are MUDs and MOOs dead?

I thought MUDs and MOOs were dead… or at least only used by the same folks who have been using them since the 80s or the new folks that have to play with them for some academic enterprise. The only folks that i know who use MUDs and MOOs are academics – the folks who have been studying them. Sometimes, i wonder if they are studying each other engage in what MUDs and MOOs are supposed to be about.

Anyhow, does anyone have a good status report on MUDs and MOOs?

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10 thoughts on “are MUDs and MOOs dead?”

  1. Yoz

    I’m only a casual MOOer on a couple of different ones, and while Lambda still has a good rate of new signups, the number of people online at once seems to be slowly dropping. However, new MOOs and MUSHes are still popping up, and there’s lots of interesting development going on (such as enCore). Lambda has aged pretty well, with ARB elections and policy ballots still happening, and it’s now the kind of solid old community with a reliable amount of inbred bitterness and progress-resistant longevity, much like the WELL.

  2. Jacob Haller

    This is just anecdotal:

    A bunch of people I know through USENET have experimented with various means of realtime communication. There was an IRC channel for a while, but there were some people who were very vocal about preferring a MOO or MUD. So eventually someone set up LambdaMOO someplace, opened it for public use and the ICR channel died. The LambdaMOO installation still is going pretty strong; most of the time there are probably 5-20 people logged in at a time. People use it for socializing, for playing Scrabble, and for creating objects to annoy each other with.

    Of course, USENET is probably dead too.

  3. Christopher Allen

    No, MOO’s and Mud’s aren’t dead. Check out http://www.mudconnector.com — it lists 1785 mud listings, and it uses some type of “ping” software to see if they go offline. This service doesn’t include MOOs which are harder to find as they tend to have smaller number of people (most MOOs and MUSHes have serious Dunbar limits).

    There are also some commercial Muds that have large numbers of users. Simutronics had over 30K users for their text MUD in 2000, and I hear they’ve grown since then. Achaea is a “free” mud where you can buy your special items and gold from the game masters.

    My own firm, Skotos, offers a number of commercial onlinte text games. Two are a more traditional Mud-like games – The Eternal City, and Grende’s Revenge. Castle Marrach is our oldest game, and is very MUSH-like.

  4. Imran Ali

    One of my colleagues speculated on whether IM clients could provide a new social UI for MUDs…using the text-based chat UIs coupled with members of your buddy lists…maybe introducing MUDs and text-based adventures (such as the Infocom stories) to a new audience?

  5. Doctor Paradox

    I MOOed years ago, trailed off with it and just recently joined up at LambdaMOO, which appears alive and kicking. I think the most fascinating aspects of MOOs/MUDs/MUSHes are

    a) gender – it is awesome what people are doing to create, re-create, perform gender there. There are more available pronoun options than there are flavors of toothpaste in the supermarket aisle, and if none of them appeal to you, you can create some new ones.

    b) metaphysics – the entire concept of getting to create the world you inhabit. It is not merely optional – it IS the game itself, to create and participate. As you say – you can’t ‘lurk’ on a MOO and hope to understand it. It’s a powerful philosophy, a dose of which American couch potato society could use. Also noteworthy is that most MMORPGs are kill and destroy games, whereas most MOOs are focused on creating objects and people instead of destroying them – more useful philosophy, in my book.

    I think social networks could benefit from incorporating MOO-like architecture into their services. Tribe.net and myspace have it over Friendster in the sense that there is something to DO there – but still I don’t really get the sense that I can truly ‘hang out’ in a forum or bulletin board. It feels very separate to watch threads on a forum, but being on a MOO feels like ‘being there.’ It captures that demension of absorption that social networks don’t yet have, for me.

  8. Doctor Paradox

    The thing about blogs is that you can’t ‘see’ who else is there when you are. There is no realtime element. Which is great, to have discourse divorced from silly space-time constraints that are, like, so 2003. On the other hand, i find myself craving a space to have these kinds of discussions both many-to-many and in realtime. Less like IM, more like the old BBSes. MOOs/MUDs offer that realtime ‘immersion/absorption’ element, but having spent more time there now i am agreeing with danah that ‘alive and kicking’ may mean alive and kicking to the established communities who have been there for years already, and not so much growing and finding new members. But i think that the concept of a user-created world/experience is still useful and interesting. i want to empower the Fakesters – the ones thinking outside the box – not squash them.

    Also noting that as a geek and a developer i am caught in a frame problem and have less ability to speak for the average user (more work needed here), but i am dreaming of some technology that will let users have more control about creating the spaces which they inhabit. Blogging and social networks (et al) are empowering otherwise non-technically-minded users to self-express using the web as medium. i want to go beyond self-expression and give users the ability to build things that are useful to them, their organizations and their communities, without having to know all the mechanics of programming. Think Hypercard for the web, but better. 🙂 Trying to get users to define what they want to do with their data and how they want to structure their interactions is non-trivial. Empowering users to define and develop at least some subset of those functions on their own without needing me as web developer intermediary all the time would be very useful.

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