And now (I know this may be difficult), imagine that the hot dog is *not* the text display. Instead, the hot dog is players having fun playing a well-designed game. How you get there is not interesting to me in the least.



The way I read it, Idealiad's suggestion is to have shared world assets, not so much hot-linking between different games with different logics. I think that's very doable, especially if the world is hosted in a standalone SQL db. A common world would mean that any graphical assets used to visualize real-time maps, mobs, and objects can also be shared. Scripting can be different, but probably mob and item properties would have to be conformed. Otherwise, devs will not get the full benefit of a pret-a-porter world with only one set of builders.

A database can easily be designed to handle common user accounts, some shared statistics, and to drive a portal site that would be commonly promoted.

It's a good idea. It gives devs creative freedom while solving what is for many a problem–coming up with a full-blown world. This may just work, if enough serious people sign up. That's a big if.

It was TinyMUD and UnterMud that supported portals. TinyTalk was a mud client.
—-
* TinyTalk supports "portals", special exits which connect between
the various TinyMUD systems. There are also commands which allow
manually switching systems.
—-
Also TinyFugue supported it.A portal allows a mud character to move ...
CoolMud supports distributed objects. A player can transparently walk between muds with all their stuff.
All the actual objects remain on the original server, Used a protocol called YO, which was conceptually
similar to Corba/Java RMI/RubyDrb.

No the hotdog isn't 'Madden Football 2012'.

I'm not sure where you're going with this comment. Clearly, what I meant is that no medium has any kind of inherent superiority to another medium. And when it comes to entertaining people, mixing mediums is absolutely fine. Take, for example, cinema.

A game should be judged on what it's trying to do, and how successful it is in doing that. Measuring how much of this medium was used vs. that medium says nothing about the quality of the game. At the core of a game is the progression / development / story it delivers, not the form, but the content. Just like at the core of a great movie is the theme, and not what screen format it was shot in.

A good principle, as long as you keep in mind that over time people acquire tastes in what kinds of games they like, and if you market your game in a way in which it won't be perceived by them then you're going to be wasting your time.

Absolutely, people are creatures of habit, and always respond to form first, then (maybe) later to substance.

The big bone of contention here is that many devs, and even more players, in this community simply don't understand/tolerate the notion that you may wish to cater to audiences other than die-hard veteran mudders. They are so formed by habit and informed by their long mudding careers that even the slightest deviation from what they've seen before is subjected to uninformed criticism and ridicule.

I can't remember the number of different versions I've heard of the 'all or nothing' false dilemma most recently presented by quixadhal. The rule that if you add a tileset to your MUD UI, you have to make a roguelike, is a fabrication.

What *is* true is that we don't know what a modern graphical MUD looks/feels/plays like, mostly because we haven't had a commercially successful one that would solidify an image and generate an audience. My sense is that for the desktop web, a modern graphical MUD will look like a browser-based game on steroids. It is regrettable that it seems 99.9% certain this kind of game will come from the browser-based camp, and not from the MUD camp.

What you say is true Planzi, but I'm still returning to the same notion. If you remove the majority of text from a MUD, I don't think it qualifies as still being a MUD. It may well be a superior multi-user game, and may become more popular as well.

It's much the same with books. A book is pages of text. You can make an electronic book, where the "pages" are now screenfulls, and it still feels like a book. You can add a few pictures, and it still feels like a book. But once you move the focus away from reading the text, it no longer has that same feeling. It's not a book anymore. An "audio book" is a story to be sure, but it doesn't feel like a real book because the reader is putting their own spin on it as they narrate. A "graphic novel" is also a story, but it also doesn't feel like a real book, because the artwork is conveying much of the story and again, puts a specific image on it. A book is unique because it lets you imagine the actual images, sounds, smells, etc… all of which are described, but not presented directly.

A MUD, or a text adventure (like the old Infocom games), does the same kind of thing. It uses text to convey descriptions of what is, and what is going on around you. Your brain fills in the details to create the immersion. If the descriptions are well done, you'll imagine a vivid world that will be somewhat unique to YOU (the player), as another person viewing the same content may imagine it slightly differently.

If we remove those text descriptions, and move everything to rogue-like map interfaces where the player is simply a character symbol, moving across a field of other symbols, we've lost what makes a MUD a unique type of game. You now have a different type of game. I'm not saying that other new game can't be great… but I wouldn't call it a MUD, any more than I'd call a movie a book.

This is where the fundamental breakdown in your reasoning occurs. You keep equating the replacement of "room descriptions" with ASCII/graphical maps as removing all text from the medium. That is not the case being discussed here. It is definitely not the case with my game in particular. It's a misconception I've been fighting against for years. Text has not been removed from the medium. There's just as much text to read as there ever was. The only thing that changed is descriptions of terrain have been de-emphasized in favor of descriptions about characters and objects, and their interactions with each other and the environment. I'm sure you were even aware of that distinction at one point, but you have this habit of stretching generalizations to their breaking points and beyond. You really are perpetuating the all of nothing false dilemma that plamzi mentioned.

So Quix, let me ask you this. Are blind-players who have a screen reader not playing a MUD then? Even if it was your mud? Because by your definition, your mud wouldn't be a "real mud" (substituting for real book). If someone were to have a screen-reader play Leather Goddess of Phobos or Hitchhiker's guide, would they not be playing the same game as you? If Audio books aren't the same as real books, then screen-readers are not the same as reading the text and your game is not longer a mud.

I know it may seem like I'm being obtuse and I'm really not. But the logic doesn't seem to follow, at least to me.

I guess that would depend on the screen reader. If the screen reader is reading the text without adding inflection (which may or may not be the same as you'd use in your own mental voice), then it's just changing the type of media. If, however, the screen reader uses heuristics to try and speak naturally, I'd have to ask who programmed it, and what their idea of "natural" was.

That's what I meant when I referred to audio books. These are narrated by humans, and in some cases the narrator is putting their own feelings and ideas into the spoken text. Consider a book you, youself, known and love. If asked to read that, would you read it with the same voice as an unknown text, or would you put emphasis and cadence that would make the narration reflect your own feelings about the story?



So, what you have is a graphic novel where the scene is depicted with pictures, and the narrative and action text is printed over that backdrop. I'm allowed to imagine how the characters feel, but I'm explicitly shown what the environment looks like?

Ok. If a screen-reader is changing the media, then how is ASCII art or maps not just changing the media? Is it because it is not showing you a wall of text (or not) saying what is in the forest (let's go with a forest).

Another question. So, if you MUD has color, as many do, and you use them in the description to denote something like the creepy trail, but creepy is in red and the rest of the text is in green, then a screen reader without inflection is going to lose that inflection, which is doing more than just changing the media. We all can look at that highlighting differently and interpret it differently. A screen reader is no different. And even going without color, however a player chooses to read the text will cause them to put their own inflection on it depending on their mood, time of day, etc…

Another question (x2). Let's say I use a mud client and go with MUSHclient and develop my own GUI for it, where I have windows and mappers, and such. Now, I've done it on my own and it has graphics for quick things I want to do. Am I no longer playing a MUD as you define it because I've gone off on my own, as a player, and developed something non-text based for it? Yes, I might still be showing the text of the mud in a window, but I've got other area's where graphics are showing (favorite spells, quick launch buttons which launch macros, etc…).

In fairness to quix people can't keep changing the context and calling it the same discussion. What players do with their clients is a lot different than how a dev represents their game when they're advertising it and developing content for it.

It's actually not that hard to come up with good, sensible definitions. A text-based game is a game designed to be experienced primarily as text. A text-based mud is an online text-based game. A text-based mud can have a hybrid client or even an all-graphical client. As long as it supports text-based clients, its text-based roots are intact. The definition of a mud has never been synonymous with 'text-based' or 'all-text'.

I agree, but his argument with the audio book is what got it started. It is still a book, even if it is read. It's the same context. He said a book is text, but an audio book isn't the same thing. The author of the book might not have wanted it to be an audio book, but the publisher did. So, they made it an audio book. (author = dev, publisher = player). It's still the book, just in a different way.

Which leads to how much text is it to be considered text-based? Room descriptions? That is where the big argument seems to be.

So, let's make up a cheesy description to demonstrate.

The leaf-strewn trail winds between a mix of gnarled oak and ghostly ash trees.  The sunlight seems to cautiously pick out an occasional patch of dry earth along the trail, or a jagged stump further into the woods.  A brief glimpse of blue to the east might be a lake.  A few rustling sounds suggest that you are not alone here, but hopefully the natives are just squirrels and other typical woodland critters.

Now, compare that to:

%%%+%%%
%%+%%%%
%%+%%%~
%%+%%%~
%%%+%%%
%%%+%%%
%%%%+%%

Do they convey the same information? Perhaps, if the flavor text really is just flavor text. Do they convey the same feeling? Hardly.



This is true, to a degree. In the above description, I think you can still get a sense that these woods are not happy smurf village woods, but rather mysterious woods that might be dangerous. How is the above map going to convey that?

I could make the following description apply to the same map:

The neatly trimmed stone path glistens white in the brilliant sunlight.  Majestic oak and gleaming ash compete to capture more of the joyous sunlight.  To the east, you catch a brief glimpse of cool water, perhaps a lake.  A few rustling noises are almost certainly over-fat squirrels, chasing one another through the fallen leaves.

As a developer, I have no control over what the player does on their own machine. I could force them to use my own client (which is NOT a bad idea, BTW), and thus have more control over how they see things, but some of the people here would cry that abandoning TELNET makes the game no longer a MUD.

As I already said above, I have no objections to ADDING maps. If you want pointy-click buttons instead of typing commands, by all means… likewise for health bars and other gimmicks. Removing text as the core of the game environment is a fundamental change in the game, and IMHO you should come up with a new name for your new multiplayer online genre.

For a 'text-based' game or client, it is enough to be able to say that the primary medium is text. We can even come up with a definition of an "all-text" game, which is incidentally the only kind of game that quixadhal feels is a MUD. An "all-text" game is one that uses no other medium except text. Not even ASCII art or ASCII maps, which would disqualify most MUDs ever created.

Screen readers would not change the fact that the game's sole medium by design is text. Text readers are audio clients' for a 'text-only game', just like a 3rd party plugin for WoW can be a text-based client for a graphical (by design) game.

If you operate under the belief that only an all-text game is a real MUD, then you're technically not even a traditionalist, because even the earliest MUDs contained ASCII art. More apt descriptions would be "purist" and "zealot".

Quix never said ASCII maps and art disqualified it. He specifically replacing descriptions with them made it no longer a mud but having both was OK.

If you want to carry his own logic through, you'll soon hit a wall. What he's basically saying is that a "real MUD" has to be able to deliver every aspect of the experience in text. Now think about this for a moment. It means that you can't just *replace* the information that something is a mob or a room item using *visual* indicators like ANSI colors. You should be able to deliver this information in text as well. That's taking his point to its logical extreme.

My point is that a poorly designed mud with bad graphics, horrid sound, and awful text is still a mud.
And no matter how well "Madden Football 2012" is designed and how well it uses different kinds of media, it isn't a mud at all.