As a text adventure expert, I’ve recently become interested in MUDs again, especially from a historical perspective. There have been lots of works about multiplayer online games, including MUDs as early examples, but I believe little has been said so far about their history beyond the original MUD, nowadays usually called MUD1.
Richard Bartle (one of the two authors of MUD1 with Roy Trubshaw in 1978) has written about online games including the history of MUDs, but that is only one writer’s perspective, and there are lots of gaps in his historical overview. On the other hand, many people have taken an interest in the social and sociopolitical aspects of MUDs, and they have been used as “sandboxes” for sociological studies. There have also been some ludological examinations that mostly take MUDs as a stepping-stone for modern online gaming.
Early on, the MUD concept was extended to make it easier to create new quests or to make the quests more flexible. These extended variants, such as AberMUD, TinyMUD, MOO and LPMUD, were mostly interesting from a programming perspective, but they also drew different kinds of players simply because of their origin or the channels over which they were advertised.
As some of you may know, the longest chapter in my book 10 GOTO 20 is about Tubmud, one of the earliest LPMUDs and (as far as I know) the originator of the Amylaar driver. I think it might be interesting to record Tubmud‘s history (as an example of a classic MUD with a timeline that can be traced all the way back to MUD1) in the form of an oral history project that could be augmented by a collection of documents. I’ve briefly talked about this idea on Mastodon, and for some reason I keep thinking about it.
Now that I’ve finally finished my first scholarly article, maybe that should be the next one. I think I’ll start by finding out how best to go about it and then decide which parts would be most interesting and most rewarding to work on with my specific skillset.
The featured image uses a photo by JillHeyer.
