You haven't lived until you've died in MUD

So! The $64,000 question: what is a "MUD"? Well "MUD" actually stands for "Multi-User Dungeon" and is basically taken to refer to computer games that are multi-user adventures. In simple terms, a MUD is a virtual world which you share with other players and, in some cases, computer generated creatures (known as "mobiles"). The medium is text although many MUDs, such as MUD II, have now adopted the use of graphical and other windows based interfaces.

MUD II was written by Dr Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw and is a direct descendant of the original, first-ever MUD (often referred to as MUD I) which they  wrote back in 1978 at Essex University; in those bygone days before even Pacman did good box office. This December marks its 20th Anniversary. Two decades in the business and still going strong, there are now over a thousand MUDs on the internet all of which followed and were inspired by this single game. To give you an idea about the size of what we're talking about here, a 1994 study showed that approximately ten percent of all bits transmitted over the main internet backbones belonged to MUDs.

How many computer games would you consider playing even a few months after starting them, let alone several years? Well MUD II has defied all its critics. It has flown in the face of conventional wisdom about the life expectancy of computer games and there are many people, who played the original game at Essex almost twenty years ago, that still play today. It's complex, and it has technical depth but to describe it in simple terms one could call it a fantasy world of magic, heroic deeds, friendship, treachery and constantly evolving new areas, objects and creatures. It's because of this continual development that MUD II remains at the cutting edge of MUD technology.

Its principal creator, Richard (MD of MUSE Ltd - the company that developed the game), wrote a full programming language from which to design MUD worlds; aptly known as "MUDDLE". The parser is outstanding in its comprehension of English sentence construction and the mobiles in MUD II are smart - very smart (Richard did his PhD in artificial intelligence). What's more is that the expertise in dealing with players, built up over two decades, is superb not to mention unrivalled. And who better to talk to than MUD II's very own game management specialist, Ricky Kumar (known to players as Kyric).

Game Management Specialist Ricky Kumar talks about MUD II, management and the future of online games

"My modem went dead just as I was about to flee from the dragon! Can I have my points back?" "Go boil your head, Liar!" All in a day's work for Ricky. Just out of university, the 24 year old law graduate runs the game as a sideline to his real passion, equity portfolio management, and has managed MUD II formally on various sites across the country for over 6 years notwithstanding the fact that he was in higher education at the time: "I knew the managing director of MUSE, Richard Bartle, having played the game myself as early as 1985 and corresponded with him for a number of years about the concept. We shared a lot of ideas on how we could progress MUD II and he asked me whether I'd be interested in managing the game."

He agreed. Why of course he did and for what more reason than for the fact that, according to market research company Datamonitor, more than 15 million people in the United states and Europe will be paying nearly one billion pounds a year to play online games by the year 2002. Did this statistic feature in his answer at all? "There is a future in online games and if you get in at the right time, there's a lot of money involved. I do it for the love of the game but I've also learnt a lot about marketing, management and the games industry which is what I value most of all." We believe you Ricky.

MUD II is most famed for its original slot on the ancient DEC-10 machines that ran in the early days (late seventies) at Essex where amongst its players were students who used the servers during the night to play the earlier version of the game - MUD I. Since that time flares went out of fashion, Thatcher resigned and MUSE Ltd has had a string of licensees. Most notably British Telecom during the 1980's and multi-million dollar US software house Interplay (the company that brought us Virtual Pool and Descent). The latter relationship ended in disaster: "To cut a long story short, Interplay bought the rights to the game from MUSE and agreed to put a number of their games, which included MUD II, on a big multi-billion dollar network. They backed out of the deal and everything went ugly."

MUDs now dominate the internet and cover all kinds of subject matter from medieval settings to space MUDs, from Discworld scenarios to primitive soap operas. However, although commercial MUDs are still relatively few in number there is a big potential, according to Ricky who is quick to make the point: "MUD II is one of Wireplay's most played games and it's in competition with mainstream graphical games like Quake and Duke Nuk'em. I think that's quite an impressive statement." Not bad for a game that's been around in one form or another for over 20 years.

With online games fast becoming a commercial reality the question is, of course, who will manage the players. Ricky points out that no-one knows where the players will come from, nor who's going to handle them. "Online games are communities and you can't deal with players by sitting some uninterested youth at a helpdesk phone any more than you could run a council or a police force that way." This is where people who have real experience in running online games become valuable. Companies fresh to the industry may think 'well how hard can it be?' but if they don't do their homework they'll find out quickly that it is very, very hard indeed.

So what is it that Ricky does, then, in his capacity as a manager? "I actively involve myself in a lot of different aspects of the game, including development, marketing and strategic planning." And why, pray tell? "I enjoy the extra involvement as it's challenging; it's great that I've been permitted to co-ordinate so much of the commercial process."  Ricky feels that much of the hands-on managerial work requires, amongst other things, an eye for detail and a well developed sense of empathy. "It's important to play the game whether openly or incognito in order to gauge how it feels to the players and to evaluate the possible effects of suggested changes. A game is a volatile thing, much like the stock market; small changes can have big consequences. A good understanding of  implications is essential because it enables a manager to avert a potential crisis, instil atmosphere or to build traditions within the game creatively." That's all very well but what is it that makes online games, particularly MUDs, successful?

"I think that management is the main thing. The games which succeed in the future are likely to be the ones which are managed well. The product has to be good, though, and  MUD II really is exceptional - state of the art." Obviously a large, financed project would go down well in the USA but is there a global market for this kind of game? "Without a doubt. Even if a good marketing campaign were able to tap 0.1% of the existing market for MUDs on the internet and elsewhere, it'd be lucrative. That's to say nothing about the potential market which is enormous because of the width of the appeal."

According to Ricky, the players vary across the board in terms of age, fifteen year olds through to pensioners, students to chief executives of large companies. It's also cosmopolitan and has a big female following. "Text tends to appeal to women more than graphics do and although the games market is aimed at the male section of the population, we always manage to pick up a large amount of female players."

In this modern hi-tech age where graphics are becoming more and more advanced, we ask Ricky what the advantages are of text-based games like MUD II over other graphical based ones. "Text doesn't age, it exists. Text is more cerebral, because it forces the reader to construct their own virtual environment, and educational because it requires the reader to understand the text in order to progress through that environment and climb the hierarchy. It's absorbing, it's substantial and it's much more difficult to give up." Until the time when formal texts of any kind become outdated, such games will continue to be popular. Perhaps, in time, large publishing houses will consider investing money in MUD, as opposed to writing, projects. "Well it's possible. The written word is making a big comeback and the internet is largely responsible for this. People can be creative in MUDs in a different way to novels, for example, because MUD text is dynamic and it's also three dimensional. Although MUDs have been around for almost two decades now, this really is a new kind of artistic medium that many people haven't yet discovered."

So what about the future of MUD II. Will we see the game flying its flag, say, 5 or 10 years down the line? "With sound management I can't see a reason why not. Especially in virtual reality, there's no substitute for text and graphical games still have a limited scope for competing with it. In a similar way that a film can't often match the book upon which it was based." Then what? "Well there's always the possibility that cable companies would take on MUD II as the next in a line of interactive entertainments." And who knows? The book deal, the movie rights and so on...

MUD II is known, on the one hand, for it's peculiar Englishness but yet at the same time it has a tendency towards the type of blood-bath violence that makes it accessible to Quake players. What is it that makes people want to play massively multi-player games and what does it add that you don't get in a normal single-player game? Emotional involvement. You really don't know what games are about until you suddenly experience an intense reaction. The slogan 'You haven't lived until you've died in MUD II' sums it up perfectly. "It means different things to different people but for me it's an emanation of the feelings invoked by death. Our reactions show that we're alive and breathing and death in this game can be very emotional. Hence, you haven't lived until you've had this experience."

Wireplay now plays host to over 100 games including top titles such as Age of Empires, Jedi Knight, Quake, Quake II, Total Annihilation, Duke Nuk'em and Unreal with new games constantly being added to the roster. In spite of the stiff competition MUD II continues to be very popular, rarely straying from its ranking as the number 1 game on Wireplay's Rapid Play system. There are some excellent MUD II websites aswell, such as the one managed by Dr Richard Bartle himself, that can be found at the following address: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard

The software is free for downloading on the Wireplay website, online system and is amazingly only 300k in size! For more information about how you can play MUD II, call the Wireplay helpdesk on 0345 577 577 or e-mail the game's manager Ricky Kumar.