[MUD-Dev] Otherland

[Richard A. Bartle]

One of the major recent works of SF/Fantasy concerning Virtual
Worlds is Tad Williams' "Otherland" series. If you haven't read it,
you should (but set aside a couple of weeks - it's around 5,000
pages long in total).  It's well-researched, believable, and
practically guaranteed to contain at least two characters you'll
recognise from your own games (although these will be different from
game to game).  The very first line of the very first volume of the
series is:

  "It started in mud, as many things do."

The opening chapter concerns a man in the trenches of the first
world war, so a first line like this isn't entirely
unsurprising. However, given that this is a book about about virtual
worlds, and that the first such world to survive its birth was
called MUD, I found it very tempting to hope that "It started in
mud" could be a punning reference to the beginnings of virtual
worlds. After all, "Otherland" boasts a virtual shopping mall named
after LambdaMOO; it was written by someone who clearly has more than
a passing knowledge of the subject.

Then again, this IS the first line of a hugely important series. For
me to assume it is indeed a reference to MUDs smacks rather of
delusions of grandeur on my part. But still...

I finally cracked, and wrote to Tad Williams asking for him to
confirm or deny my theory. I wasn't expecting a reply, because
authors get esacks of email every day, but in this case I found a
writer who was actually happy to answer my query. Here's what he
said:

--------

The use of "mud" was a joke, of course, but not just on Multi-User
Dungeons, although that is there as well.  (There's an expression,
"primal mud" I've run across to talk about the early state of the
cooling earth, and in fact there is -- or was, a few years ago -- a
theory that there may even be an earlier sort of organization of
life-like patterns, "clay crystal", that might have formed the
lattice for what eventually become all terrestrial life.

So there are several reasons to say that "it all began in mud".
But, yes, RPGs most definitely supplied one of them.

--------

In other words, he did indeed mean it.

As my daughter said when I told her this, "cool!".

Isn't it nice when the real world has something positive to say
about virtual worlds, instead of making them out to be
suicide-inducing havens of bad porn and devil worship?

Richard




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