Mu* and history and time
-
Y’know, I’ve been a lurker on this site (and the predecessor) for a long time now. I never really felt like taking a side, or voicing an opinion with any discussion, but this one caught my eye. Then again, perhaps I’m just getting so old I need to start putting my two cents in. So, here is my opinion, take it, burn it, throw shade at it, or move along.
As someone who’s been around since nearly the dawn of MU*ing (1995 at the tender age of 23), the idea of archiving old sites, logs, and games that have long since passed is not something that I have ever really considered before. The games I played within have lived, breathed, they have had a life, and then they died, and you move on to the next one. The logs that I enjoyed, I kept, I archived for my own perusal, though even those I can honestly say I have never read over again, and were the first to be deleted as space was needed. (In older computers, kids, you use to have to worry about that!)
I am not one to get sentimental over things, and as a result the idea of a kind of archaeological repository for future generations to find and enjoy isn’t something that I have ever thought of, or about. You are correct in the fact that history tends to forget about the every day life and focus more on the grandeur scheme of things. I guess, for those that really want to have this world, this environment, that we have created to remain, for those that have children, teach them about it. It’s always upon the next generation to learn, and keep it all going for future generations to discover and rediscover.
As far as the last question? If this hobby didn’t exist, if I hadn’t started gaming, I would never have met my husband, gotten married, and enjoyed thirty (plus) years of cooperative story-telling. So, yes, it has been worth while, the good, the bad, the ugly.
Right. My two cents.
-
Archive.org may have already captured some of your game’s wiki, but it’s not terribly clever about which bits it records.
Login-only stuff like the old WORA and SWOFA are probably just gone if the one or two people who made captures don’t share them or lost them.
I lament the loss of a collection of scanned drawings I had, from back when the internet barely had pictures on it and we used FTP to exchange character art. I still have the drive they’re on, somewhere, but no way to open it myself.
From a professional archivist sort of standpoint, this has always been a problem. People don’t record a lot of everyday life, and what they do produce is often the shit we call ephemera, and gets thrown away shortly after it’s used. TTRPGs produce a shitload of it. Researchers and museum goers love it. Inexplicably, my brother has managed to keep every concert ticket stub from every show he’s ever been to since Mötley Crüe in 1986 or something. In keeping with her character, a friend has every birthday card she have ever received. You know you wanna look at that shit. Alas, digital environments make it even more ephemeral.
-
Archive.org may have already captured some of your game’s wiki, but it’s not terribly clever about which bits it records.
Login-only stuff like the old WORA and SWOFA are probably just gone if the one or two people who made captures don’t share them or lost them.
i don’t think anybody even like peripherally involved with WORA MUSHes anymore and last I heard Spider was creeping on Tumblr or something
edit: Im pretty sure at one time there was an actual WORA Wiki but as best i can remember it was deleted by somebody who hostile takeovered the site or something like that?
-
an actual WORA Wiki
Thenomain’s still around, but I think he’s the last person of admin-level around from that era. Lord knows if he’s kept anything.
-
I have, on occasion, wanted to do video essay deep dives into THE CULTURE, if for no other reason than to have it compiled and learn about some of the history (and maybe serve as advertising for the community?)
But oh god do I not know where to even start.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst Do a video about Jill in the style of those Jeff the Killer or Slenderman videos. 🤭
-
@Jennkryst You should.
Lol now I kind of want to write a book about the history of MUSHes, even though it would basically only appeal to the tiniest of audiences.
-
@Faraday If you don’t have a Jill the Guest or a Bane section, I will riot.
I don’t know what I’m doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
-
@Faraday If you don’t have a Jill the Guest or a Bane section, I will riot.
I don’t have enough WORA/Hogpit tea to do it justice.
-
-
I’m not really a MUSHer, or at least I wouldn’t describe myself that way, but I do consider myself a part of “this hobby”. I would more broadly consider myself a text-gamer or a MU*er. I’m making that distinction since the OP focuses mostly on MUSH history. I’ve played MUSH and happily would again, but it’s not the main kind of text-game I play.
So with that perspective in mind, I don’t think this hobby will ever really be consigned to the annals of history, because I think that text-games scratch a very specific itch that no amount of graphics can ever fully replace. They used to be more popular before graphical games took over, but the people who still play them now are those who actually always liked the genre just for what it was, not simply because it was all we had available.
What may happen (and has already been happening for a very long time) is that it evolves, and I think that’s fine, and good, and not a tragedy. It’s why I don’t really call myself a MUSHer. There are many other kinds of games that fulfil the same function that MUSHes do.
In terms of preserving history, I think that what would interest me most would be any kind of effort to try and trace the history of that exact evolution. From the first game that called itself a MUD, to the first game that called itself a MUSH; to authors and academics who’ve tried to write about the hobby in various ways, to varying degrees of success; all the major forums and websites and chat servers where fans of the hobby have congregated, even major schisms like the the MSB/BMD split; various controversies over the years like MUDs with exploitative business models, plagiarism and copyright allegations, child-safety concerns, GenAI, attitudes towards played-bys, art commissions, accessibility awareness; PvE vs PvP perspectives, and other game design philosophies; MU* taxonomy, clients, engines, and ways the genre has shifted over time from exclusively text-based to incorporating graphics.
I think this would be beneficial because despite how fractured the hobby is, it’s a lot larger, historied, and interconnected than many people realise. MUSH players could benefit from learning more about alternative mediums like RP-focused MUDs, and vice versa. There’s so much multi-directional influence that many people, including myself, aren’t aware of. (I literally don’t know what a MOO or MUCK is.) Maybe an effort to catalogue that kind of history could encourage more cross-pollination, and invigorate the hobby.
The day-to-day stories that were lost, I personally care less about. Books are infinite, stories are infinite, but maybe this thread has inspired me to think more about ways the history of the medium itself could be preserved.
As for the last question, I’ll be honest: I’ve definitely spent more time in specific corners of this hobby than was beneficial or healthy for me, but I don’t regret my participation altogether, and will continue to participate.
-
In terms of preserving history, I think that what would interest me most would be any kind of effort to try and trace the history of that exact evolution.
A lot of that already exists for the early stuff. The evolution from the cave game to MUDs to MUSHes is pretty well documented. Iron Realms has a good summary. The Wikipedia MUD page has a lot too.
I agree with you that the hobby will probably never die completely.
I’m not as convinced that there’s as much to learn from the other subgenres. I was recently in some discussions with folks who do more MUDs/RPIs, and I felt like we didn’t have very much in common. In fact, the goals were often in direct opposition. Even when I tried to write the MUSH 101 tutorial to introduce folks who had never MUSHed before, it was almost impossible to make broad generalizations. And that was just among “MUSHes”.
-
It’s funny reading this IRE History because … they get it wrong. They said AOL had a “pay to play” model and IRE was the first one to do it for free. But AOL’s model (at least in so far as a few of their games, Modus Operandi comes to mind, and I think there was a dragon-something game too) originally WAS free to play, and then they switched to pay to play and THAT was a catastrophy. I was an early adopter of Achaea and played from the very beginning; that it was free to play is a bit of a joke, since you couldn’t walk out of safe rooms without getting killed repeatedly by people who spent hundreds of dollars on credits lol
ETA: Unless of course they meant AOL’s fee, which was per hour and then went to a monthly flat. I think that was around the time that the MUDs on the platform started doing pay-to-play.
-
They said AOL had a “pay to play” model and IRE was the first one to do it for free.
Where did you read this? There’s talk of Gemstone III running on GEnie, but I don’t see anything about AOL being pay-to-play other than a vague reference to its switch from hourly to monthly dialup rates.
Also, they don’t say IRE was the first one to do it for free, period, since the first games (like Colossal Cave) were free. They said they were the first to do a free game with micro-transactions.
I don’t actually know much about the early commercial text games. When they say:
Players paid between six and twelve dollars per hour to access it, which sounds absurd today but reflected the genuine cost of network infrastructure at the time. … By 1995, the pay-per-hour model was generating real revenue for a handful of studios.
How did that actually work, logistically, in an era before reliable online payment systems? I’ve heard of paid BBS systems, but I never gave much thought to how they got their money.
-
two of the MUDs i used to play, Ancient Anguish and Bat, are still around and are both more than 30 and that’s kind of nuts
-
Yeah IRE’s “free-to-play” model was always incredibly predatory. I actually think how they treat both their “volunteers” and even paid staff might be worse. But that’s a rant for another thread and another day.
-
How did that actually work, logistically, in an era before reliable online payment systems? I’ve heard of paid BBS systems, but I never gave much thought to how they got their money.
You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.
Yeah IRE’s “free-to-play” model was always incredibly predatory. I actually think how they treat both their “volunteers” and even paid staff might be worse. But that’s a rant for another thread and another day.
I was a volunteer on IRE! Ask me anything lol I never had an issue as a volunteer, except for other players. I also knew Matt Mihaly and some of his team. They were nice people (at least to me) and I never heard any complaints from the paid staff. But I’m sure it happened, and I’m sure that some paid staff and volunteers had bad experiences, if only because it was really the wild west era of MUDing and in general some people are terrible to other people online.
I do think the model was predatory, but I believe that about any micro-transaction sort of situation. I spent a considerable amount of money on IRE games and never got anywhere, mostly because I didn’t understand how to make triggers.
-
Also in the era of fuck around and find out with the webbersite and interweebs, you got to get a bill for all those hours you logged. All that fun, glorious fun, that cost you more than your paycheck.
Good times. Good times.
-
You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.
I don’t know if it applies to the early MUs but I know some services also billed through one’s ISP.
I think I still owe my dad a hundred bucks or so from that period… -
I was a volunteer on IRE! Ask me anything lol I never had an issue as a volunteer, except for other players. I also knew Matt Mihaly and some of his team. They were nice people (at least to me) and I never heard any complaints from the paid staff. But I’m sure it happened, and I’m sure that some paid staff and volunteers had bad experiences, if only because it was really the wild west era of MUDing and in general some people are terrible to other people online.
I do think the model was predatory, but I believe that about any micro-transaction sort of situation. I spent a considerable amount of money on IRE games and never got anywhere, mostly because I didn’t understand how to make triggers.
I was also IRE staff. The team I was in had more backstabbing and politics than Game of Thrones. I wasn’t too heavily involved, because I was 18 and real life was still new and exciting and full of promise that didn’t depend on the whims of pretend-Gods online. But for instance I watched multiple “volunteers” being cajoled into essentially working a full-time job at that company, unpaid, expected to be on-call all day, all for the promise of a dangled carrot of maybe, just maybe, if you keep up all this hard work, we might consider you for a paid position. And the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve looked back, the more I’ve realised how incredibly fucked up and completely disgusting that was.I mean they pick these volunteers from a crop of the most dedicated/addicted players who have generally spent a lot of money on this game, invested their identity into it, are desperate for approval, and then keep milking that need through the false promise that there’s a chance that if they keep buying in like that, and in fact even harder since they’re not even players/customers anymore, but staff with duties, then they might eventually end up recouping their investment, turning their addiction/hobby into their dream job. Take into account the wealth disparity that some of these hopeful volunteers weren’t American, but earning below the American equivalent of minimum wage in their countries, and they really believed an IRE Producer’s salary could be their golden ticket.
Then there’s the whole ego aspect of being in this parasocial position where other players refer to you as a God, and I know because I was one. It wasn’t just IC, I had a full-on fanclub who would get excited anytime I dropped even a single syllable their way. That kind of power-dynamic weirded me out and made me intensely uncomfortable, but what concerned me even more was to see other Gods so readily leaning into it, in-game and off-game too.
Whole thing was unhealthy for everyone involved IMO, and since I have friends still involved with IRE, I know it’s not completely a thing of the past.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login