Mu* and history and time
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.
I figured that part, I was wondering about the logistics of how they got paid. The infrastructure for shopping online was still in its infancy then.
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@Faraday Cheque or money order (or cash) sent through the mail, most likely. Along with a unique identifier, like a username or account number.
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@Pavel Yeah that’s why I was curious. Sending in a check every month to pay an hourly MUD bill seems wild to me
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@Faraday You weren’t paying for the MUD, not really. On AOL, you were paying for the hours you used to dial up. The games themselves were free. I believe the same thing for Gemstone on GEnie, you were paying for GEnie and not for Gemstone itself.
@kestrel you had a different experience than I did. No one ever promised me a paid position with IRE, or dangled it in front of me. I did spend a lot of money on the game but I was pretty young, stupid, and didn’t have any parental oversight. I don’t know how much money I spent, but I didn’t have a job so it couldn’t have been that much, it just felt like a lot of money for someone who didn’t really have any. I was also a God (Cassiopeia), I think on Aetolia but it might’ve been Imperian. Maybe I wasn’t a great one, I surely didn’t have a fanclub.
I’m not saying that IRE MUDs weren’t toxic or the things you are saying didn’t happen though. I dealt with a ton of toxicity as a player and was admittedly pretty toxic myself back then. I have a lot of bad memories, but a lot of good ones too. And all in all, it was 20+ years ago now and I’d like to think I grew from it. I’m not discounting your experience, just telling my own. I think the things you are expressing aren’t exclusive to IRE though.
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Huh, kinda heartening to realize there was at least one exploitative online RP experience I didn’t get mauled by. Saluting you vets of that era.
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