Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Shout Out to MUDs
July 18, 2007

While finalizing my preparations for this weekend's ALA Techsource Gaming, Learning and Libraries Symposium, I had to pop back on to the MUD I used to haunt in college to grab some code. If that sentence stops making sense about halfway through, do not despair. Here is the lowdown on MUDs and why I think they are still a valid and valueable part of educational "gaming" (a.k.a. learning that doesn't suck).

To start, what is a MUD? In brief, it is a Multi-User Dungeon - an online, multi-player game that is entirely text based. Think World of Warcraft where you had to read the description of the landscape and type in all of your commands. Since there are other people playing in the same world as you, the game is made more complex by the social, economic, and political interactions that come with a community.

So why was I back on the MUD? Well, back in college I was an administrator on the game. A "Wizard" as they tend to be called. That meant that I was involved in content creation. The code I wrote was displayed as rooms in the game for players. Creating worlds...very cool! At the symposium, I will be talking about Interactive Fiction mainly in its guise as text adventure games. I wanted to grab a code snippet from the MUD to show what the backend code looked like from a C varient LPMUD in 1997 as compared to the original DUNGEN code written at MIT in FORTRAN in the late 1970s. Both of these computer langauges are then contrasted with the ease of content creation found in the powerful Interactife Fiction development engines of today. But that, as they say, is another story.

So anyway, a shout out to anyone reading this who may have been (or may still be) a MUDder!

Posted by Chris Harris on July 18, 2007 | Comments (0)