Interactive Multi-User Computer Games Dr Richard Bartle, MUSE Ltd., 34, Grantham Road, Great Horkesley, Colchester, Essex. CO6 4TU, UK. email: Richard%tharr.UUCP@ukc.ac.uk Copyright (c) MUSE Ltd, British Telecom plc. December, 1990. Abstract: This is a short research report covering the field of interactive, multi-user computer games. Its main component is a comprehensive overview of what presently constitute the most important products in this category. The report ends in a discussion of ways by which existing services may be improved to the benefit of both the user and the vendor. Author's note: this document grew from a longer report commissioned by British Telecom plc. It is commercially oriented, so was delayed for six months after delivery prior to being made publicly available. Certain commercially sensitive details have still had to be struck out, in particular a comprehensive contact list of leading people in the field. Furthermore, some of the information (particularly that concerning game access) has been superseded since it was written. I hope that what remains is nevertheless of some use. Table of Contents 1. Introduction. 4 1.1 The Field of Study. 4 1.2 Narrowing the Field of Study. 4 1.3 Acceptance Criteria. 5 1.4 Categories of IMPCGs. 5 1.5 Brief History (Industry). 6 1.6 Brief History (Academia). 7 2. Game Architecture. 8 2.1 Technical Aspects. 8 2.2 Operational Aspects. 8 2.3 Managerial Aspects. 10 2.4 Scenarios. 11 2.5 Clients. 12 2.6 Bots. 12 2.7 Indicators. 13 Breadth 13 Depth 13 Size 14 Parser 15 Players 15 Role-playing 16 Wiz Powers 16 Age 18 Gameplay 18 Atmosphere 19 3. Reviewing Strategy. 20 3.1 Review Format. 20 3.2 Accuracy. 20 3.3 Locations. 20 3.4 Genealogy. 22 4. Reviews - UK. 24 4.1 Federation II. 24 4.2 Gods. 26 4.3 MirrorWorld. 29 4.4 MUD2. 32 4.5 Shades. 36 4.6 AberMUG. 41 4.7 Avalon. 41 4.8 Bloodstone. 44 4.9 Empyrion. 47 4.10 MIST. 48 4.11 Mosaic. 49 4.12 Prodigy. 51 4.13 Quest. 53 4.14 Realm. 54 4.15 Trash. 55 4.16 Void. 57 4.17 Zone. 59 4.18 Chaos World of Wizards. 62 4.19 Rock. 64 4.20 Sector 7. 64 4.21 Other MUAs. 65 Table of Contents (continued) 5. Reviews - Rest of the World. 71 5.1 British Legends. 71 5.2 Gemstone III. 72 5.3 Other Commercial MUAs. 73 5.4 AberMUD. 75 5.5 LPMUD. 77 5.6 TinyMUD. 79 5.7 TinyMUCK. 83 5.8 TinyMUSH. 84 5.9 TinyMOO. 85 5.10 UberMUD. 86 5.11 Other InterNet MUAs. 87 6. Reviews - Non-MUAs. 92 6.1 Fantasy Sports. 94 6.2 Island of Kesmai. 94 6.3 Sniper! 98 6.4 The Spy. 99 7. Discussion. 101 7.1 Organisation. 101 7.2 Why Do People Play? 101 7.3 Why Do People Not Play? 107 7.4 Why Do People Stop Playing? 109 7.5 What Does the Future Hold? 112 7.6 Conclusion. 114 1. Introduction. 1.1 The Field of Study. "Interactive, multi-user computer games": despite containing three adjectives, the phrase is wide-ranging in its coverage. The first task in reviewing the area must therefore be to formulate a set of criteria that can be used to determine whether a system should, or should not, be the object of study. The term 'games' refers to those pastimes which are undertaken primarily for the purpose of entertaining the user (or, in this context, player). Although games can be designed for business or educational use, rather than solely for leisure-time activity, nevertheless to qualify they must somehow be "fun". They also need a set of rules, and, if competitive, some means of gauging how close the player is to "winning" (ie. meeting a predefined overall objective). Additionally, most require some skill on the part of the players. In cases where modelling the real world is a significant aspect of a game, it may be referred to as a 'simulation' (although not all simulations are games). 'Computer games' are games which are played against, moderated by, or played using, a computer. In rare cases, they can be played between computers. 'Multi-player computer' games are computer-run games that several individuals can play simultaneously. 'Interactive, multi-player computer games' are those computer-run games where the individual players can issue commands which affect the way the game treats other players. This specific-seeming definition nevertheless admits such activities as two friends playing a pinball down at the local pub. It's a game, there's a computer inside it controlling everything, it'll entertain up to four players taking turns, and one player's score affects the extent to which the other players will take risks (and, hence, is a means of interaction). Nevertheless, a pinball is not what is generally regarded as an interactive, multi-player computer game; indeed, if it were, then the range of other games that also fit the definition would reduce any overall analysis to a level of vague generalities. 1.2 Narrowing the Field of Study. It is necessary to discard from consideration those games which lie outside the spirit of the definition. 'Computer games' in this context are those games which run solely on general-purpose computers. This excludes machines hard-wired to play one game (chess, space invaders, pinball), but still includes certain categories of games machine (Sega, Nintendo, modern video games). If a game is to be 'multi-player', there are three alternatives: several people playing on the same machine in the same room; several people playing over a LAN; several people playing over a public network. In practice, only the latter is worth considering: games in the first category tend to be commercial flops unless the multi-player facility is merely a gimmicky extension to an essentially single-player game; games in the second category rarely sell, because most LANs are company-owned and are unavailable for leisure activities (although within the next few years they may be introduced into amusement arcades). Thus, 'multi-player computer games' can be reduced to those which individuals contact over some public network, eg. that of the telephone. However, this further constrains the architecture of such games, in that unless users all have similar, tamper-proof machines, the bulk of processing must be centralised within a single computer (or a cluster). Otherwise, system security would be compromised. Although some processing can be done locally (graphics, sound effects, parsing etc.), nothing multi-user can be trusted to a user's home machine. Even in situations where all players are known to have identical hardware and software (as is the case with games consoles), unless one machine is in overall control there is a dangerous susceptibility to the sudden system failure of a component machine. Distributed games are not, for the moment at least, viable. A special case is that of two-player games. With players who can trust one another not to cheat, modem-to-modem games can be played in distributed fashion. If finding a player is difficult, contact agencies can pair people up (CompuServe in the USA, for example, has a "Challenge Forum" for people wishing to find opponents for tandem games such as Falcon, Flight Simulator 3, Modem Wars, 'Vette and Omega). In this instance, the host machine is merely acting as a bulletin board or matchmaker. However, there do exist two-player games where major processing is done on the contact machine itself. This leaves us with a set of games where the players have computers which they use as front-ends to access a (usually larger) computer, upon which the games themselves run. There are some games of the FIST variety where the user can dial telephone numbers to issue commands, but no such games have anything that is not subsumed by some aspect of play-by-modem games; not even the emerging voice-activated telephone games are much of an advance. Finally, what is meant by the term 'interactive' when applied to multi-player computer games? Actually, the word is ambiguous: it can mean "allowing players to act upon one another", but also merely "on-line" (in a computer sense). Both these meanings are, to some extent, already implied. Although being multi-player indicates that there is some degree of awareness of other individuals playing at the same time (if you can't tell by playing that it's multi-player, it may as well not be), 'interactive' emphasises the requirement that players be able to do things with and to each other. This is exemplified by the ability to communicate freely. Limited forms of communication using standard protocols are possible in certain games (eg. bridge), but in general the players have to be able to send messages to one another in free-form natural language if they are to communicate effectively. Inter-player communication not the end of it, however, because an ordinary chatline program can perform such a function; a chatline, though, is not a game. There may be conventions observed by participants, but there are no formal rules of play, and there is no way to "win" - or even advance in status - on a chatline. To be an interactive, multi-player game, communication between players is necessary, but not sufficient; players need to be able to do things to one another that, within the framework of the game, will have a tangible effect. 1.3 Acceptance Criteria. To summarise, then, for the purposes of the remainder of this report, an interactive, multi-player computer game (IMPCG) is something which satisfies the following criteria: - It is played by people primarily for fun. - It has a set of rules, and an overall game-dependent objective. - You need a general-purpose computer to play it. - It runs primarily on a central computer, connected to the players' computers over a public network. - More than one person can play it simultaneously. - Players can communicate with one another in real time, using a natural language (eg. English). - Players can issue commands independently which may affect the status of other players within the game. 1.4 Categories of IMPCGs. Existing interactive, multi-player computer games satisfying the above criteria are, in the main, programs sharing a common heritage known variously as MUGs (Multi-User Games), MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, Multi-User Dimensions) and MUAs (Multi-User Adventures). Although the terms are often used interchangeably, there are technical distinctions: MUG - Used mainly by journalists and people who don't know any better. A UK-only term. Vague - soccer is a "multi-user game" - but employed in the present context the term refers to any on-line computer game, whether interactive or not. Scrabble by modem is a MUG (and, on Minitel, a very popular one). MUD - Ambiguous in that it can refer not only to a class of interactive, multi-player computer games, but also to a particular game (the first one of this genre). In the UK, normally the specific form is used, but elsewhere 'MUDs' is generic. MUA - Perhaps the most accurate description. Multi-user adventures are, simply, adventure games for more than one player. Adventure is a term already used to refer to a popular form of single-player computer game, such as those produced by Infocom, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls. The very first adventure game (now called Colossal Cave) was originally entitled Adventure. MUA is used by purists, but rarely appears in non-technical magazine articles due to its being hard to incorporate into witty headlines. However, for the remainder of this report the acronym MUA will be used to refer to this kind of IMPCG. This is because MUG is too general (and unused outside the UK), and MUD is ambiguous. MUAs are not the only IMPCGs, just the dominant form. There are other games which satisfy our adopted criteria, but they are one-off individuals, not classes of games. Examples are Island of Kesmai, You guessed it! and Sniper on CompuServe. All are characterised by communication and interaction, and they do not play the same as MUAs. They can, however, each be seen as a specialised form of MUA, and could, for example, readily be programmed in the better MUA definition languages. This report will therefore concentrate on MUAs as best exemplifying IMPCGs, while making reference to other games that also qualify when appropriate. 1.5 Brief History (Industry). Present day MUAs are all descendents of a single game known as MUD (Multi-User Dungeon; to avoid confusion with the generic term, the game will be referred to as MUD1 for the remainder of this report). Although there were early attempts to turn single-player adventures such as Colossal Cave and Zork into multi-player adventures, and there may have been attempts to write MUAs from scratch, these came to nothing or petered out. MUD1 was the first proper, workable multi-user adventure game. MUD1 was written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University on a DECsystem-10 mainframe. Trubshaw began in Autumn 1979, and Bartle took over in Summer 1980. Initially, the game was playable only by students at the university and guests using (what was then) EPSS. After a year or so, however, external players began to direct-dial from home using modems, and the game's popularity grew. Many of MUD1's players found it difficult to get a slot in the game, since the number of dial-up ports on the university machine was limited, and because the game was only available late at night when there was spare processing capacity. Some of these players wrote their own MUAs, based on MUD1 and using similar commands. Among these were AMP, Gods and Shades. After a flurry of articles in computer hobby magazines around 1984, MUD1's fame spread even wider. Bartle and Trubshaw formed MUSE Ltd to rewrite the game as MUD2, and run it on VAXes owned by a division of BT then known as NIS (Network Information Services). Due to an internal dispute between NIS and Prestel, Prestel declined to take MUD2 as "their" MUA, and chose the lookalike game Shades instead. MUD1 was, for two years, available on the CompuNet network in the UK, but it was removed when CompuNet discarded their DECsystem-10s. A version of MUD1 still runs on CompuServe in the USA, and, despite its venerable age, continues to be one of their most profitable leisure products. After a time, people who had played games based on MUD1 wrote their own MUAs, and the process snowballed. Nowadays, there are some twenty or more MUAs in the UK of varying degrees of sophistication, six of which (MUD2, Shades, Gods/The Zone, Federation II, AberMUG and Bloodstone) are run on a commercial basis. The UK leads the world in this technology, despite the constraints of high communications charges (even using PSS, it costs over 5 times more per hour to call MUD2 than the game itself charges for playing). This, then, is the state of the "industry" in the UK. However, there are two almost disjoint streams to the development of MUAs, the other one being based in academia. 1.6 Brief History (Academia). With the publicity of the mid-1980's and the advent of JANet (Joint Academic Network - free inter-university networking), students at other universities continued to play MUD1 at Essex (along with other games written using the same shell, MIST being the main one). These students also wrote their own MUD1-like games. The first, AberMUD, was programmed at Aberystwyth, and made available to other sites over JANet and InterNet. This in turned spawned other MUAs based on it (TinyMUD, LPMUD), which were distributed freely to (mainly Unix) sites around the network. There are now some fifty sites running versions of these games, and the sources are available free to anyone who wants them. There is a thriving NewsNet section dedicated to these games (which are called "MUDs" by everyone), and new sites are coming on stream all the time. They're mainly in the USA, but can be found in many other countries as well. Only one game is run commercially, an incarnation of AberMUD called AberMUG, which was mentioned earlier; a version of TinyMUD has appeared alongside Gods, but as a test and without any publicity. It can thus be seen that at present there are two almost completely disjoint MUA camps. Few people in one group are aware of people in the other. At present, the best games are the top-notch UK professional MUAs, but with the huge number of US academics presently engaged in MUA activity, it is only a matter of time before players over there start writing their own versions and marketing them commercially. Unless the UK can maintain the lead that history has given it, these American MUAs will doubtless come to dominate the scene over the coming years. 2. Game Architecture. 2.1 Technical Aspects. To gain the most from reviews of MUAs, some understanding is required of how such games work. In essence, they can be regarded as high-level operating systems. Players log in to a host computer interactively over an appropriate network. The host computer usually has a fast processor and lots of disc space, because MUAs are computationally expensive. Players type commands on their own home micro, which are passed through the network to the host computer. This takes commands from all players, executes these commands (usually asynchronously - ie. in turn - but sometimes synchronously under timesharing), and sends information back based on how the commands were interpreted in the game context. This information is then displayed on the players' computers. Thus, it can be seen that players' own computers act as 'front-end' processors for the host, handling all i/o. Although most front-ends are dumb, in that they send raw commands and print raw output, some are intelligent enough that they can draw pictures when instructed, word-wrap, produce sound effects, and so on. The game running on the host computer will be either 'Interpreted' or 'compiled'. Interpreted games are written in a MUA-specific definition language of the programmer's own design, and are flexible, easy to modify, robust and slow. Compiled games are hard-coded in a standard implementation language such as C, and are inflexible, hard to make changes to, fragile and fast. The better games are interpreted and use fast hardware. The way games behave is determined by a definition file, commonly called a 'database'. For interpreted games, it is rarely a database in the conventional sense of the word, being more akin to a program. It becomes a database when converted into internal data structures and loaded into memory. Even compiled games rarely use a true database for definition purposes. Interpreted games can behave radically different given contrasting databases as input. Compiled games will generally use the database only for text. Interpreted games are managed by an interpreter program, which can take as input the database of any game written in the appropriate definition language. Thus, having written an interpreter for one target machine, any MUA written for it will automatically run on all other machines for which interpreters exist. This is not the case for compiled games, which must be written virtually from scratch for each game. In executing players' commands, the process is one of database management. Players issue commands in a stylised form of (usually) English. This is parsed into a tuple normally of the form verb/object/instrument. The game uses these tuples to look up instructions in an internalised database query language, and those instructions are then executed to interrogate or modify the database. Success/failure messages are passed back to the player who issued the command, and to other players entitled to receive them. 2.2 Operational Aspects. From the players' point of view, the underlying mechanisms are of little or no interest. To them, MUAs are environments where things happen. Players have 'personae', which exist in a world elsewhere. The computer is their interface to this otherworld, carrying out their orders and reporting back to them what has happened. MUAs are sprawling landscapes, richly described, and you can try anything (within reason) that you like. Taking a less poetic view, MUAs are made up of 'objects', which have properties. Some of the objects represent rooms, others represent players, and others represent ordinary/non-special objects. Rooms are linked together in a network by means of 'exit' properties, and each has a 'contents' property (ie. a list of objects the room contains - it can be the empty list). If a player object is in one room, then executing for that player a movement command (eg. "north") involves taking the following steps: 1) Find the room which has, in its contents property list, the object that represents the player who issued the command. 2) On the inter-room network (the 'travel table'), follow the north exit property for this room to find another room. 3) Remove from the contents property list of the first room the object representing the player who issued the command. 4) Add that object to the contents property list of the second room. 5) Check through all other objects in the contents property list of the first room: for any that represent a player, send the message " has left." to that player's front-end, where is a string property associated with the persona of the player who issued the command. 6) Check through all other objects in the contents property list of the second room: for any that represent a player, send the message " has arrived." to that player's front-end. 7) Send to the front-end of the player who issued the command the description property of the second room. From this example, it can be seen that MUAs are really little more than a framework of discrete objects which players can manipulate by commands, with an additional facility for persona-directed message-sending. In a well-designed game, the ways in which objects can be manipulated bear a close resemblance to the real world, so that when a player uses a command like "drop" the result can be predicted relatively easily. Poorer games may not allow objects to be handled in ways that one might expect they should be, eg. it might be impossible to place one object inside another. Some MUAs are underconstrained in this respect, eg. you can place a large object inside a smaller one. In addition to objects representing players and rooms, there is a third category of special object in many games, 'mobiles'. These objects represent "intelligent" inhabitants of the MUA's environment, but rather than being controlled by players, instead they act under the instructions of the game itself. At worst, this means they act mindlessly, moving around on a fixed course and attacking things at random. At best, they can communicate, pick up and drop objects, and have at their disposal the full set of commands available to "real" players. To become games, rather than clever but boring world modelling systems, players have to be given a goal. The commonest way to implement this is by associating with players a score property that can be incremented if the player performs the right series of actions. Normally, this involves seeking out objects designated as treasure, and depositing them in some given location. However, in most games such points can also be gained for solving puzzles, or for winning fights against mobiles or other players. When players have accumulated enough points, they go up a level of experience, and gain more powers. Reaching the final level is the overall goal, and at that stage powers are granted which are so considerable that the player can use them to change the very character of the game, hopefully to its benefit. This top level is usually 'wiz' (short for 'wizard/witch'), but recently the word 'god' has become increasingly popular in newer games whose authors want to emphasise the rewards of reaching the top. There is sometimes an 'arch-wiz' level, which is invitation-only and used for game-management purposes. Fighting is part and parcel of most MUAs, although some deliberately omit the concept, either for programming reasons, moral reasons, or both. In fights, a player or mobile attempts to cause damage to another player or mobile. If more damage is given than the victim can receive in total, then the fight finishes and the victim "dies". What happens to their persona then depends on the game: it is either eliminated, or it is allowed to return (but usually at a lower points total). The loser's fate may also depend on who started the fight. Fights proceed either automatically, with blows occurring until one player flees or is killed, or on a blow-by-blow basis. The former is fairer in fights against players with fast comms links or against mobiles, but the latter is more realistic. The concept of the 'reset' is central to many MUAs. With several people in the game, puzzles will rapidly be solved and objects swiftly removed from play. After a time, there is nothing left to do. At this point, the game resets, ie. it starts afresh, with only players' personae remaining as they were previously. Doors that were opened are closed, dead mobiles are resurrected, and objects are arranged in their original places. In some games, players can continue to play earlier sessions until they quit, and in others everyone is ejected. With 'rolling resets', objects are replaced individually without disrupting the flow of the game. Although this is less harsh on the players, it can make planning your future actions difficult, and the game is usually lacking in complex puzzles as these can be hard to invert. Games that don't have any sort of reset either exist around the concept of performing quests of some kind, are primarily for building your own worlds, or are incredibly boring to play. A recent trend has emerged for MUAs which do not place much emphasis on puzzle-solving, but instead focus on world-design issues. Players are allowed to add rooms and objects (rarely commands) indiscriminately. Other players then explore these areas. Little goes on here that could be called "gaming", and the whole exercise can be seen as a means of providing common subject matter for people to talk about in what is really just a thinly-veiled chatline. Nevertheless, there are conventional MUAs where object-creation by wizzes is encouraged as a means of providing new and original puzzles for non-wizzes (mortals) to solve. As this is a post-MUD1 concept, however, most of the older games and their descendents are not specified highly enough to be able to implement it. Since they are all descended from MUD1, MUAs have a common core of commands, the following of which are the bare minimum necessary: movement commands, 'get', 'drop', 'quit', 'say', 'inventory', 'score' and 'help'. Most also have 'kill', although some do not (by design). 2.3 Managerial Aspects. Running a MUA is not simply a case of mounting a game on a computer and inviting all-comers to play. MUAs arouse such emotions in their players that they will often resort to lying, cheating and vitriolic abuse to achieve whatever goals they have set themselves. Many games have suffered from poor management; what seems good in the short term can have serious long-term consequences concerning the game's playability and its attractiveness to players. As well as the rules which are encapsulated by what the game will allow players to do, MUAs also have a set of (usually unwritten) rules that define the boundaries of reasonable behaviour. Although some MUAs may allow swearing, for example, others will not. Many MUAs disallow a practice known as 'looby-looing', where one persona takes all the risks to gain points for another persona (normally owned by the same player). MUAs with fighting will generally take a grim view of players who 'pslam' (ie. hang up the phone) during combat. When people reach wiz level, they have powers to harass and victimise mortals beyond all endurance, and should keep themselves in check. What happens if they don't, though? Should they be punished? If so, how? Answering these questions is the essence of game management. Good managers with years of experience behind them are rare in MUAs - most new MUA managers have little or no idea of this aspect of the game when they start up. Once they have gained the required expertise, it's often too late to do anything about it, especially in a pay MUA where customers would lose the results of years of effort were the persona file to be reinitialised (the last resort!). Although under-management is the most common fault in MUAs, over-management (when it happens) is worse. The consequences of accusing innocent players of doing things they haven't will drive away more players than will allowing a guilty player to play unchallenged. It is beyond the brief of this report to go into details of how a MUA should properly be managed; it is sufficient to point out that games can be wrecked by the antics of the people in overall control (however well-meaning they are). To give some flavour of what can and does go wrong, though, here is a list of common mistakes: - Granting too much power to inexperienced people. Players who are given the ability to interfere with other players without fear of repercussions will do so unless they have learned already the full consequences of such actions. Usual cause: too few points required to reach wiz. - Giving too much power to stupid people. As above, except that the player is too dim to realise they're doing wrong. Sad, because some dim people plod on for years striving to make wiz. Usual cause: no way for non-stupid people to eliminate the stupid people, eg. death by fighting. - Reinstating people who "lose" points through no fault of the game's. What happens is that people take advantage, claiming for "lost" points they never had in the first place. Points should only be given back if they were lost through a game fault, and then only if a small number of players were affected. Usual cause: belief that no-one would lie to you. - Failing to remove persistent offenders. If you allow disruptive elements to continue playing, they'll just push the limits of acceptable behaviour back even further the next time. Getting rid of one bad guy and ten hangers-on will net more good guys in the long run. Usual cause: giving "one last chance" too often. - Favouring some players over others, and letting them off when they make a mistake because you know they didn't mean it, or they're friendly, or they were drunk, or they have twenty messages of support from friends. The majority of players may remain silent, but they won't forget the inconsistency when you hammer someone else for committing basically the same offence. Usual cause: believing the flattery of others. 2.4 Scenarios. MUAs implement an imaginary world. There are no constraints on this at all, except those imposed by the operations allowed on the database and the objects the database can represent. MUD1 was set in a fantasy environment, ie. a vaguely medieval world where magic works and dragons are real. Most of the first generation of lookalike games stayed in the genre, partly because the authors liked that kind of game (or they wouldn't have played MUD1), and partly because MUD1 could be used as a source of ideas for commands, spells, monsters and so forth. As MUD1 was interpreted, it was possible to use the same shell to interpret alternative databases, and experiments were done into other domains. These included ITV's Fraggle Rock, Essex University's computing department, various aborted science fiction worlds, and more assorted fantasy environments. Nowadays, although fantasy still predominates, MUAs are set in the whole range of scenarios popular among face-to-face role-playing games players (cyberpunk, 1920's Lovecraftian horror, Arthurian Britain) plus others beside. Some of the DIY-style MUAs have all of them together in a colourful tapestry (or hotch-potch, depending on your degree of cynicism) of intermingled milieux. The setting of a MUA is one of the most important things about it. In choosing between two competing MUAs, players will select the one with the atmosphere they like the best, be it a gloomy, dark future, mystique-laden high fantasy, or dreamy spirit-world. Although the other players contribute greatly to this, the primary source of atmosphere is the game itself. For text-based MUAs (which almost all are), the impact of well-written room and objects descriptions on new players cannot be understated. However, writing these descriptions is no easy thing - an average sized game can easily have a novel's worth of material embedded in the way it describes locations. 2.5 Clients. Although they are not strictly part of a game, clients can greatly enhance its attractiveness to players. Authors of these programs command respect from the MUA-playing community commensurate with that of MUA authors. Clients are programs that are run on the front-end of a MUA, and their purpose is to make playing the game easier. They are basically comms programs, and although they preponderate in the academic MUA world, nevertheless there are clients for commercial games. Usually, a client is written specific to one MUD, but some function adequately with others. As well as basic i/o and network management, clients let you do things like: - gag a player (not print any lines containing that player's persona name) - highlight a player (print that player's persona name in reverse video or a stronger colour) - log all i/o to a file for later perusal - define macros, so a few keystrokes can expand into a longer command string - load files and transmit them as if they had been typed directly - perform screen functions, directing text of different origin to different windows - log in to a MUA automatically (sometimes also concurrently) - set trigger commands to be executed automatically when a given event occurs - use command buffering to pull back previous command lines, edit them them, and transmit them to the MUA - repeat commands any number of times - fork a shell process to gain access to the operating system Clients can also be used to do sound effects and graphics, but are always MUA-specific in such cases. 2.6 Bots. Bots ("robots") are programs which play MUAs using the same interface as players. Like clients, they are not part of the MUA per se, but their programmers are considered important individuals in the MUA field. Apart from some experimental versions in the commercial sector, all present-day bots run on academic MUA sites. On the face of it, bots are indistinguishable from players, although from their reaction to events and communication they can invariably be recognised for what they are. Bots predominate on MUAs which are not sophisticated enough to have intelligent mobiles, however in the future there may be some mobiles that evolve into bots so they can be run on another CPU. Bots are not as popular now as they were at first, because after the novelty wore off they lacked any real lustre, and people became bored with them. Also, they tend to crash the (surprisingly fragile) academic MUAs upon which they run, and can generate lots of background "noise" that irritates players. When several bots were run at once on individual MUAs, that also angered human players. Bots are usually able to perform the following types of action: - mapping - reaction to keywords - the registering and forgetting of players over time - liking and disliking players - obeying commands from authorised players (including repeat-until commands) - the ability to log data to disc - the ability to give help to players - movement - the creation and use their own macros - communication with players (usually not too well, but sometimes using an expert system interface) 2.7 Indicators. To compare MUAs against one another scientifically, some means of assessing their strengths and weaknesses in important areas must be established. It is beyond the scope of this report to suggest a formal approach to this; however, the main parameters by which a MUA is commonly judged should be expressed, so as to help place the reviews of individual MUAs in a wider context. When considering a MUA, then, experienced players and reviewers look at the following indicators: 'Breadth' The breadth of a MUA is the extent to which it is able to deal with things the players want to do. If a game has trees and an axe, then it is reasonable to assume that players will attempt to fell the trees. Likewise, if it has water then players will try to swim, and if it has a spade they will try to dig. They will also try to write, sing, throw, sleep, and perform similar "reasonable" actions. The more commands a game is able to cope with, the greater its breadth. Giving a stock "I don't understand that" or "You can't do that" response shows a lack of robustness. Games with the greatest breadth cover eventualities most players would never consider, such as trying to open a door with a skeleton, trying to read a "guardian" mobile as if it were a newspaper, or hitting a sack and expecting to fall asleep. 'Depth' Depth expresses a sense of the level of detail to which a MUA descends; it is sometimes called 'sophistication'. It is a dependent upon the physics of the world which the MUA manages. Games with good depth generally treat objects in a way which approximates the real world. Games with bad depth will omit certain concepts, or misimplement them. Dropping a glass object on a hard surface "should" break it (unless there's a game-related reason why not, eg. it's magic); dropping it on a soft surface "shouldn't" break it. Placing a small box inside a sack "should" be allowed; placing it inside a sack which the box itself contains "shouldn't" be allowed. 'Selective depth' is where the system can handle a concept when applied to one kind of object, but not to another. For example, rooms may be able to contain objects, but boxes might not; players may be able to carry objects but mobiles might not; a box may be able to contain another box, but not if that second box contains another object; players may be able to enter a vehicle, but not drop things into it from outside. Selective depth problems are usually caused by omissions in the initial design of a MUA or by having parts of the database designed by different people. All MUAs are based on discrete objects, and are consequently pressed when obliged to represent continuous quantities such as fluids. Most MUAs can handle containers, but almost all MUAs are unable to model what happens when a jug containing 5 litres of water is poured into a bowl with a 3 litre capacity. Likewise, it is beyond the definition languages of most MUAs even to express concepts like temperature or density, let alone provide a working ontology. Another representational problem concerns compositionality. If 1,300 matchsticks have been made into a model of the Eiffel Tower, and 700 are removed, does that leave a 600-matchstick model? What if 1,299 were removed? What if only 1 was? What if the matchsticks were made into something else? Even the best MUAs have tremendous difficulty in this area, and it is therefore either avoided completely or simplified by use of a "make" command that only works with certain other objects as ingredients. Since the idea of rooms is central to MUAs, there is often a problem with things that happen across room boundaries. Line-of-sight is hard to implement, as are determining the direction from which distant noises come, representing smoke or weather that covers a wide area, and inclusion of "small" rooms that can only hold a certain volume, eg. inside a grandfather clock. Some MUAs are (co-ordinate) point-based rather than room-based, which makes directional calculations easier, but they have related problems in dealing with objects larger than the granularity of the points. MUAs with great depth can suffer if too much detail is given to the players. Players do not like being asked over which joint of which finger of which hand they wish a ring to be placed. They don't like being informed of how many petals there are on the flower they have just picked, nor do they want a 400-line description of the painting they are looking at. If a MUA deals with details, it should only bring them to the attention of players when it is important to do so (either for breadth or puzzle-solving reasons). Detail for its own sake is tedious. 'Size' The size of a MUA is easy to gauge in terms of raw data: it is the number of rooms (or locations) that the MUA contains. This can be deceptive: a MUA consisting of a 100 by 100 grid can claim to have 10,000 rooms, however if it did then it would need a a large number of players to populate it - even 50 players wouldn't meet each other often enough to promote the interaction that makes MUAs such fun to play. In reality, point-based MUAs actually have an interaction radius that makes "nearby" players able to see and hear one another. On a 100 by 100 grid, an interaction radius of 5 would bring the effective number of rooms down from 10,000 to around 400. Some of the world-construction MUAs do actually have thousands of rooms in the conventional sense. Even though they have large numbers of people playing simultaneously, they are nevertheless sparse. Unless players can easily find out where other players are located, and can easily get to those locations, these games may as well be single-user. There are other factors determining the feel of how big a game is, such as the mean distance of rooms from the start, and how many people play at once. These are flexible, though, and for a commercial MUA any figure from about 200 rooms to 1,000 will probably be OK. New games that boast thousands of rooms are not, on the whole, to be taken seriously. 'Parser' The format of commands acceptable to a MUA is important, as it is the only means by which players can describe what they wish to do in the game. The part of the MUA which converts input into a form that the game can execute is the parser. The absolute minimum requirement is that , and are catered for. Good parsers allow adverbs, and will fold these and prepositions into the verb to produce a new verb: the sentence "go west quickly" might, for example, convert into the tuple run/west; "put the apple in the box" might convert into insert/apple/box. Similarly, good parsers allow adjectives to apply to nouns, as in "get the gnarled stick". In commercial MUAs, where speed is of the essence, a good parser will make life easier for players by accepting abbreviations ("k z w ls" - "kill the zombie with the longsword"), and by allowing players to define their own abbreviations (synonyms) and macros. Easy ways to repeat commands are also common (eg. "w.." to mean "go west twice"), as are pronouns (eg. "tickle him" instead of "tickle Aloysius"). These syntactic features can easily be incorporated into a client, rather than be part of the parser. However, clients can not help at the semantic level. Some commands imply things by their use which are not stated explicitly. The simplest example is the implied string ("say this is interesting" instead of "say 'this is interesting'"), but there are also implied objects ("open door" meaning "open the door using whatever key I'm holding that fits") and implied bindings ("drop weapon" meaning "drop the weapon I'm holding, not the one on the floor"). 'Binding' is the process whereby a parser ties a noun to a set of specific objects, and it functions best when there is a classification hierarchy defining a partial order over all objects. For example, if a spoon is of type gold, and gold is of type metal, and metal is of type solid, then any of "drop spoon", "drop gold", "drop metal" or "drop solid" will drop the spoon, along with other objects of the class named. Most older MUAs do not have a classification hierarchy, but, with the advent of object-oriented programming, many newer ones do. 'Players' A powerful reason for playing a MUA is the quality and quantity of the other players. Indeed, for some MUAs that's the only reason to play them - the games are otherwise void of redeeming features. The first metric to use when assessing players is their number. There's a minimum population for every MUA, below which the game is not sustainable and will die. This varies for each MUA, but if you play for extended periods and see few other players, the chances are that it needs an influx of newcomers to survive. Games that aren't intrinsically much fun to play need a larger user base than those that are, if they're to remain viable. Any game on a large network is likely to be popular if it has no challengers. After number, the type of player is worth considering. MUAs which are played mainly by teenagers are more likely to be violent and acrimonious than those played mainly by adults in their thirties. Although it is true that certain scenarios will attract a given type of player and others will not, and that therefore the type of players are really only a reflection of the design of the game itself, this does not always follow: an expensive game will tend to be played only by people with sufficient disposable income, and would thereby effectively disqualify students from it. The gender of players is also a good indicator of how a game will be played: if there are more of one gender than another, eg. 10% female to 90% male, then gender tends to matter little; with a more even distribution, eg. 45% female to 65% male, games can rapidly become little more than dating agencies if improperly managed. In almost all cases, there are more males than females who play a MUA (that's in real life: the gender of the persona a player is controlling does not have to be the same as that of the player). A further signal that a game might be less entertaining than it should be is the wiz/mortal ratio. If there are more players with game-altering powers at their disposal than there are without, playing as a mortal can be hell, with constant interference from above. It also devalues the overall goal if there are so many wizzes that it seems "anyone" can become one. Top-heavy games are hard to deal with, because once players have reached wiz level it is often impossible to remove them without causing even worse problems. Finally, if you really want to know what a MUA is like, the players are the best way to find out. Just ask them. After a few minutes of conversation, you'll have learned more about the MUA than hours of playing would ever tell you. 'Role-playing' Many MUAs make a big thing out of being role-playing games. Strictly speaking, such a game is one where players choose a personality other than their own, and try to behave in character all the time. Theoretically, then the more freedom players have to define their personae, the better suited a game is for role-play. However, in practice the term is often used to refer to games where there are strictures on what a player may or may not do - enforced role-play. Thus, games with character classes, alignments, skill levels and so on are usually understood to be role-playing in nature. In MUAs where there is freedom to act however one chooses, "I was only role-playing" is more often heard as an excuse to justify antisocial behaviour that the player regrets, eg. viciously attacking someone else. The role-playing issue can be looked on as a distinction between 'hidden depth' and 'open depth'. A game with open depth (lots of fussy, detailed information made available to the players) looks more impressive on the face of it than one with hidden depth (players have to find out things for themselves). Although the former are exciting to newcomers, the latter are more rewarding in the long term. 'Wiz Powers' Wiz powers are those command which (normally only privileged) players are able to use on other players, and against which there is no defence. Such powers are important for two reasons: the desirability of earning the right to wield them is an important early driving force for mortals; they allow wizzes to mould the game to their own personality, enriching it and helping it to evolve. There is less consistency in the naming of wiz commands than there is for normal commands. This is because people who write their own MUAs have not always reached wiz level in another MUA, and are thus unaware of existing conventions. Having wide-ranging wiz powers is usually a good thing, although having too few can be a blessing in disguise for games with an over-large wiz/mortal ratio. Most MUAs strive to provide a comprehensive range of powers for their wizzes, although many of the most potent wiz-only command often require facilities which the implementation is unable to deliver. Among these are: - 'snooping' Being able to copy someone else's textual i/o to your own machine, while continuing to play yourself. Multiple snoops are where several people can be watched simultaneously. - 'attaching' Being able to control another player or mobile using normal commands, receiving incoming text from their point of view as if you were playing them yourself. A lesser ability is 'dubbing', where your speech appears to issue from the dubbed object, but otherwise your commands refer to your own persona. - multiple levels of invisibility Not all games offer a means for players to disappear from the view of others, but some do. Of those, few permit selective invisibility, where one category of player (eg. mortals) cannot see you, yet another (eg. wizzes) can. - object creation The ability to manufacture arbitrary objects, rooms, mobiles, whatever, and place them in the game. These additions may or may not be permanent. Some games allow anyone to perform such feats, notably in the academic sector. - command definition Like object definition, but commands can be added. Very dangerous, in practice, because commands are, in effect, programs, and can thus crash, hang, hog the cpu, and perform arbitrary alterations to the game's data structures. Be wary of playing any new game offering this facility until you obtain cast-iron assurances that it's safe. - 'proofing' The ability to display arbitrary messages on players' screens which they cannot distinguish from those the game itself would send. Sometimes called 'illusion'. Primitive proofs are commonly available, but multi-line proofs are uncommon, as are proofs which are sent selectively to either individual players, players in one location, or players satisfying some audio-visual requirement (eg. players who are in the dark should not receive messages telling them that a butterfly is fluttering by). - 'FODding' The ability to delete a persona from the game, completely. Sometimes known as 'blotting' or 'toading'. "FOD" stands for "finger of death". - 'teleporting' The ability to move to an arbitrary location. Can be extended to allow the movement of any object from one locale to another, although this can cause problems without the proper checks (objects that are allowed to contain themselves can readily cause crashes). - 'pre/post-fixing' Being able to change the way in which players are described. Some games allow players to do this themselves, which can have depressing results... - 'tinkering' Having the capacity to change anything in the game whatsoever, akin to poking a Basic program. Very dangerous, and if it's offered to more than a handful of trusted people it will speedily render a game unplayable. As a postscript, the presence of some wiz commands can greatly influence the way a game is played and managed. In particular, if nowhere is safe from the snoop command (or any form of logging), this greatly discourages people from indulging in imaginative sexually-oriented talk, and thus makes such MUAs more acceptable to the parents of younger players and to moral guardians. 'Age' The length of time a MUA has been around can reveal a great deal about it. First, it obviously works, and is likely to be relatively free of bugs. It is therefore stable. However, unless it is frequently updated with new features and puzzles, it also runs the risk of being stale. Furthermore, if it has a comparatively fixed-size user base then it can saturate the market, ie. everyone who is going to try it has now done so. Old games also tend to be unable to cope with the latest advances in MUA technology, and become fossilised. New games, on the other hand, are likely to be unstable yet fresh, and can revitalise a user base that another MUA has saturated. New MUAs will often contain experimental features unavailable in most other games, but if they're the authors' first attempt at a MUA then they can still be fossilised, albeit in a more contemporary setting. Only MUAs that are complete rewrites of an earlier version are usually able to keep up with future developments, since by then the design team has acquired a degree of awareness of the generality needed to maintain and improve upon their MUA. The ideal situation is where an old yet second-generation MUA is given access to either an untapped user base or one which existing MUAs have saturated. 'Gameplay' A defining characteristic for a MUA is its gameplay. What's the overall goal, and how do you reach it? Is there a hierarchy of player levels? Do personae gain powers as they advance? Is there fighting - and what happens to losers? Do the environment and command set promote socialising, combat, puzzle-solving or puzzle-designing? Implicit in the way a game interprets players' commands is a set of "rules" that decree what the game will allow, and what activities are favoured. These should support the game scenario, and not get in the way. For example, a game with fifteen different character classes and complex procedures for training to acquire weapon and spell skills may go well with a "city-state" scenario where there exists a complex society and a legislature; however, it would get in the way of a "wandering knights battling dragons" scenario. Players should really be able to do what they want, and if the game prevents them then there should be a sound reason for it. New games announcing that players can be elves, dwarfs, trolls, bunny rabbits and so on have to be able to justify why these different types are present. Artificial constraints ("if you want to be a magic-user you can't be a troll") may give a veneer of attention to detail, but rarely does it ever make much difference. One often-overlooked aspect of a MUA is its treatment of newcomers. It is not good for a novice to join a game, have no idea how to talk to people (and be unable to find out), and to wander around for half an hour and not see anything that could be picked up. Ideally, there should be some mechanism to ensure that even when a game is near to being played out of points-giving objects and puzzles, novices should still be able to find something. There should be on-line help, and it's desirable to have the game provide unsolicited hints if it is advanced enough to recognise when a player is having trouble. For commercial games, a guest account should be provided, and game walk-throughs (or, if undertaken interactively, 'tours') ought to be available. Rules and regulations should be kept to a minimum - a daunting 100-page booklet describing how to play the game may be intended to impress with its depth, but it's more likely to scare off new players in the long run. Gameplay is immensely important, but only to people who play primarily for gaming reasons. Compare MUAs with board games: "real" boardgamers look at the rules, decide on strategies, try them out, and play to win; "occasional" boardgamers don't care much for game realism if that means lots of rules to learn, and they only indulge in games on social occasions, not really caring whether they win or lose. MUAs can be geared to be suitable for either serious or trivial users; the best MUAs can cater for both. 'Atmosphere' Finally, in judging a MUA there is the crucially important but frustratingly intangible quality of atmosphere. The scenario, the room and object descriptions, the events that occur, the things the players say, all add up to a background feeling that dictates the mood of the game. It is difficult to determine whether a game truly has atmosphere without playing it for some time, however there are some things to watch out for which are certainly not conducive to it. A good sign that a game will lack atmosphere is shoddy descriptions. Misspellings, poor punctuation, incorrect grammar, tortuous phrases that dismally fail to promote the feeling of brooding terror that its thesaurus-wielding author hoped they would - all these interrupt the flow of narrative and bring the player momentarily into the real world instead of that of the game. Other signals are improper articles ("a ox", "a water"), bad gender possessives ("Susan taps you with his bat") and numbered objects ("There is a rat22 here"). Subject matter plays a part. A wrecked pirate ship with a vacuum cleaner in the hold may be supposed to be funny, but it will jar on players' sensibilities. If players have the ability to add things to the game without their creations first being checked out for consistency by someone with editorial control, there is a very good chance that any overall sense of atmosphere or mystique will be completely non-existent. Different games have different atmospheres at different times, and the same MUA may cycle between murderous hack-and-slay and jovial sweetness-and-light every six months. Something to beware of, though, is the MUA which radiates joy and kindness all the time: this is usually imposed on players in dictatorial fashion from above, in "you will be nice!" style. Since no-one can possibly get on with everyone else forever, a seething mass of hatred builds up, and when it bubbles over there are terrible recriminations. Games can have their atmosphere disturbed by external factors, such as an uncertain future or a price rise, and almost every MUA has its prophets of doom who will tell anyone willing to listen that the game has gone downhill since the "fun" days of yesteryear, and it's only a matter of time before it keels over. Reviewers who are talking to players should be ready to hear this kind of morose rambling, and only give it credit if it is substantiated in talks with others. 3. Reviewing Strategy. 3.1 Review Format. The meat of this report is a series of reviews of MUAs currently active in the UK. Each review commences with a header giving facts concerning the game under consideration - its name, its authors, its commercial status, and how to access it. Following the header are historical notes, presenting background information on the game, and a brief description of its setting. After that comes the main body of the review, where the game is discussed in some detail. Although the reviews have been written as objectively as is reasonably possible, naturally some subjectivity will inevitably creep in. To counteract this eventuality, brief quotes from reviews in magazines and from players will also be given (if available). All the quotes are unsolicited. In order that some impression may be given of the overall importance of the game in the IMPCG industry, the review header also includes a grading which is purely subjective. Games will be rated as being in either the first, second, or third rank; first rank is most important. This grading is based on an assessment of the impact which the game has had on the MUA-playing community. It therefore does not follow that the "best" games are necessarily of a higher rank than lesser ones. After the reviews of UK games, there follow reviews of MUAs from the rest of the world. The same approach is taken for these as for UK games. A handful are commercial, and these appear first; the rest are on academic machines, and for these no pricing structure is given (they are all free). Their importance is relative to other games in the same category. 3.2 Accuracy. Although every attempt has been made to be accurate in the reviews, they are not guaranteed correct. This is because information supplied by the game designers is often out-of-date, over-optimistic, or contains outright lies. Likewise, many semi-professional reviewers in magazines have little or no idea what they should be (or, indeed, are) looking for, and will give anything good or bland reviews so as to elicit future advertising revenue from the flattered game author. Since some of the information stated in the reviews in this report come from such sources, it is possible that they contain errors. Where possible, however, facts have been verified independently. Opinions expressed in the review, however, while primarily the review author's, are grounded in either personal experience or statements made by a number of players or reviewers. Some of the later quotes that are given in this report are solicited, but as the result of general questions (eg. "How do you think MUAs should be made more widely available") rather than specific ones ("What do you think about Shades' lack of containers?). Most quotes, however, are from public access sources that anyone can read, such as bulletin boards, NewsNet, magazine articles and publicity material. They therefore appear here without the permission - or indeed the knowledge - of their originator, who may regard them as too out of context to reflect their intended meaning. 3.3 Locations. Included in each review is an indication of how the game can be accessed. Some games run on the same system as others, and their location is indicated by specifying the name of the appropriate system. Most games operate at 1200/75 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, but a good many can handle other baud rates too. For some of the academic MUAs there are many copies of the games sprinkled across the networks. All these have their own local name to distinguish them from other systems running the same software. The reviews of these games concern the general software, however local versions are listed along with the address at which they can be reached. As a guide to the countries in which these lie, consult the last section of the address: .au Australia .ca Canada .dk Denmark .fi Finland .nl Netherlands .se Sweden .uk United Kingdom Anything else is assumed to be America (the .edu selector means "educational establishment"). Systems supporting more than one MUA are: Name: CompuNet Phone: Pre-game registration required, call (081) 997 2591 voice MUAs: Federation II, Realm Comment: Long-running but troubled network, originally backed by Commodore and carrying MUD1. After staff buy-outs, its future now seems more secure. Still caters primarily for users with Commodore hardware. Users pay to play. Name: CompuServe Phone: Pre-game registration required, call (0800) 289378 MUAs: British Legends, Island of Kesmai, Sniper, Megawars 1, Megawars 3, You Guessed It! Comment: Largest user base of any commercial network in the world (around 1,000,000 users). Very expensive by UK standards. Recently began a UK publicity drive. Name: Essex University Phone: PSS A2206411411 MUAs: MIST, Rock. Comment: Site of the original MUD1 game and many other MUAs using MUD1's interpreter (Valley, Crud, Blud, Uni). About to lose all its MUAs because the hardware upon which they run will shortly be scrapped. Name: InterNet Phone: Not available MUAs: TinyMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD, UberMUD, TinyMUCK, TinyMOO, many more. Comment: An international network of (mainly Unix) computers primarily used by research institutions (Universities and large companies) for electronic mail. It carries daily updates of public messages on a wide range of topics, rec.games.mud being the one of main interest to MUA players. Free to users. Name: IO World of Adventure (IOWA) Phone: (0883) 744044 and 744164. MUAs: MirrorWorld, Parody, Quest, Empyrion, Chaos World of Wizards. Comment: Made an attempt this year to run commercially, but its players deserted it and it had to back down. Free at present, and a popular place to meet and chat. A local call from London. Name: JANet Phone: Not available MUAs: AberMUD, TinyMUD, MIST. Comment: The main UK network for research institutions. Linked to InterNet. Free to users. Name: Lap of the Gods Phone: (081) 994 9199 MUAs: Gods, The Zone, Future Life, TinyMUD. Comment: Long-standing system, has its own particular clientele. Users pay to play. Name: Prestel Phone: Consult BT for your local number MUAs: Shades, Trash. Comment: Large user base, and prices to match. A local phone call from almost anywhere in the UK. Shades and Trash can be played for free on a development machine at (0342) 810905, but be prepared for sudden surprises, eg. text in french. Name: Synergy Phone: (081) 968 0333 MUAs: Avalon, The Spy. Comment: New system, having started this year. Small user base at present. Users pay to play. 3.4 Genealogy. This diagram shows the family tree of MUAs (where parenthood is known). Children are listed alphabetically rather than in order of appearance, because time of birth is difficult to establish for most of the games. MUD1 | +-------AMP | +-------Federation II | +-------Gods | | | +-------Future Life | +-------MirrorWorld | | | +-------Empyrion | | | +-------Mosaic | | | | | +-------Avalon | | | +-------Parody | | | | | +-------Prodigy | | | +-------Quest | +-------MIST | | | +-------AberMUD | | | +-------LPMUD | | | | | +-------DUM II | | | +-------TinyMUD | | +-------Cthulhu | | | | | +-------Midgaard | | | | | +-------SMUG | | | | | +-------TinyMUCK | | | | | | | +-------TinyMOO | | | | | +-------TinyMUSH | | | | | +-------UberMUD | | | +-------YAMA +-------MUD2 | +-------Rock | +-------Shades | | | +-------Bloodstone | | | +-------Sector 7 | | | +-------Trash | | | +-------Zone | | | +-------Void | +-------VaxMUD | +-------Wanderland 4. Reviews - UK. 4.1 Federation II. Name: Federation II Importance: 1 Author(s): Alan Lenton ("Bella") Location: CompuNet Pricing Structure: L1.50/hour plus L12 flat quarterly fee Brief Description: SF, interplanetary trading/exploration game. Historical Notes: The Multi-User Galaxy Game project was begun in 1985 by CompuNet as a SF alternative to MUD1, which then ran on the system. When the other programmer left CompuNet, Lenton rewrote the game from scratch as Federation II. It was officially launched on CompuNet in 1989; reported also to run on MicroLink, and on any other commercial system willing to take it. Review: Federation II (known as Fed to its players) is a departure from the conventional form of MUA. Rather than being based around the accumulation of context-independent points, it is instead concerned with money (game-money - 'Imperial Groats' - rather than real money), which, unusually, can be given away to other players. The game-play is dominated by economics rather than by fighting skills or puzzle-solving abilities (there are no puzzles in Federation II). Federation II's setting, the solar system of the future, is wide in scope but lacking in descriptive atmosphere. Referred to as 'dataspace' by its author, it consists of the Earth plus six other planets/moons. Despite this, the actual number of rooms it contains is not large, and movement in space is with standard compass points rather than being directionally based on pitch/yaw/roll. Most surprisingly (except from a programmer's point of view), the planets are stationary. There are 17 player levels, although most experienced players stop at level 9. As well as pure monetary qualifications, other conditions need to be satisfied in order to reach the next level. These are intended to ensure that players don't try to run before they can walk, and include such things as having undertaken a certain number of trading contracts, and owning a warehouse ('whorehouse' in game parlance) on every planet. There are no wizzes in Federation II. Game management problems are dealt with by the six richest players in the game, which ordinarily would lead to even worse management problems; however, the real power is wielded by the game's author, Alan Lenton, who used to be a MUD1 arch-wizard and is one of the most experienced MUA managers around. Consequently, Federation II runs smoothly. The game is insensitive in some respects - it promotes the consumption of alcohol by having its social focus at a bar named "Chez Diesel" on Mars, and quaffing drinks will increase players' stamina; this might offend some people. On the whole, though, there is little of the overt use of non-violent contact commands ("kiss", "hug" etc.) seen on some other games. This is partly because of Lenton's managerial skills, and partly because Federation II attracts a higher proportion of female players than any other UK MUA. Federation II lacks both depth and breadth - it has only 96 distinct commands. The overall aim of the game (reaching level 17) is virtually unattainable, so it is treated mainly as a social forum rather than as a "real" game. There is little interaction required by the game mechanics, and fights are infrequent (but see later concerning insularity). The 33 objects in the game are exclusively for giving to one of the 51 mobiles in exchange for points, or consuming so as to increase one's stamina. They are not used for solving puzzles. Beginners choose their name and gender, then distribute 140 units between strength, stamina, dexterity and intelligence attributes. Intelligence as an attribute is unusual in MUAs - most games assume the intelligence of the persona equates with that of the player commanding it. In Federation II intelligence determines the power of the ship-board computer a persona can use. Players proceed by buying spaceships (usually with a loan), equipping them (hull size, armour, shielding, drives, weapons, tractor beams, computers, power plants), then purchasing commodities (24 are technical/industrial, 16 are agricultural, 10 are leisure) from one planet and moving them to another where they're needed (there are periodic announcements of contracts that are to be undertaken). Players competing for the same contract race to get there first. Completing contracts gives players money, which they use to improve their ships, start their own companies, build factories and buy warehouses. Federation II has two novelties not present in other MUAs. One is a bounty system, where players can place reward money on their enemies in order to induce someone to attack them; the other is an insurance system, whereby players pay a certain premium and in the event of their untimely death they are resurrected at their previous level. These two features tend to work against each other, and the insurance facility in particular means that players rarely lose their status once it is gained. Players have the ability to describe themselves ("buy clothes"); ordinarily, this would be perilous to any coherence of descriptive power in the game, but since Federation II is deficient in that area anyway it doesn't really make much difference. Atmosphere, as perceived by the players (not as found on planets' surfaces), is engendered entirely by those players. Regrettably, the highest-level players form a clique that is very choosy about who can join, and they can make life very unpleasant for any upstarts they dislike. This makes the game very insular, a charge repeated many times by ex-players and professional reviewers. When combat does take place it is non-automatic, and there are many weapon-control commands. Experienced players will invariably win, except against hordes of novices (in which case they will later kill them individually, having themselves been resurrected on an insurance policy). Players are only allowed one persona per account ID, but can have several account IDs. Federation II does not have resets, and there is no automatic save to disc of players' scores. Thus, if the game crashes then points gained after a player's last explicit "save" command are lost. Federation II is written entirely in C, is compiled directly (rather than working from a definition language), and it therefore runs very quickly but could never be used to implement any other scenario. Why is it of the first rank? It takes a courageous new approach to the standard MUD1 style of fantasy-based, combat-oriented, puzzle-solving world - it can run alongside such a MUA without poaching any players; it is portable, and available on several networks; it has a publicity director (Clement Chambers) and will thus continue to be in the news; it is continually being updated and improved (Lenton works on it full time); its author is one of the most experienced in the field. Summary: Federation II is a game with a pedigree, but of modest size, poor breadth, shallow depth and little atmosphere. Nevertheless, its players are enthusiastic, its support team dedicated, and its future rosy. Quotes: "Federation II is a wonderful blend of space-trading game and adventure." Popular Computing Weekly [magazine] "It sets you free from reality." Trancer [player] "Reality is boring." Topcat [player] "We all want an alter-ego, and Fed releases it." Penelope [player] "I found the other players very helpful and quite willing to give vital information to help me on my way." Popular Computing [magazine] "It boasts quite the best manual of any game I've seen." Popular Computing Weekly [magazine] "Britain's most advanced multi-user game" CompuNet [promotional material] "I feel proud an honoured to offer people this game. It's like partying without risk to the body. I'm giving them value for money, so they come back for more." Clement Chambers [marketing manager] 4.2 Gods. Name: Gods Importance: 1 Author(s): Ben Laurie ("Tiger Tiger") Location: Lap of the Gods Pricing Structure: L0.575/hour or L11.50/month flat fee Brief Description: Advanced MUD1 clone, fantasy world. Historical Notes: Although the present system went live in October 1988, Gods began in 1985 as a non-commercial MUA; its author was inspired by MUD1 to write his own game, and was among the first people to do so. Gods was Shades' only rival to be the Prestel Micronet MUA. Review: The dominant concept in Gods, which permeates every facet of it, is that of object creation. Instead of becoming a wiz when one gains the appropriate experience points, one becomes a 'god'. Gods have the ability to alter the game at will, but doing so costs them points. When mortals cash in treasure for points, they take it to the temple of their favoured god. This will add to that god's points, as well as to their own. Thus, popular and respected gods will be able to make more changes to the game, and ones that are unpopular will lose the ability. The idea is attractive, but fundamentally flawed. Gods can use their powers to do anything they like, without any interference from the equivalent of arch-wizzes. Unfortunately, what they like to do is prevent people they dislike from becoming gods. Although theoretically a seller's market ("which god shall I give these points to?"), it's actually a buyer's market ("give those to me"). There are two reasons for this: treasure is worth more if the receiving god is present when it is offered at that god's temple; gods who see mortals giving treasure to non-present gods have sufficient powers that they can readily persuade such mortals that it would be in their best interests to deposit their treasure elsewhere. Thus, unless there are several gods playing for most of the time, the treasure dedicated to each god will tend to be proportional to the period the god spends in the game. If a god needs more points to create something, it's just a question of sitting around in the game for long enough to get them. This dominance of the idea that gods can create things is a shame, because otherwise Gods is a very well thought-out game, wide in its extent and with imposing depth to its world. Despite being first-generation, it has nevertheless stood the test of time, and its definition language is one of the clearest and most functional around. It is based on the notion of 'objects', which are items that have 'properties'. Properties are either 'mundane' (they return a simple value) or 'esoteric' (they run some code to return a value). Commands are implemented as properties of objects, thus making Gods one of the earliest object-oriented programming languages and pre-dating much of the work presently going on in the TinyMUD field. Gods operate by changing objects' properties, but this is not yet fully implemented, nor is it likely to be in the near future. They can alter mundane properties easily, but esoteric properties are out of bounds. This is because they require programming skills, and there is no guarantee that they will be safe. Problems of unwanted interactions between independently-created objects are expected, and a facility to test/debug objects is necessary. It is interesting to note that these are issues which have always concerned Gods experts, but their importance is only now being recognised in the TinyMUD world. Nevertheless, it is a pity that the central vision of Gods is still some way away even after all these years, and that what the game presently boasts as its major player-winning feature is actually no better than what is available as just one riff in MUD2. Gods' over-emphasis on object creation distracts attention from the many really quite splendid other features that it has. Its parser is good, it has a built-in class hierarchy of objects (although "get all" doesn't work), and there's a neat counting feature for similar object (eg. "You pick up thirty-one assorted rabbits."). The game is atmospheric - its large (2,000 rooms), North African seaport setting is rooted in historical fact (although elements from different periods are disconcertingly juxtaposed; this may be deliberate). Puzzles can vary with time depending on whether it is night or day, and commands that you use frequently can develop different affectations. Gods has the reputation of being a difficult, challenging game. One of Gods' recent innovations is its treatment of fights. Some players like fighting, some don't, so Gods has two classes: fighters and non- fighters. Non-fighters cannot be attacked, receive no points for killing, but don't die if killed. Fighters can be attacked, do receive points for killing, and lose them for dying. Whether this will work in the long run is something which remains to be seen, though - the non-fighters would appear to be able to annoy and dispose of the fighters without taking any personal risk, and it may be that unimaginative non-fighters may find themselves at high levels without really having much knowledge of the game at all. As well as a points value, treasure also has a monetary (alms) value. There is a commercial system in Gods which can be played as a game without reference to the deities. Money can be used to buy certain objects, for gambling in a slot machine (slot machines are not uncommon in money-oriented MUAs), and for buying drinks at a bar to regain stamina. As with Federation II, this "alcohol is good for you" attitude could offend some people, and Gods may attract another form of objection by its explicit use of "black magic" as a form of spell use which can be practised. That said, critics of this sort are likely to complain about the very name of the game anyway, irrespective of other considerations. Gods tries to maintain an aura of mystique by keeping information from players until they gain experience. Thus, a newcomer (of 'scum' level) is only told how many points are required to reach levels 1 to 4, and has no idea how many levels there are altogether. Similarly, only those spells which can be used are listed. This works as an incentive to go up levels, but can be rather worrying when you first start to play. Another way in which Gods strives to provide atmosphere is by folding objects into room descriptions. This looks good, but newcomers find that they can't always tell what is gettable and what isn't. Rather than limiting the number of objects a player can carry, or letting players carry as much as they like, Gods has a halfway solution which is perhaps more realistic. The more objects carried, the greater is the chance of dropping one. Thus, with your arms full of treasure you can only travel a short distance before something falls to the ground. Travelling light, you can play for hours and not drop a thing. Gods runs on an 80386 processor under Xenix. The Lap of the Gods system to which it is connected consists of specialist multiplexer hardware and associated software, collectively known as The Butler. This has recently been upgraded so as to provide on-line help facilities, but the information it displays is rather hurriedly put together. This is reminiscent of the whole system - every feature imaginable can be expressed in one way or another, but somehow it's never used quite as fruitfully as it could be. Day-to-day running of the Gods system is now by one of the game's gods, Heptaparaparshinokh. It appears to have no major managerial problems, perhaps due to the fact that it is, in part, an experiment on the way deities behave without higher deities above them. There is a guest facility for beginners, with a built-in tour available. Gods has a client written for it, Hear-Gods, which consists of normal terminal software for the Atari ST with the addition of sampled sound-effects. A version of Gods runs in Germany. Summary: A lone pioneer of object-creating MUAs, Gods is well written and abounds in detail. It is old, yet still fresh, and has worn well. However, its overall premiss, though seductive in theory, is unproven in practice. Had it been written as a conventional MUA instead of a slightly eccentric one, it might have had much wider appeal and taken its place at the forefront of MUA development. As it is, Gods' story is one of missed opportunity, and its considerable potential is still to be realised. Quotes: "Certainly a game I would recommend to anyone." ACE [magazine] "You will find a coliseum and a set of dry docks close by each other, but this doesn't seem unusual in the game." Comms Plus! [magazine] "The system of scoring is complicated." ACE [magazine] "With the current generation of modems, I personally feel that objects should be readily apparent to players." Comms Plus! [magazine] "Really, we can't explain what the games are like - you'll have to try them" Lap of the Gods [promotional material] 4.3 MirrorWorld. Name: MirrorWorld Importance: 1 Author(s): Pip Cordrey ("Pippin"), Nat Billington ("Natso"), Lorenzo Wood ("Penfold"), Patrick Bossert ("Zoot"), Tim Rogers ("Grobble"), Piers de Lavison ("Inziladun") Location: IOWA Pricing Structure: free Brief Description: Standard MUD1 clone, Tolkienesque. Historical Notes: Pip Cordrey used to run a BBS called 'Labbs', which had a section devoted to MUD1 in its early days. Six people from St. Paul's School worked on that section, and Cordrey organised them into a team to develop a MUA that would run on a home computer. The system was named MirrorWorld because it had rolling resets (as in the film "Westworld"). It went live in 1986. The St. Paul's group are now all MirrorWorld arch-wizzes. Review: MirrorWorld (MW to its players) is a venerable yet thriving MUA. Its stated aim is for players "to score points by killing monsters and other players, finding and selling treasure, and doing clever things". Its conventional setting is well described, and it has a strong, magical atmosphere. The game is easy to enter, and provides guest facilities. The new user is well catered for with on-line help, but the authors seem preoccupied by the expense of telephone calls to the game, and the newcomer is somewhat bombarded with dire warnings of how costly it is to play. Another of the things with which MirrorWorld is obsessed out of all proportion to its importance is the concept of rolling resets (or 'autosets', as they are called in the game). MirrorWorld was among the first MUAs to incorporate rolling resets, and the authors consider it their invention. The main reason for having rolling resets is to give a seamless scenario which doesn't have its atmosphere ruined by intrusive resets; however, MirrorWorld's alternative is to have a little man in a white coat appear to reset puzzles, which, although a cute idea, doesn't fit in well with the fantasy milieu. The downside of rolling resets is that they're difficult to implement for hard puzzles, and this betrays a hint as to the deeper nature of the game (or rather the lack of it). From the outset, MirrorWorld was intended to run on a home microcomputer (rather than the mainframe that hosted MUD1), and it partially succeeded: the main computer is a BBC Master 128, but it has a 4mb RAMdisc and custom-built multiplexer added on. This modest CPU perhaps explains the overriding feeling that pervades all of MirrorWorld - its (spasmodically elegant) simplicity. Everything about MirrorWorld is simple. The parser is so basic that it merely looks at words in the order they come, not even 'parsing' at all in the computational linguistic sense. It has only a dozen or so spells, and they are defined poorly or not at all - "blind", in particular, can only be implemented in an astonishingly inadequate way (teleportation to a special room). There's a fragment of originality in the way that spells are time-based, so that lower-level players have a longer delay between casting a spell and its taking effect than do higher-level players. Unfortunately, people coming in using fast comms links have a similar advantage... The "nullify" spell is unique to MirrorWorld and its sisters, as it interrupts an opponent's spell if it fires during that spell's delay period. Otherwise, though, MirrorWorld's spells are depressingly ordinary. The problem that MirrorWorld faces is its implementation. Along with most of the other IOWA games, it is written in a database definition language called 'Slate'. That Slate is sufficiently powerful to be used to define several disparate databases is to its credit, however it is a comparatively feeble language, rooted in old ideas and methods, and resistant to change. For example, when an "act" command was needed, Slate wasn't really up to the job, and the resultant hack makes MirrorWorld the most impoverished major MUA in this area. Slate is a lot like a bad Basic. Variables cannot be declared arbitrarily - only predefined system ones are usable. Its subroutines have no parameterisation, and there is a confusion between commands, actions, and actions tied to objects (in an object-oriented fashion that would be more convincing if objects were arranged in an inheritance hierarchy). All this makes use of Slate difficult, but not impossible. However, no amount of fancy programming can get round the fact that too much is built into the Slate interpreter, and not enough is in the hands of the database designer. Modern features cannot be added to MirrorWorld without making alterations to the Slate language, and thus to the compiler itself. These criticisms of Slate aside, it must be said that the language does work very well for simple MUAs, and that there are people willing to pay L3,000 to buy a complete Slate system so as to program their own MUAs in it. Accepting that MirrorWorld is not really much of an intellectual's MUA, it nonetheless has some nice, novel touches. There is an arena for fights, where people go for mass combat and only one survivor is allowed to leave. There is a gambling module, which is another concept the MirrorWorld team implemented first, and which thus receives more publicity than it really merits. Also, the persona file stores more details about a player's status than is common, so eg. if your persona is crippled and you quit, it'll still be crippled when you return. On the managerial side, MirrorWorld functions well. There are written and unwritten rules that the players must not transgress, which keeps everyone peaceful but can occasionally stifle originality (today's best wizzes are often yesterday's most misbehaving mortals; guidelines are a better solution than cast-iron rules). MirrorWorld is overseen by Pip Cordrey, who has arch-wiz status on Shades and is thus well qualified for the task. MirrorWorld is regularly updated. There are 12 levels for normal players, with an unusually large number of points required to make wiz. Indeed, despite its age the game has under 20 wizzes in total. Wizzes can die in the game, which is something that is impossible in other games (and difficult to justify in this one). Some of the feminine forms of levels below wiz appear a little condescending, eg. male = peasant, female = washer-woman; male = potent, female = bewitched. Although relaxing and pleasant enough to play, MirrorWorld is not a true heavyweight of MUAs. However, it has made an immense contribution to the genre, has an experienced programming and design team behind it, and has pioneered the concept of genuine choice between different MUAs on a single system dedicated to such games. After a rough period in early 1990, when its authors thought that it was better than it was and prematurely charged people to play game (which lead to their rapid abandonment of the system), MirrorWorld has bounced back and is again an entertaining place to spend an evening. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Pip Cordrey in publicising IOWA (and MUAs in general), it is likely to remain so for some considerable time. Summary: MirrorWorld is very shallow, has little breadth, and it possesses a thoroughly awful parser; and yet, it isn't frustrating to play. Of average size, its gameplay is good - especially for MUA novices - and its players friendly. The atmosphere is well maintained, but, although it tries hard, MirrorWorld is more a picturebook MUA than a meaty novel. Quotes: "MirrorWorld has that feel to it that just keeps you playing on and on." ACE [magazine] "The feeling you get is that you have visited this place sometime before." Confidential [magazine] "Used treasure is repositioned by an old man who wanders round the game dropping things, which is a little less painful than being thrown off every 45 - 60 minutes!" ACE [magazine] "[Resets] do nothing except drag you out of your fantasy world and plop you right back in the real one." Pip Cordrey [owner] "Make sure that your phone bills contain no surprises." Pip Cordrey [owner] "Though some players are not quite as friendly as on some games, it really is good." ACE [magazine] "On-line entertainment for the nineties" IOWA [promotional material] 45 MUSE Ltd Reviews - UK "If you have offended against one of the rules, the thing that the wizard or arch-wizard wants to hear is that you recognise that you have broken the rules and will not do it again." Pip Cordrey [owner] "[Cordrey] has something that only a handful of other men have: his own world." Confidential [magazine] 4.4 MUD2. Name: MUD2 Importance: 1 Author(s): Richard Bartle, Roy Trubshaw Location: (081) 203 3033 PSS 23421920100441 Pricing Structure: L0.50/hour to L1/hour, depending on amount bought up front Brief Description: Advanced MUD1 rewrite, fantasy world. Historical Notes: By 1985, MUD1 was becoming fossilised, so a completely new version was written from scratch. Although MUD2 contains nearly all of MUD1 as a subset, it is considerably larger. Originally intended to run on Micronet, this was thwarted by BT politics, and MUD2 now runs on one of BT's Vax clusters connected to Telecom Gold's network. BT and MUSE have both been trying to escape from their mutual contract ever since. Warning: the principal author of MUD2 is the author of this report; expect unrestrained enthusiasm. Review: The cutting edge of MUA technology. MUD2 is the most advanced MUA in the world, with a big lead over its challengers (Gods and Avalon are probably the next-best in programming terms). Although roughly the same age as Shades, MUD2 is a second-generation MUA and was designed for portability and endurability. Thus, there are versions of its interpreter in C and Pascal, and it runs on a VAX under VMS, an Archimedes under Unix, and on both an Atari ST and a VME-based piece of specialist hardware under OS9. The same database will load on all these configurations. In every aspect of MUA technology (except its parser, which, although admirably capable of choosing implied objects, does not handle pronouns, adjectives or adverbs), MUD2 excels. Its breadth and depth are unparalleled, its atmosphere compelling, and its management sound. In terms of detail, MUD2 (or simply MUD to most players) is the only MUA that deals routinely with fluids (miscible or otherwise), heat, all audio-visual effects, smells and consistency. If you drop an object from a height through several vertically-placed rooms into running water, it will consider impact damage, water damage, and will place the object either where it landed or further downstream depending on whether it floats or not - players in intervening rooms will see it pass. This form of world modelling adds a sense of realism to MUD2 which most other games cannot even represent in their definition languages, let alone emulate in practice. The number of commands, spells and interactions MUD2 supports is also unrivalled. Many of its nuances are found only occasionally by the more enterprising players, and it has a dedicated band of enthusiasts whose main preoccupation is simply exploring the range of command possibilities the game might trap (eg. "play poker" for a poker object meant for stoking a fire, or "stick pin in doll" using a rolling pin rather than a needlework pin). MUD2's mobiles are the most sophisticated of any MUA. It has a large number of them (over 160), and they are of many different types (some fly, some swim, some regenerate, some can cast spells). They are also multi-functional: for example, there is a sword that can be used for combat as expected, but it also continually makes comments about its wielder, its own prowess, other weapons, fights, and the weather. It will inform its owners when magic has been cast against them, and cure them of ailments (especially if they deafen themselves to avoid its endless chatter!). Even mundane mobiles are very advanced. They incorporate expert systems that enable them to fight (often better than the players): MUD2's thief knows not only how to steal objects, but how to score points for them (it carries them to a 'swamp' room and drops them there). Most mobiles know which weapons to use, to drop useless objects when attacked, to attempt to steal useful objects from opponents in a fight, when to flee, and when to offer a withdrawal (MUD2, uniquely, has a mechanism that allows combatants to agree to stop fighting without either losing points). Mobiles are also capable of planning to achieve goals, eg. if they can't go west because there's a locked door in the way, they should unlock it with the right key and then proceed (Bartle's PhD concerned Artificial Intelligence planning techniques). There are 11 levels in MUD2, which fall into two streams (magical/non-magical) and two forms ('protected' and 'non-protected' personae). Only magic-users who are not protected personae can reach wiz. The distinction between fighters and magic-users is unusual, and although it does add something to the game, MUD2 could survive quite adequately without it, treating everyone as if they were magic-users. To switch from fighter to magic-user, there's a special object (a "touchstone") that must be touched, with a high chance of causing death at lower levels. Some players don't like the idea, others look on it as a watershed that thrusts their play into a different gear. Protected personae are mainly people exploring who don't want to be molested by other players. Conversion back to the normal stream is allowed at any time, at a cost of two-thirds of the persona's score. This ensures that people with no aspirations of reaching wiz can play in relative safety, but that anyone seeking the top rank must run risks. Another safeguard that ensures unsuitable people don't "sneak" to wiz is a system of 'tasks'. These are eight quests, any seven of which a persona must solve if it is to become a wiz. Some require co-operation with other players, some test knowledge of the game, some test fighting, and some are important puzzles; most are a combination. When players makes wiz in MUD2, it can therefore be guaranteed that they have had a broad education in the game. Wiz powers in MUD2 are considerable. As well as object, mobile and room creation (by fleshing out "blanks"), wizzes can attach to mobiles and personae (and thus play as several beings at once), there is a full complement of proof commands, and multiple snoops are possible. There are four levels of invisibility, so wizzes and arch-wizzes can choose to whom they are visible. Wizzes have the ability to alter the manner in which players are described, and the messages given when arriving, departing or using magic. As these powers are creative in aspect, they are not granted to mortals (because otherwise the game's atmosphere could be spoiled). Among MUD2s other features are: a command that draws birds-eye view maps; a safe start location where people can enter the game for a chat and to see who's playing without risking assault; many-on-many fights; a wide range of spells with their effects properly handled (so if you're blinded and walk into a room where dripping water can be heard, you'll be given that part of the room description but not the rest); and delayed-effect actions. To new players, MUD2 can seem imposing. This is usually because its sophistication, though concealed from newcomers in part, is nonetheless imposingly evident; however, the game's reputation also has an effect. To ease the way, a pair of excellent handbooks are provided that answer many of the questions that enter newcomers' minds (but which reviewers don't always bother to read...). The game itself has special novice-level treasure that other players are discouraged (by its negative value) from picking up, and which is therefore often in play even when a reset is due. Room descriptions are friendly in areas frequented by novices, and get increasingly forbidding the further away one travels; MUD2's prose is generally regarded as the finest of any MUA's. There is a tour facility, that enables prospective players to be shown round various areas of the game with a running commentary (and which takes account for what's currently in the rooms being visited). Fighting in MUD2 is of the automatic variety, with spells, potions and (breakable) weapons available for use. Death results in persona deletion, irrespective of who started the fight; although this is regarded as unfair by many inexperienced players, those who have played for longer accept that it is the best approach to adopt - in terms of game management, it's essential. MUD2 is managed by its principal author, the most experienced of all MUA managers. At present, MUD2 is top heavy with arch-wizzes, though; this is because several were appointed in preparation for an impending move to Prestel which was (as usual) cancelled by BT. There is a full classification system in MUD2, which readily accepts commands such as "get food" (to pick up anything that might be edible). Unlike many of the first generation games, it allows multiple objects of the same type, however since its parser is weak on adjectives that leads to objects with names like "key21". This can be rather unatmospheric. Because of the game's high puzzle-density and large number of objects, it resets every 105 minutes; this is despite its average size (around 800 rooms). MUD2 is programmed in a special MUA programming language called MUDDLE. This is the key to its success, since it gives complete control to the MUA designer without hardwiring essential functions into its interpreter. Object-oriented in concept, but reading like a hierarchical version of Prolog, MUDDLE's versatility should ensure that MUD2 maintains its lead position in the MUA world for some time yet. Summary: MUD2 is well designed, has superb depth, is wide-ranging in its scope, and is easily modifiable. Its age belies its advanced features, particularly its mobiles and the facilities provided for its wizzes. Its atmosphere is carefully maintained by powerful room descriptions, and its gameplay is well thought-out. Only its parser is less than satisfactory. Clearly, MUD2 stands head and shoulders above all other MUAs. However, it has enjoyed only modest success compared to, say, Shades. This is almost entirely due to its being tied to BT by an agreement that was rendered inappropriate within a year because of reorganisations within that company. Quotes: "An adventure on a grand scale." ACE [magazine] "MUD was, and still is, the multi-user game that others are measured by." PC Plus [magazine] "MUD is the first of a new generation of interactive games." Daily Mail "If you want a civilised entry into a game, try MUD, the Multi-User Dungeon." MUSE [promotional material] "The game is very user-friendly." Computer and Video Games [magazine] "Where MUD scores is in the atmosphere of the world you have to explore. It's not as communal as Shades, but ... it can become an obsessive exercise in politics, co-operation and the exercise of power." ACE [magazine] "The atmosphere can be slightly daunting for a first-time player, but as a rule other MUDders are tolerant of newcomers and even helpful if you meet trouble." PC Plus [magazine] "[In atmosphere] MUD is definitely better than Shades." Acorn User [magazine] "I prefer to play [MUAs] in "verbose", even if I don't bother to read it all. It's handy for picking up the feel of the place. I rarely read the whole description unless it's my first visit to the room and I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere. I quite like the "unverbose" mode that MUD has, no other game seems to have that one." Wabit [player] "One of the best things about MUD is the style of the text. The locative descriptions are long, well-written, and vividly evocative." PC Plus [magazine] "Part of MUD's strength is the quality of the descriptions of each location, which are excellent." Acorn User [magazine] "Deaths lurk around every corner." Computer and Video Games [magazine] "Due to various political shenanigans at BT, MUD2 never got to Prestel." GM [magazine] "Shades versus MUD: how about blank objects, levels of invisibility, far greater realism, atmosphere, better room descriptions, greater flexibility with everything..." Faramir [player] "Just because we think MUD is a better game doesn't mean that all of the existing Shades players will drop Shades and come a running to MUD." Wabit [player] "Novices and guests don't like MUD. They can't find any treasure. Shades is more exciting for a beginner." Acorn User [magazine] "I honestly think that MUD's main problem is a lack of players, due to a lack of advertising and a general lack of anyone in charge being that bothered by the lack of players." Wabit [player] "MUD has too many internal problems. The game itself is far superior to anything else on the market, and with a little forward thinking could still be the number one game. Although advertising would have helped, I don't see that as being the culprit ... the problems were actually caused by an internal political power struggle, and as there wasn't anybody strong enough to put people in their place, the struggle gained momentum." Wabit [player] "It's an adventure, sure, but it's far more." Computer and Video Games [magazine] "Some activities are, it must be said, a little unusual, but are in keeping with the alternative comedy theme that pervades the game." Atari ST User [magazine] "MUD is expected to be one of the most popular innovations in home computing." The Times "Despite its outward appearance as just another computerised fantasy, MUD is a great deal more than that, and what it promises is even more intriguing." Computing [magazine] "MUD's success has been little short of phenomenal." Atari ST User [magazine] "MUD has a devoted following (one regular player lives in Japan) among whom some must certainly be counted micro-junkies. One unemployed participant built up a L1,000 phone bill and got zapped by British Telecom." Mail on Sunday [magazine] "If you buy your credits in bulk, it can be satisfyingly cheap to play." ACE [magazine] "One player in Wales clocked up a telephone bill of L3,000 before she was cut off." The [Economist] "MUD has been described as the greatest adventure in the world." Computer and Video Games [magazine] "MUD leaves other adventures for dead." Personal Computer World [magazine] "You haven't lived until you've died in MUD" MUSE [slogan] 4.5 Shades. Name: Shades Importance: 1 Author(s): Neil Newell ("Hazeii") Location: Prestel (Micronet) Pricing Structure: L4.80/hour 8am - 6pm L1.20/hour 6pm - 8am L19.80/hour on (0898) 100890 Brief Description: Standard MUD1 clone. Historical Notes: Newell was a MUD1 player. Shades was written over Christmas 1985 when MUD1 was unavailable, partly as a spoof. It was launched nine months later on Micronet, in preference to MUD2 and Gods because of internal BT wranglings. It has been highly successful on that service. Nowadays, it is billed as "the most popular on-line multi-user adventure game in Europe", which, in terms of player numbers, is absolutely correct. Review: Shades is very lucky. MUD2 was going to go on Micronet, but due to rivalries between departments of BT (Prestel and what was then NIS), the deal fell through. Micronet's much-vaunted Viewdata scrolling software was, for example, originally programmed to MUSE's specifications for MUD2. Shades was chosen as a substitute (ahead of Gods for technical reasons), and has remained the premier MUA on Micronet ever since, challenged only by the jokey Trash (which comes from the same stable). Most MUA authors - Newell included - consider this form of protectionism absolutely disgraceful. Compared against almost any other MUA, Shades looks decidedly inferior. Because it is the only MUA accessible at local call telephone rates from anywhere in the country, Shades has enjoyed tremendous success. It has introduced many people to MUAs who might otherwise have been unaware of such games, and for this reason alone it ranks very highly. It has been well marketed, and has good technical support, but it is five years old now and really shows its age. Because of the hard-coded way it is programmed, it is fossilised in 1985. Its infrequent updatings (minor changes every six months, of late) means it continues to shed old players while only attracting a trickle of new ones: its user base has been saturated. Technically speaking, Shades is actually pre-MUD1 in sophistication. It has insufficient depth to handle even basic concepts like containers. Its mobiles follow a set track, rather than moving with some randomness, and they cannot contain/hold objects either; this means that at times the game works counter-intuitively. For example, there is a "thief" mobile which steals things, however he can't carry his booty so it just automatically appears in his lair. If you see him steal an object, and you kill him before he leaves the room, your treasure is still in his lair. The game itself is not really all that bad, given its age. There are over a thousand locations now (which is probably too many, since each game can only handle eight players at once), and its database is the usual castles and buried treasure fare. The aim is to collect treasure and drop it in one location (the Mad King's room) for points. There are 14 levels, some of which aren't immediately obvious as being gender equivalent (eg. male = gallant, female = dauntless; male = soothsayer, female = spellbinder). This doesn't appear to bother the players (who call themselves 'Shadists'). Persona attributes are strength, stamina, power and fight skill, which is an unusual combination. All players start with identical statistics, but they can change (stamina goes up to 230: again, uncommon). Only the latter three attributes are used in combat, which plays a central role in the game. Blows in fights are handled automatically, with power being the damage you do, and chance to hit depending on the combatants' respective levels. Fight skill defines the number of blows that occur per round of combat; it can rise and fall depending on the outcome of the fight. Shades has a problem with fights, after complaints from players lead to a misguided (from a managerial perspective) alteration to the way fights work. If you start a fight and are killed, you lose all your points; if you were attacked and are killed, you only lose half your points. If the winner started the fight, the reward is 6.25% of the loser's score; if the winner was the player attacked, the figure is 25%. This, in a game where fighting is a key element, is something of a surprise. It discourages inter-player fighting, which in turn means that anyone can reach wiz merely by playing for hours on end, whether they are 'suitable' in some sense or not. Once they have reached a high level, they are unlikely to be attacked at all - other high-level players will not attack because the rewards don't match the risks, and low- level players won't because they'd lose the fight (incredibly, Shades doesn't allow fights involving more than two players). There is a "berserk" command which could balance this, as it allows low-level players to flee without losing points (whereupon another can attack), however it is used infrequently because it doesn't work all the time. As if this isn't bad enough, Shades has another means of ensuring that anyone can be a wiz if they really want to be: 'pacifists'. These are similar to MUD2's protected personae, but have no maximum level and a quicker advancement rate - only half that of non-pacifists. A pacifist can be attacked, but loses no points for fleeing. Pacifists can't start fights. Switching modes between pacifist and fighter zeroes your score. Shades has many problems as a result of earlier managerial decisions. Although the situation is better now, there are still mistakes (eg. offering 10,000 points for the best map of the game). Despite having a MirrorWorld arch-wiz (Pippin) and a MUD2 arch-wiz (Lordant) on its books, Shades has always been a place where, if you complain loudly enough and with enough people supporting you, you'll get your way in the end. There are horror stories of people deliberately working up secret personae, gathering a coterie of impressionable admirers around them, then doing all they can to wreck the game as a wiz and having their minions leap to their defence every time there's a warning that they're out of line (receiving 50 letters telling you you're wrong is often enough to make even the most hardened arch-wiz think twice). By the time these trouble-makers have been ejected, they've worked up another persona and can start their disruption again. In addition, they probably didn't pay any money for what they did, having simply torn up their Micronet bill and waited to be cut off (you can get around 5 or 6 months' play for free this way). One of the problems is that the game lacks logging facilities, so gathering evidence is always difficult. Another is that wizzes have feeble powers compared to other MUAs, and can't always keep mortals under control. However, since most mortals seem convinced that wizzes don't play fair, perhaps it's just as well there isn't anything really dangerous they can do. Shades still has some oddities despite its age: there are mispunctuations ("moats bank" instead of "moat's bank", occasional American spellings ("center"), and room descriptions giving wrong directions. This latter point is extremely irritating, because Shades has no "exits" command (unlike virtually every other MUA) and thus you have to rely on reading the long descriptions of rooms to find out which directions you can move. Atmosphere is player-driven. The players can be friendly at times, although stroppy at others. The room descriptions are not particularly evocative, and are constantly spoiled by out-of-place objects and events. Using rooms as a form of providing help is a neat idea, but it feels odd compared to the rest of the rooms (especially as there is a standard on-line help feature built-in anyway). Not really obviously (and perhaps politically unwise), the means chosen to give players back lost stamina is to touch a "little girl" mobile. The spells in Shades are the usual batch, but there is no "blind" and no "deaf" (some room descriptions contain sound references that would still appear audible to a deaf persona). The only original spell is "jaunt", which enables the user to teleport to the location occupied by another player. Most MUAs do not have such a spell, as it can be a most unfair way of stealing treasure that someone else has worked on, and there are problems of consistency that can occur when someone suddenly appears in a room (eg. it's a "falling off a cliff" or a "you can only get here if you're carrying a cross" room). Another point worth mentioning is that the more usual spell, "summon" (move someone to your room, rather than vice versa), is available to novices in Shades, whereas it is restricted to high-level players only in most MUAs. Finally, the incantation "where treasure" will tell you the location of every item of treasure in the game, thus (unfortunately) making novices aware of every major room and object right from the start. Shades uses the normal fixed-time reset method, albeit using a shorter period than most MUAs (45 minutes - under half that of MUD2) since it gets played out quicker. The more people there are playing, the more treasure is worth (to compensate for its subsequent scarcity), but there is no time-based scaling. There are two widespread clients for Shades. Named Ripper and Shadist, their principal function is as an aid to fighting in the game, however they can perform simple i/o tasks too. It is widely acknowledged that Shades is a good game for people new to MUAs. It is easy to get into, there is lots of treasure lying around for novices to find, and there are no difficult problems to solve. The scenario is not threatening, and the players can be jolly, supportive and entertaining. For people who want a game rather than a place to socialise, Shades has its shortcomings, but it is by no means as awful as is often made out. It's a nice, easy, friendly, non-taxing MUA. It might not be the best programmed, the most challenging or the most innovative MUA, but its claims to be the most successful of the first generation MUAs are not made without some considerable justification. Summary: Shades is a very shallow MUA, its breadth is well below average, and its parser is notably weak. It is old, and looks it. It is of slightly above average size, but almost totally reliant on its players for what little atmosphere it can be said to possess. The gameplay requires no imagination on the part of its players, its wizzes are over-numerous, and by the standards of other MUAs they're virtually impotent. Management is much improved of late, but there are still legacies of the past that won't go away. Shades is popular because it's the only MUA with local-call access nationwide. It's a good game in that it's a MUA, but alongside other MUAs it looks very weak. It was in the right place at the right time, has been exploited marvellously, but is now, sadly, well past its sell-by date. Quotes: "Shades, already Europe's leading multi-user game, heralds the introduction of a new generation of interactive entertainment." Micronet [promotional material] "There is nothing else like Shades." Micronet [promotional material] "Shades is still fun to play." Comms Plus! [magazine] "Shades seems to be the most popular MUG around at the moment if you're judging by sheer weight of numbers, though it has something of an advantage in being part of Micronet/Prestel." ACE [magazine] "Pity that there's no real alternative available for people to show their disquiet. If something like Avalon was available at the same call rates, I doubt you'd see most Shades players for dust..." Nigel Hardy [Sector 7 author] "Shades is better at coping with this [resets] than MUD, since there are eight games of Shades running on each Prestel computer." Acorn User [magazine] "She stood close to me, put her arms around my neck and whispered, "It's not the treasure I want, silly boy. Take a look around." I did. I couldn't believe my eyes! We were in the Bridal Suite! There was a bed, the door was locked, and I was being cuddled again." Comms Plus! [magazine] "I found that type-ahead didn't work properly." Comms Plus! [magazine] "The location descriptions are atmospheric, and also vital to moving about the game as there is no "exits" command." Comms Plus! [magazine] "Shades has an emotional immediacy - MUD seems a somewhat austere environment in which grand concepts are brought to grand conclusions." PC Plus [magazine] "Shades has a more light-hearted approach. It is a teddy bear adventure. MUD manages to be rather serious until you meet some practical joker: then the fun starts!" Acorn User [magazine] "Shades is a good place to start for the new player. It's friendly, and fairly easy to get going." ACE [magazine] "First time users find it less daunting than MUD, while serious adventurers may find it less enthralling." PC Plus [magazine] "If you are new to multi-user adventures, go for Shades. ... Once you have mastered Shades, the dizzy heights of MUD wizardhood still beckon." Acorn User [magazine] "Shades is very basic, having no real depth or imagination. What little thought has gone into it has been wasted - who really wants to play football in a fantasy game? The players themselves are usually big whingers. They hate enthusiastic killers just as much as they hate people who talk too much. However, where Shades wins over MUD is how the game is actually managed. Ego seekers seem to be pushed to one side, and everyone seems to know exactly where they stand within the framework." Wabit [player] "Shades (and Trash) is left way behind in the technical fields compared to (say) Avalon or Gods (I'll explain that: Avalon and Gods have much better parsers, much better commands, and much better things for immortals to do once they've made it). They [Shades and Trash] were written when even single-user adventures were in their infancy, and have stood the test of time remarkably well. But now they look just a trifle run down and archaic." Graeme [player] "Shades has a more amateurish feel to it [than MUD2]." Acorn User [magazine] "The game itself is rubbish. It has no life or realism in it. Role-playing is one thing, but that just wasn't believable. As for the players, yes, they have got lots more [than MUD2]. The only problem I found was that they didn't want to talk or interact more than what they had to. Eventually I was kicked off by a wizard for annoying too many people by chatting to them." Wabit [player] "Having all the players start out equal is a design principle. Although it doesn't mean it can be achieved in practice, the mere fact that the goal is unattainable doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to reduce the distance to it." Nei