look through Schick's _Heroic
Worlds_ shows that there were more than 50 RPGs on the market by 1984;
how many different *systems* there were is another question, but I'd
judge it at at least 30, counting off the ones that I know were based
on the same system and rounding down a bit.

D&D has always been the best-known RPG, and is a "gatekeeper" RPG --
almost anyone who has played any paper RPGs has played D&D.  Thus,
it's useful as a sort of lingua franca for role-players.  With that
said, though, I think it's one of the worst possible choices to base a
computer RPG on, and I have to wonder exactly what the early mud
designers were thinking -- did they just not know about any other
RPGs?
--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'   visit the rec.games.design FAQ:
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)       http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html