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Role Playing (Games) Classic Games (Games)

The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword 64

Posted by Zonk from the qwerty-keys-flying-everywhere dept.
Wired has an article up which harkens back to the days of yore, when men played Zork and women congregated in MUDs and MOOs. The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword takes a look at the still extant realms of the text-based virtual space. From the article: "For me, asking why I play a MU (multi-user text game) when I could play EverQuest is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story..."
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The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword More

The Keyboard is Mightier Than The Sword

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  • Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @05:39PM (#12121717) Journal
    is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story

    Because you can check out the book for free from the library (MUD) while the movie costs money (EverQuest).

    Duh!

    • Re:Analogy (Score:5, Funny)

      by Shazow ( 263582 ) <{andrey.petrov} {at} {shazow.net}> on Saturday April 02, 2005 @05:42PM (#12121740) Homepage
      My friend claims that "books are the weakest form of storytelling" (in primary comparison to film). I want to kill my friend, but I haven't been able to get him over international waters just yet.

      • Re:Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @05:58PM (#12121845) Homepage Journal
        "books are the weakest form of storytelling"

        I sort of agree, because it leaves more power for the reader. In other words, viewing a movie is a weaker experience, because so much has already been done for him/her.

        • Are we talking about the various media's comparative strengths in terms of their ability to pull you into their world and make you think, or their ability to whack your brain with a blunt object so you don't have to worry about it functioning for a while?

          (Not to make a statement about what media are stronger than others. . . the popular crap is just as crappy in literature as it is in film, and I consider my favorite movies to be just as great as my favorite books.)

        • Re:Analogy (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Meagermanx ( 768421 )
          Well I would say that technically the movie would be much stronger than the book, for storytelling alone, because the movie shows exactly what is going on and conveys what happens better. Who steps where, who says what in what tone, etcetera. Nothing is left up to your imagination.
          When you read a book however, you imagine what is going on, so it makes the story more real to you. Everyone imagines their own version of Gollum, and that version, which is a collection of your own fears, experiences, and thought
      • Your friend is on crack ... film, written word and television all facilitate telling different types of stories. An effective movie does not always make an effective book nor an effective TV show. Books are a space based medium so a very rich and complex story can be told with no regard to length. A movie is limited to 90 minutes to 180 minutes [there are exceptions] thus is limited in scope to how much it can develop and a much more delicate balance is required between plot/character development. Telev

    • Snobbery (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sgant ( 178166 )
      It's almost a universal snobbery that inhabits the world...where people will always say "the book was better than the movie". Why can't the two artforms exist on an even keel?

      There exist movies that are better as a visual form than any book. Movies that convey emotion and character that no book, no matter how eloquent the author, could never approach. Stanley Kubrick once said "If it can be written or thought; it can be filmed". This is true.

      Yes, there are many many examples of books turned into movies th

      • Re:Snobbery (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @09:16PM (#12123164)
        Movies that are made from books are never as good as the original.
        Books that are made from movies are never as good as the original.
        T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.
        Movie spinoffs of TV shows are never as good as the TV show.
        Video games made from books, movies, or TV shows are LAME.
        Movies, books, and TV shows made from video games pretty much always suck.

        It's not that one medium is better than another, it's that the stuff that works well in one medium doesn't necessarily work out so well in others. Certain things just won't work in some media - imagine trying to turn The Matrix into a book. Those fight scenes would be B-O-R-I-N-G.
        • "Movies, books, and TV shows made from video games pretty much always suck."
          I disagree with the last one.
          Do the Mario!!
          Right guys? Guys?

        • Re:Snobbery (Score:4, Insightful)

          by SirBruce ( 679714 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @10:03PM (#12123485) Homepage
          >T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.

          Buffy the Vampire Slayer disproves this rule.

          Bruce
          • If anything, isn't Buffy the exception that proves the rule? I heard that the movie was originally written to be a lot more like how the TV show was done, but the movie's producers forced the director to tone the camp level down so much that it just destroyed the whole thing. Plus, the whole thing just needs far more space than you really get with ninety minutes to two hours.

            But otherwise, I agree. The movie was terrible, the TV show was one of the best ever.
            • the movie's producers forced the director to tone the camp level down

              The movie was far more campy (and less serious) than the TV show, and worse off for it.
        • Movies that are made from books are never as good as the original.

          I have a counter-example: The Tenant.
          I first saw the movie [imdb.com], from Roman Polanski. One of the best movies I ever saw.

          Years later, I read the book, from Roland Topor, which is a pretty good book. I got amazed as how well the book was translated to the screen. We always complain that the book has so many more elements that can't fit in a two hour movie (LOTR anywone?), but amazingly every tiny aspect of the book was there. Polanski did a geniu
        • T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.
          In the case of StarGate - I'd have to stay the T.V. spinoff is BETTER than the movie.

          Of course for every StarGate and Buffy, you have your "Uncle Buck", "Gung Ho" and probably lots of others I can't recall.

          The problem is - when you take a story that has come to an end like "Gung Ho" and try to milk it - there is no material left - so you get dreck.

        • T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.

          M*A*S*H. The movie was good but the show was better.

        • This is basically true, but many counter examples exist. Fight Club was improved in it's transition to the big screen. Arguably The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption were as good at the books. I'm sure there will be a generation of people saying that The Lord of the Rings movies are better than the books in that they cut out some of the fat, a view with which I agree.

          The Running Man movie was better than the book. Stand By Me... Why is Stephen King coming up so often?

          Battlefield Earth was hideou
          • It's interesting that a lot of the examples of better movies are situations where one might realy not even consider reading the book.

            It's been described as "un-american" to have not seen The Godfather, but the book though probably good in its own right is completly overshadowed and almost forgotten (I know of noone my age (23) who has read the book).

            With Fight Club, a movie made from a book that did not permiate every bit of society got a lot of hype, and many people probably didn't realize it was even a
          • I disagree regarding Starship Troopers. The movie is ok, but in a tongue in cheek sort of way. The book had interesting bits regarding military culture that the movie misses, for obvious reasons. The way the drops are done, or the suits is totally unlike what you get from reading the book (the book does it in a more engaging way). It also misses the Heinlein right-winged pseudo-libertarian retoric (the insects were an allegory for Communists) and replaces it with a tongue in cheek parody of a Fascist societ

          • Jaws was a much better movie that its book.

          • Star Wars: KOTR is much better than Star Wars: TPM or TCW.

            It isn't based on them, either. KOTR is before any star wars movie.

            Tim Burton's Batman was better than pretty much all of the batmen that came before that time.

            But not The Dark Knight Returns, from 5 years earlier.

            Starship Troopers was more entertaining as a movie than the short story upon which it is based.

            Books in excess of 250 pages are never "short stories".
        • Movies that are made from books are never as good as the original.

          Forest Gump was far, far better as a movie than book.

          "Never as good as" is an empty phrase, because it leaves open the possibility of being worse or better. All you've effectively said is "Different things are non-identical to each other", which doesn't convey anything meaningful.
      • Allthough I'm not very literate, I have read my share of books in the past.
        Thinking of movies, converted from/based on books, I can't really come up with one... Besides maybe 'A Clockwork Orange', which I read in highschool and did not like too much (then again, I might not have been ready for the type of english used at that time, being non-native english speaking and all) ; But absolutely love the movie.

        I am curious on what your (as you said, personal) opinions are on where movie translations came out b

      • I just thought I should point out, it's thought by many (all opinion, of course) that The Shining by Steven King and 2001 by Clarke are competent (but only that) genre books, and Kubrick's film versions are vastly superior.
      • It's almost a universal snobbery that inhabits the world...where people will always say "the book was better than the movie". Why can't the two artforms exist on an even keel?

        If nothing else, people are willing to invest much more time in reading a book. There aren't a lot of worthwhile books which you can crank through in the ~2 hours that a typical movie takes. In order to fit a story into those two hours, quite a lot of the original book's contents are interpreted, ignored, condensed, or otherwise whi
    • That's not a fair analogy.

      Checking a book out from the library isn't a fair analysis. That's like comparing a bicycle with a borrowed car.

      Compare a $30 book that provides eight hours of entertainment with a $10 (or less) movie that provides a couple hours of entertainment. Or a $30 book with a $20 DVD or $18 CD or a $50 game or a $15 MMORPG subscription.

      In my experience, MUDs are more clique-ish than MMORPGs and can often consist of much more inane chatting than game playing. Also, a lot of the good MUDS
    • Many quality commerical MUDs require a monthly fee to play. DragonRealms/GemStoneIII http://www.play.net/ [play.net], for example, costs $15 a month for a standard account (as much as EQ, SWG, WoW, DAoC, ETC.) and $75! a month for a Platinum account, which many people are happy to pay. On top of this is the extensive buying and selling of in game items, money and charcters which sometimes go for hundreds and even thousands of dollars! Simutronics has been going strong since the early/mid 90s.. No other MMORPG has su

  • TinyTIM Needs Food Badly! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    telnet://yay.tim.org:5440 [tim.org]

  • MudConnector, TopMudSites, & MU* Hosting (Score:5, Informative)

    by SilverThorn ( 133151 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @06:09PM (#12121903) Homepage
    For those looking to get interested into the lost art of MUDDING (and the secret art of MUDSEX), take a look at these sites for finding a game to play on:

    The Mud Connector: http://www.mudconnector.com/ [mudconnector.com]
    TopMudSites.com: http://www.topmudsites.com/ [topmudsites.com]

    And for those that wish to become admins of their own online MU* world and seeking cheap, reliable MU* hosting services, check out:

    MURPE Online Game Hosting Services: http://www.murpe.com/hosting/ [murpe.com]

    -- M

  • TinyCWRU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cei ( 107343 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @06:32PM (#12122055) Homepage Journal
    Any of the old TinyCWRU crew around on slashdot? I'm guessing Crocker. Any others? I'm sorry to see that tinymush.org seems to be gone. It was a blast to login to TinyCWRU as recently as a couple of years back and still be able to use characters created ~1990... Anyone know if somebody has inherited the database?

  • a minor perspective or two on MUD advantages (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02, 2005 @06:39PM (#12122097)
    muds are user/volunteer driven, not corporate driven, so you can have a lot more freedom and variety in your environments and gameplay styles.
    hack-n-slash exists for those who like it, but so does role-playing-ONLY muds. you won't see one of those from a company trying to sell you pretty visuals and/or high-end, overly-priced graphics hardware.

    MUDs don't demand other high-end, expensive hardware like super-fast CPUs and 256MB+ of RAM.
    not to mention 1-2GB of HDD space. they're also dialup friendly, not requiring one to find the non-ubiquitous broadband service in one's area, and pay as much or more per month for the internet connection as the game itself, like you would for mmorpgs.

    playing text muds actually teaches you typing a lot better than most commercial or free typing tutor software.

    playing a mud also tends to teach you the very basics of computer logic, due to the command line format/style.

    And of course, MUDs tend to be free...

  • Wasn't it really.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @06:54PM (#12122168)
    "men played Zork and women congregated in MUDs and MOOs. "

    Wasn't it really: "Men played Zork and MUDs and MOOs. Some of the men playing MUDs and MOOs said they were women."

    • Most women in MUDs and MOOs were actually men. But some were the genuine article.
      • Wizzed on MUCKs for years, and went to a few conventions and met up with players. There's actually a very high ratio of women-to-men in most RP Mucks. Not even, but still much higher than many other games. I've had the opportunity to meet a number of folks who've played on my games and others, and women are a sizeable portion of the user base.

        Women are drawn to MUCKs for the opportunity to interact, socialize, and enjoy their own adventures without needing to learn all sorts of fancy controls and whatnot.

  • How I started (Score:2, Insightful)

    by karn096 ( 807073 )
    I started playing back in '95, I was bored and at a friends house and doing random searches for games on webcrawler.com and I stumbled across a mud (what i dont remember anymore) I rushed to get home so I can try it out, and proceeded to play for hours every day for the next 7 or 8 years! Theres always something new to do, and Muds are never hampered by what you can do like their graphical counterparts.. Your only limited by your imagination.
    My personal preference over the years was GodWars ( http://www.min [mindcloud.com]

  • Not that old one again (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tofino ( 628530 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @07:39PM (#12122502)
    "For me, asking why I play a MU (multi-user text game) when I could play EverQuest is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story..."



    Please. This is hardly a valid metaphor. Unless of course you really want to compare literature with hoary flavour text and:

    The orc hits you for 9 damage!
    You hit the orc for 4 damage!
    The orc missed you!
    You hit the orc for 14 damage!
    The orc hits you for 3 damage!
    You hit the orc for 8 damage!
    You kill the orc!

    • Re:Not that old one again (Score:5, Funny)

      by daeley ( 126313 ) on Saturday April 02, 2005 @08:00PM (#12122666) Homepage
      The orc hits you for 9 damage!
      You hit the orc for 4 damage!
      The orc missed you!
      You hit the orc for 14 damage!
      The orc hits you for 3 damage!
      You hit the orc for 8 damage!
      You kill the orc!

      Ah, yes, a stanza of the Elven Saga-Songs of the Prickly Cactus Age. It loses some of its power without the 12-part nasal harmony and trollskin drums. That and the other 56 hours of singing, of course.
    • You kill the orc!
      Yah! Take that you smelly orc.
      I've only played a couple of MUDs and none of them have had such boring battle descriptions. But even so, how much more interesting could EverQuest be?

  • Roleplaying, depth, and so on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Saturday April 02, 2005 @07:54PM (#12122614) Homepage
    There is a richness you can give a game when you don't need art assets to deal with everything. In 1998, some friends and I completed the first phase of a mud, Avendar - the Crucible of Legends [avendar.com], now to become a pen & paper RPG project by a fledgling gaming company as well. We were all players coming from the venerable Carrion Fields [carrionfields.org], which remains popular to this day. We came to pursue our vision - with technological enhancements, an entirely original world, that remained high fantasy but got away from both Tolkienesque and the Arthurian sorts of settings. There are hundreds of areas, thousands of monsters, tens of thousands of distinct rooms, and an original history and lore that players add to as time goes by.

    We had a vision, and it evolved as time went by, but as avid students and participants in both the fantasy genre and gaming in general, MUDs were powerful mediums both for Roleplay, and later storytelling. It was also a way to dig deeply into our bag of tricks and realize all sorts of things that are ludicrous to even imagine still in an MMORPG like everquest. Text gives you an amazing freedom to do a lot of things that would be difficult still to handle in a graphical sense - whether it is instantly whisking a pair of players into a pocket dimension for a duel, or having the city catch fire from invading bandits, both of which are things that can and do happen in Avendar, just to name a couple.

    The only thing I've enjoyed nearly as much as my work on Avendar - and I wrote 100,000 lines of C code to lay the technological I-beams for its ceration - was using the NWN [bioware.com] toolset. While it was far more limited, it did have an enormous power and the ability for fans to add to its base of art by creating monsters, placeables, portraits, and so on gave it a flexibility that an MMO simply cannot have, which is probably why tens of thousands of people are still playing it. The persistent world I worked on, City of Arabel [nwncityofarabel.com], still to this day is packed to the gills - the 55 slots on the server are nearly constantly filled.

    Then again, for all the amateurs, it is easy to see why it is hard for it to flourish. There are so many incredibly *bad* gaming creations out there. They pursue some single-minded vision without considering the playing experience it introduces, and end up utterly devoid of fun. I've always liked Raph Koster for that reason - not so much his expertise, because his actually creations I haven't liked much - but for his focus.

    I'd have to say that Jack Emmert [slashdot.org] is probably the new bearer of that standard, as he's taken "original story and vision" and mixed it with "fun play" remarkably well. I just hope his creation stays viable long enough for him to add all the other things he clearly wants to add.

    In the mean time, if you've never tried a MUD, I strongly recommend you do.
  • "For me, asking why I play a MU (multi-user text game) when I could play EverQuest is like asking someone why they would read a book instead of watching the movie of the same story..."

    That doesnt make sence, since movies aren't 20-30 hours long. Unless you play a MU ten times more then a EQ player, a likely impossible feat, The only reason to stick too a mu is the community and fear of change and perhaps gameplay(point and click aint all its cracked up to be).
  • I personally play this one from time to time. its based off the lord of the rings. Its very cool. Check it out if you like LOTR. it is here: http://www.t2tmud.org/ [t2tmud.org]
  • I think the reason the two are still unequal has to do with the amount of control players have. In MUD's, players can often obtain much more realm influencing roles than in MMORPG's. Not to mention, MMORPG's are a money maker, designed to be a time sink. More time = more money. MUD's on the other hand, are community driven, but simply lack the visual side. I also think that if anyone COULD pull off a free expansive world like an MMORPG they would have. Saying MUDs are better because they are like book

  • Bah. GUIs make things more fun (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Evil Couch ( 621105 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:37AM (#12124803) Homepage
    Likening a GUIed persistant world to a movie isn't a very valid comparison.

    When you type in "kill orc" 15 times in a row, you're not thinking "And this one is a devasting overhead swing, then I parry, dodge to the side and thrust my blade into his ribcage". You're typing in "kill orc" 15 times. or pushing the up arrow and enter 14 times. either way, there's no immersion.

    You're not letting your creativity have full reign of the situation. You are sitting there, numbly hitting an orc because you want its stuff. You're only really paying attention to two things. His HP and your HP. If you hit "are severly wounded and bleeding from orifices you didn't know you had" before he does, you type in "flee" or an arbitrary cardinal direction.

    compared that to a persistant world game with a GUI. you're swinging your blade and seeing other things that don't pertain to your fight. maybe it's a buddy racing to help you. maybe it's a baddy racing to help your orc. it adds excitment and drama to a fight other than staring at text prompts for levels of damage. attack animations have variety. attacking a selected target is often automatic, leaving my hands free to do something else that might be useful. calling for help, insulting a monster's mother and questioning her source of income, using some special ability, spell or other, or just moving around, whether or not it actually gives me a tactical advantage. I can imagine that it does and move accordingly. no such middle ground for movement occurs in a MUD. either you go N or you don't. When you flee combat, either the monster follows you or he doesn't. in a game with a GUI, you're in a frantic race to dodge around level architecture to get away from it. it's a good deal more exciting because the your input into the game and it's feedback to you is a lot less binary.

    There's quite of few other reasons that I feel that having a GUI for a game is a giant plus, but it really boils down to "am I having enough fun playing the game this way?". For me, MUDs just aren't enough.

    • Since you know what I am thinking their is no need for me to state it here.

      But it isn't very nice :)
    • If you think all MUD combat is simply typing "kill orc" 15 times, then I HIGHLY recommend you try out Dragonrealms by Simutronics, one of the few MUD gaming companies who not only has several WILDLY successful and very long running games (think before AOL), but in Dragonrealms, they've removed numbers from just about every aspect of gameplay they could.

      Combat consists of you performing various attacking actions such as "parry, jab, riposte, lunge, etc." which can have many different affects on the monster.

      • and you think that is better? Now instead of kill troll 15 times, I have to gues one of 5-10 different statements to accomplish the same thing? That doesn't sound better to me, but loathsomely more haineous. I relish using more than one of my senses in accomplishing a task. I do however agree that the comparison between GUI's and movies is severly inaccurate. A movie still only uses a couple of sense and interaction is out completely. How can you even think of comparing those things?
        • You don't "guess" one of several statements. You learn the commands to play the game much as you would a graphical one. Each attack does something different, and skilled fighters figure out tactics for that system, such as certain attacks put you in a more favorable combat position, some affect your balance in combat, etc.

          Now, all this detail adds a TON of depth to the game for me, but if you're a typical EQ player who just likes to hit "attack" and kick back and relax, I can see why that might not appeal

  • Elizabeth Price first was drawn to MUDs after a divorce left her with little money and a 16-MHz PC. At the time, it was the only computer interaction she could afford. But even after she bounced back financially, the keyboard called.
    "Now I'm on a Power Mac G5 with a cable connection to the internet," she said. "I certainly could play EverQuest if I wanted to."

    No you can't.

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