Mu* and history and time
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@Jennkryst Do a video about Jill in the style of those Jeff the Killer or Slenderman videos. 🤭
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@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.
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@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
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@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.
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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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