What is a MUD anyway?

William Astle

May 27, 2006

The term MUD is an acronym for Multi-User Dungeon or Domain or Dimension
according to Wikipedia. This is all well and good, but what, exactly, does
that mean? Well, historically, a MUD has been a combination of a realtime
chat room and a roleplaying game with the computer as the dungeonmaster or
controller. One could say it's a primitive form of artificial reality, one
which relies on the imagination. On the other hand, MUDs have evolved
significantly since the early days. There are still the classic text based
games, which I will refer to as classic MUDs. But now we see a move toward
having specific client software to connect to the game where the client
software takes care of all the messy details of rendering the current game
state to the player while the server merely takes care of arbitrating the
game. Even so, these are still recognizable as MUDs when the fancy skins are
removed. But all this does not help us define just what a MUD is.

MUDs have several points which define them. These are described below.

Multiplayer. A MUD must be multiplayer over a network. Most notably, a MUD
will be played over the Internet. This says nothing about how players come
to connect to the game, only that the game must be multiplayer.

Simulation. All MUDs are simulations of a sort. That is, they try to define
a reality that all the action takes place in. This reality does not have to
be particularly elegant nor does it need to be a simulation in the classic
sense where the entirety of the reality is simulated right down to how
different objects interact with each other. In fact, MUDs are generally not
total simulations but rather provide only enough to allow the player's
imagination to supply the actual simulation. There simply is not enough
computing power for a full scale simulation to be feasable anyway. Classic
MUDs use text to describe what is going on while graphical MUDs attempt to
depict the action graphically but they may also use text descriptions.

Centralized. All MUDs have the concept of a server to which the players
connect. This server may be a single machine somewhere running a MUD daemon
or it might be a server farm running highly specialized software. Either
way, there is a central point of authority that defines the game and all
players must be connected to that central authority. This gives the server
absolute control over the game dynamics.

Roleplaying. There is an element of roleplaying to MUDs. They are not
intended to merely be a substitute for reality. In general, players will not
be playing as their own selves but rather take on a role that they portray
while playing the game. Thus, a MUD has the concept of characters that are
controlled by the players. This concept applies more in meatspace than in
the game implementation itself but any implementation that prevents
free-form roleplaying will generally not be considered a MUD.

Interactivity. Every MUD has a level of interactivity that goes outside the
world that is being simulated. Players can generally chat with each other
over public or private channels even while not being in the same location in
the game. This emphasizes the fact that it is a game rather than a
replacement for life. In fact, one could liken private one-on-one chats and
other mostly private communication channels with telepathy as that's how it
would appear in real life if people could simply send messages to each other
without the benefit of some sort of technology such as the telephone.

Realtime. The simulation in the game progresses in realtime. That is, time
continues whether the player is connected or not. It also continues
regardless of whether a player is thinking or not. This is contrasted with
the concept of turns that often appears in single player computer games.
Thus, while one player plots his move, all other players may continue to
play unimpeded. Note that this does not necessarily imply that time passes
at the same rate in the game as in real life, merely that time passes no
matter what is going on.

NPC. Non player characters are characters that populate the simulated world.
These characters allow players to interact with them in various ways from
fighting with them to commerce. Sometimes, a rudimentary AI will be present
that will allow players to carry on some level of conversation with the NPC.
NPCs are a staple of MUDs as without them, the worlds would be baren and
uninteresting, no matter how well the simulation is implemented.

One can apply all the analogies one wants, but in the end, pretty much
anything that has the preceding conditions met is a MUD, or at least similar
enough that it might as well be considered a sibling or descendant.

There is a great deal of room for variation, even within these concepts.
This allows for an amazing variety of types from the classic MUD to the
massively multiplayer online roleplaying games with fancy graphical
interfaces. No doubt in the future MUDs will look quite a bit different than
they do today as computing and networking technology advances.