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Role Playing (Games) The Internet Technology

LambdaMOO, MUDs, and 'When the Internet Was Young' (undark.org) 114

Slashdot reader travers_r shares "a peek into the early days of internet culture and multiplayer gaming." (Apparently this MOO has been running continuously for 28 years.) "From the looks of it, squatters run it now..." LambdaMOO was different from the earliest MUDs, which were Tolkienesque fantasies -- hack-and-slash games for Dungeons & Dragons types with computer access, mostly college students. LambdaMOO was one of the first social MUDs, where people convened largely to play-act society, and what might have been "one of the first MUDs to be run by an adult," [co-creator Pavel] Curtis believes... Everybody comes through the Coat Closet the first time they visit LambdaMOO, entering the Living Room through a curtain of clothes, like children into Narnia. In between the textual rooms and objects they explore, there's a faster-moving flow of words, the coursing real-time chatter of LambdaMOO's other users. This is a Multi-User Domain: a chatroom and a world at once, a place where telling takes the place of being...

[I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means, because although MUDs once made up 10 percent of internet traffic, their dominance was obliterated by the arrival of the visual, hyperlinked, page-based Web. To anyone weaned on images and clicked connections, every explanation sounds batty: A MUD is a text-based virtual reality. A MUD is a chatroom built by talking. A MUD is Dungeons & Dragons all around the world. A MUD is a map made of words. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and in that sense a MUD is a real place. But a MUD is also nothing more than a window of text, scrolling along as users describe and inhabit a place from words.

Undark titled their piece "a mansion filled with hidden worlds: when the internet was young," describing the mansion's halls as "really just a string of code, where people once lived, and still do, in some way or another, as someone must, until the server winks out." I logged in a few times in 1997, so I'm probably in there too...

The article describes reading a Usenet newsgroup about MUDs back in 1990. "Approximately half of the contributors thought it was a game; the other half vehemently and heatedly disagreed."

Does all this bring back memories for any Slashdot readers?
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LambdaMOO, MUDs, and 'When the Internet Was Young'

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  • by Known Nutter ( 988758 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @01:37PM (#56986230)
    My neckbeard just grew out from reading the summary.
    • The *MUSH code base was better. If anyone remembers the original Shadowrun MUSH (my brother and I have an interesting history there), or AtlantisMUSH (the underwater post-apocalyptic one with Caps and Totes and submarine combat we started), let me know.

      • Star Trek MUSHes were my thing. Lord I loved those. Built in starship combat systems in them that, while text based, hands down beat for authenticity any ST game ever made. Multiple people at multiple "consoles", handling navigation, helm, weapons, engineering, shield control. What course do I need to go to put three different ships on three different shields? Any smart game company would have taken those systems, wrapped a GUI around it, and kept that game play. It's what STO should have been.

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          The game you're looking for is Klingon Academy. It's exactly what you're talking about, wrapped around a GUI, and everything included.

    • Gonna have to start my server back up. Love scripting!

  • Cheeseplant's House [cheeseplant.org] was the first talker I was aware of, in 1990. Might be the first ever too. Used to hang out in Cheeseplant's House waiting for MIST [wikia.com] to open - fantastic, and rather player v player bloodthirsty game before all the Diku and Tickle muds started taking over.

    Great days. I was playing MIST one day in the spanking new University X Term labs, very expensive, when a bunch of six formers came in to look the wonders of higher education. I did a 'shout' on the game - "oh god, hordes of potential
    • by malkavian ( 9512 )

      I remember Cheeseplant's House well! :) That brought back many a happy memory!

    • Was never on Cheeseplant's House, but spent a fairly decent chunk of the 90's up all night talking to people on Foothills.. I miss the talker days.
  • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @01:45PM (#56986260)

    I am one of the few (and I am not proud of it, quite the contrary) who aren't affected by rosy retrospection.
    When the Internet was young, it was difficult to access, difficult to use and didn't have much value outside of niche use(r)s.

    MUDs were "multiplayer notepad" of sorts, and they were awesome because they were "the new thing". After a while, they stopped being that. It is debatable whether their replacement was an "improvement" or not. The best of them were very difficult to improve, even through adding multimedia files (images, audio, video,later 3D etc) - but this is valid for anything: it's difficult to improve something that is very good.

    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @01:58PM (#56986330) Homepage

      I loved coding for LP muds. They weren't so much a "multiplayer notepad" as you could have true C-ish code running behind the scenes. LPC was a great language, in that you could physically interact with your objects. You could carry around a class in your inventory. Randomly call functions on it. Have other peoples' actions trigger functions. It opened up so many possibilities.

      The best were "Wizard (admin) Duels", which was basically warfare between programmers. It was common for wizards to write "dests", which destructed a person's player object to (briefly) kick them out of the game. These often involved elaborate broadcast leadups describing what they were doing and what was happening to the victim. One wizard kept desting me, so I wrote an instant counterdest that I could call that would dest him first. So he sped up his dest so that I wouldn't have time. So I had mine detect that his dest was going off automatically and autodest him. So he made his instant. So I made an object that would hop into his inventory and intercept his dest command, and dest himself instead. But then I had to be paranoid about him making objects to hop into my inventory, so I made an inventory-protector that monitored my person and the room I'm in for "suspicious" objects to destruct. On and on it went.

      The screwups could be glorious, too. At one point during the coding of my inventory protector, I messed up and it accidentally dested me. It then fell to the floor in the login room and dested everyone else in there. And anyone who logged in would then get insta-dested by it. I had accidentally created a killbot run amock ;) We had no access to the server to reboot it, and almost everyone had gotten kicked off by it... except for one wizard operating in a different room. But since we couldn't log in, we had no way to contact him. Until I came up with an idea. We uploaded files to the MUD via FTP, so I uploaded a file to his home directory with the title, "(HISNAME)_PLEASE_READ_ME_NOW.txt", which explained the situation and how to fix it. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, he notices the file, reads it, and destroys my inadverent-killbot so we can all log back in. ;)

      You just don't get those sorts of experiences anymore.

      • Uhm, so your MUD did not even have basic security? In this particular case, you need a simul_efun override for efuns that should be privileged, do permission checks and only then call the actual efun.

        The driver (LP's name for the VM) also had some egregious bugs, but that's nothing a rudimentary audit can't fix. Once you have a few security-minded people among coders, LP was quite nice. Alas, with no equivalent of git, fixes hardly ever got exported to the multitude of forks.

      • I ran an LPMUD for awhile, added some code improvements to it as well. The problem with discussing MUDs is that there were two very different types - those that were games and those that were social spaces. Like the difference between and MMORPG and Second Life.

        I had a lot of fun with it, learned a lot, made friends, etc. We even had a meet up in real life, because so many of our players came from the same city and connected via a free dialup to the University.

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        LPC was a great language, in that you could physically interact with your objects

        I learned OO programming without even realising it because of LPC. Got into my first job post-university and my boss with his 30 years of programming experience couldn't understand how I could adapt so easily to the new OO languages we were using.

        The best were "Wizard (admin) Duels", which was basically warfare between programmers.

        I was winning one of those with ease, right up until my opponent used his unix mud account access to log into the OS and delete me.

        Even then I'd created a copy of my admin .o file so waited five minutes, logged on and sent him some hugs.

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      My biggest fault was going overboard on very specific things. For example, I always thought that the whole notion of "hitpoints" was too simplistic and not realistic. I mean, that's not how people get injured in real life! But the more I started trying to "improve" it, the more complicated it got. By the end, you had blood levels, and a bleed rate based on wounds you had received, with the bleed rate slowly declining over time and blood slowly recovering. You had limbs, depending on what type of creatu

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        Lol... now I'm reading through old code... apparently every male character's fozzle had a hard-coded length (0-9), which was randomized based on their name. Except for user "timster", whose fozzle length was hardcoded to "700" ;) I think I added that in to stop him from complaining about my new body part / combat system, lol.

        Man, I went way further with this than I remember... there's code in here where if you take too many blows to the head, it messes with your sanity, so that you can end up wandering aim

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          apparently every male character's fozzle had a hard-coded length (0-9), which was randomized based on their name

          I'm starting to believe you were involved in the writing of FATAL. Next you'll be telling me you resolved a 50-50 chance by rolling d100, then using that as a target to beat when rolling d100.

          • by Whibla ( 210729 )

            Next you'll be telling me you resolved a 50-50 chance by rolling d100, then using that as a target to beat when rolling d100.

            You mean that's not how you're supposed to do it?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • When the Internet was young, it was difficult to access, difficult to use

      And that kept dumb people out.

  • I pretty much lost my first year of college to Muddog, run out of the University of Florida. In fact, I still use my original avatar name as one of my logins all over the net. Then I moved on to Three Kingdoms once Muddog died out. Man, I loved it when they got the Portal client for windows with 3k. It was soooo much better than tinyfugue that we had been using.
    • Too bad Tensor was a real prick. But it got me working with Cletus before he started Fark. (Nooster, Cheyenne and I were the other early admins on there)

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        Ah, good ol' 3k. Wonder how many months of playtime I had on that one....

      • Tensor was a prick, but the guy who ran mages and cyborgs made him look like a kitten... rastasomething... busted me for botting while I was at the keyboard.. accused me of scripting responses. Iâ(TM)d love to meet those guys in real life and buy them a beer though. They put their hearts and souls into that for years... and Batmud... loved batmud
  • They are still there if you know where to look. Connected on one know.

    I think the MUSH variant really is the best explanation: Multi-User Shared Hallucination.

    It is like cowriting a book, a massive tangled story that doesn't have to make sense and which only exists in the moments you are there. It is like Second Life, except you don't need to be a coding genius or rich kid to have pose balls and great graphics - the poses are anything you can think up, the graphics are in your mind's eye.

    It is a freedom to

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Connected on one know ... Man, I need to start proofreading this crap.

      • Yeah, MUSHes used to be really uptight about grammar back in the days... today you could even get away with something like this. :)

    • I've spent a couple hundred if not thousands of hours RPing in a MUSH some 20 years ago. Even went on a trip to the US to visit some of the other players. Looking back it was kinda crazy to fly across an ocean to meet people you pretty much don't know anything about... it was a different time, I'd say.

  • I grew up playing Zork and online text games. I was a longtime player of the World of Norrath(mud), which was the precursor to EverQuest. I was in grade school when the original D&D red box came out and I can remember the first time a group of 5 of us got together to battle the forces of darkness in the school library. I was an elf when that was a class unto itself. I still play pen and paper RPG's with a group twice a month, it is GURPS these days but little else has changed.

    • Yeah, to someone who grew up and loved games like Zork, MU* systems were like MULTI PLAYER ZORK. It blew my mind at the time and I used a whole bunch of them for years.

      I'm still on FurryMUCK but not too active there anymore. Just don't want to let go of that last thread I guess.

    • I thought it was funny that more than one person would run through my MUD area and then ask me if I ever worked at Infocom, and at the time I didn't know who they were (I knew what Zork was, but not the company because I played the mainframe version and didn't have a PC). But I definitely was trying for the adventure game vibe rather than just the typical dungeon crawl. I really wish I had the source code of all I built in that game.

  • The article says "Multi User Domain." MUD actually was multi-user dungeon, as in online dungeons and dragons.

    E

    • I've heard everything from Dungeon to Domain to Database. As I'm fairly sure they evolved from database software, I'd tend to give more credence to the latter.

      • The first MUD was explicitly called Multi User Dungeon, later there was a followup MUD2 intended for a commercial dialup service. They were actual games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        The meaning morphed over time as some programs called MUDs arrived that were less structured like games and more like social RP spaces.

  • Plenty still around (Score:3, Informative)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @02:20PM (#56986424)

    I know Batmud got into Steam greenlight before Valve discontinued submissions. As far as I know they're fairly close to completing the process.

    As for graphical games and Wow, I don't recall them hurting the userbase much. The userbase on Bat was growing even after Wow had been out for a while. What precipitated a decline was a) there being tens of thousands of games that work on any hardware now, and b) logging in and being killed three rooms from the entrance by an event monster is a proud legacy of Muds, but also not a great way to attract new players.

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @04:00PM (#56986840)

      That's less of a concern for the more social oriented ones, but even they suffer. Old players leave but few new players join. Text games just don't have the same pull anymore for a new generation of players, I guess. I have no idea where they're moving to, though.

      • by Raenex ( 947668 )

        Text games just don't have the same pull anymore for a new generation of players, I guess. I have no idea where they're moving to, though.

        Second Life, of course. It's all the rage.

  • I remember playing Medievia a lot. Color graphics (er, text)!
    And being on DyrtDev; learning how to create your OWN worlds that others could play in.
    Good times.

    • Wait...Medievia got colored text???

      Maybe I shoulda kept playing :)

    • by Morgon ( 27979 )

      I've been trying to remember the name of Medievia for ages! They had a pretty cool weather system.

      I actually donated once to get some perks. Their site claims they don't delete players, but it thinks my username is new... it's been 15+ years since I last logged in, so I suppose I can't be too mad.

  • RealmsMUD was the best MUD. EVER!

    Tsunami and Highlands were also really good. I remember back in '99 I logged into Tsunami after 5+ years of being gone (I had joined the Marine Corps) and my character was still there!

    Good times.

  • by Seth Morabito ( 2273 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @03:59PM (#56986836)

    It sure does bring back memories. I was on LambdaMOO for a while, also worked with Pavel Curtis much later at a different job. Did my years on MUCKs and MUSHes, too. It's amazing how much this stuff is both ancient history and recent history all at the same time.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @04:06PM (#56986870)

    Back when I was young (and there was still snow THIS high, i.e. before global warming, and before the invention of boots) internet access in my country was pretty much something that you either had when you were rich or when you went to a technically inclined university. Now, transporting graphics on an internet link was pretty much unheard of or at the very least frowned upon (the university had a lightning fast 2mbit connection... still pretty impressive when you were used to 9.6kbit), so text it was.

    This was also the time when I started playing a new kind of RPG, unfortunately one nobody else wanted to play, so when I found a MU* that did, my life was complete.

    And my university progress took a sharp decline...

  • by malkavian ( 9512 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @05:03PM (#56987114)

    After the sad demise of Cheeseplant's house, I went looking for a new home.. And came across Igormud.. It's still going (igormud.org 1701).
    I met a load of people on there that I became friendly with, and that got me to start travelling the world. Been round Europe and the States visiting people I'd met there. A good many of them have stayed friends with me, nigh on 30 years later!

  • It was before the days of MMORPGs and the Graphical stuff they have now.
    All the things that plague those now, used to be prevalent on the MUD: PKing, cyber bullying, code/glitch abuse, VAPEing of offenders, multi-logging, ALT characters, "illegal Trade" of EQ, "Twinking", etc.
    All in all, they were training grounds for the admin staff of the new environs.

    Ah, the good old days...
    Still, I made a handful of friends there, and ticked off more than a few offenders, too.

  • I was an administrator at PixieMUD (same handle). Yes, it was fantasy adventure themed. But the features that drove player attention was not the combat and treasure, but rather the range of "emotes" supported and the social chat lines and the ability to emote over them.

    The internal coding of the MUD environment meant that players who earned write permissions ("wizards") could code areas and objects. Many people got their first exposure to coding through this. (A C-like language, LPC). That's important becau

  • I've been reading Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community [rheingold.com] and Curtis and LambdaaMOO was mentioned in a section about what we call "video game addiction" today.

    But to the hardest-core MUDders, the traditional online epithet "Get a life" is more the issue. When you are putting in seventy or eighty hours a week on your fantasy character, you don't have much time left for a healthy social life. If you are a college student, as the majority of MUDders are, MUDding for seventy hours a week can be as destructive

  • [I]t's nearly impossible to describe to a modern computer user what that means

    Only if that user has somehow never heard of MMORPGs. A MUD is just a text-based non-massive version of that. LambdaMOO itself was more like Second Life or VRChat than a traditional MMO, but the analogy still stands.

    Rob

  • When I was half my current age I used to spend quite a lot of time playing on MUDs over a dial-up connection, and after some time of playing a lot of that, I started dreaming in text. That was quite a surreal experience, because it was like I was there inside the world, except somehow it was all text, the conversation, the location, everything was there at the same time the text was being parsed in that dream state. Seems like my mind was processing it as if it was some kind of reality and certainly with th

  • Avatar, on the NovaNET system. moved from the MAINEI system to the USM system to now Cyber1. It's been played since the early 80s, or before, on the UICU PLATO systems.

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"

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