MUD /muhd/ n.
[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A
class of virtual reality
experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat
forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an
adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a
simple economic system, and the capability for characters to
build more structure onto the database that represents the
existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often
lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding',
etc.
Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names
of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy
Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s;
descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes
generically called _BartleMUD_s. There is a widespread myth
(repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon)
that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by
Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't lived
'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is false --
Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in
1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark
claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created
the myth.
Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on
the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD,
LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for
social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they
often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This,
together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and
difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish
social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988
and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for
large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional
hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet
in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and
variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and
cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition
(in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as
`MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented
ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major
variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of
AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In
1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO,
even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language.
The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will
doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very
rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every
month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to
deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer
designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to
the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See
also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead,
mudhead, talk mode.