What is so great about playing MUDs?
2025-10-07
I realised I never explained what a MUD is and what makes it great. This is somewhat subjective so it makes sense that I provide my own perspective.
(The Aardwolf review that I promised will have to wait a bit.)
A MUD is a multi user dungeon, meaning a text-based adventure game that you play with others. It's all text, and usually played using a telnet-client. And a telnet-client is a piece of software that enables you to interact with remote computer systems using only text. It's 1970's tech basically, from before desktop environment and 3D graphics became the norm.
So you connect to this MUD, using telnet, and everything you can do in this MUD is done by writing text commands, and everything that happens is written on the screen with text. There is no graphics, no audio, or anything else. And the text just flows from bottom to top like scrolling slowly through a wikipedia article, except that at any point, while the words appear, line by line, you can choose to interact with whatever is happening right now in the game.
Say a goblins enters the room that you are in. You can choose to "look goblin" to get a more detailed description of the creature from the game. Or you can choose to "kill goblin" if you are the murderous sort. Or if any other player enters the room, you can choose to "say" something like "Hey Anton, how's the battle against the goblins going?"
Each MUD have hundreds of commands that enables you to interact with many of the game mechanics of the game. Talking, battling, crafting, exploring, managing you loot, buying from vendors, and so on. And often there is a detailed built-in help you can read to figure out how each command works.
The most common type of MUD is a hack 'n slash type of game derived from the original Dungeons and Dragons. You know, orcs, dwarves, elves, humans battling goblins, dragons, demons, in a medieval type of fantasy setting. You gain experience from killing and doing other tasks, gain levels from the experience, learn new spells or skills from each level and find new weapons to use. That sort of thing.
There are other types of MUDs as well, though they are less common overall, MUSH being the main variant. It stands for Multi-User Shared Hallucination and is more about actual roleplaying, telling stories, and social interaction, and less about killing goblins. And then there are MOOs, the Object-Oriented variant that sounds very flexible in creating environments, but I know little about them. MUCKS (Multi-User Construction Kit) are in the same vein, I think.
And obviously, each MUD is free to change anything they want. Want a sci-fi setting instead of fantasy? Write one! Think battling in spaceships sounds more fun than running around with swords and sorcery? Sure, just change the code to have space ships instead! All that is needed is some imagination, writing skills, and a bit of flair for programming or light scripting (depending on how extensive the changes you want to make need to be).
So, what makes a MUD great?
To me, it's the immersion and world-building combined with hands-on gameplay of exploring and interacting with the world. It's like reading a book, except I get to choose the direction of the plot at any time!
Sure, you can do all those things in World of Warcraft as well, but a MUD is not limited by the poor graphics at the time of the game's release. Adding new stuff is as simple as writing and change the code a bit. In a sense, a MUD is the most pure form of multiplayer gaming. The graphics will never look ugly, since it's all in my head.
It is this allure being able to be anything I can think of, in any world I want to be in, with other people. World of Warcraft has much more limited choices in that regard, though I accept that it is also a much easier game to get into.
So that's basically it. MUDs are the forerunner of modern MMOs and basically invented the genre that Everquest and WoW popularized. And then nothing more happened. I think there is still a lot of untapped potential in MUDs, especially if we ditch the common tropes of killing monsters and grinding levels, and think about what other type of games could be built in a purely text-based environment. And not only that, how about adopting some of the more modern modes of text-presentation and input, something that would work on mobile and yet still retain the pureness of "text-only"? That's what I've been thinking about lately. Maybe it's just pipe dream, but I think the journey towards it will be an interesting one nevertheless. And a oldschool MUD with all the tropes might be as good a starting point as any for experimentation with text-based games of the future. That's why I'm creating one from scratch. More on that later!
See you around!