Re: Is Online Roleplaying Dying?

Chuck Vilcinskas wrote:
> I thought I'd ask it here, since it seems to be the proper forum. But just
> now I was rather bored, and trying to find a nice new game to start on. I
> looked up several listing services, and all the ones that seem interesting
> or intriguing are "closing down" or very inactive. Why is this? To me, it's
> always been this way -- but why?

I don't have any experience in the TinyMU* universe, but to speak about 
muds in general, I've played and/or coded them for about 10 years now... 
my personal opinion is that there are two reasons for the decline in muds.

The first is the successful marketing and deployment of the "massively 
multiplayer online graphical" game.  Many people who use to gravitate 
toward the classic hack-n-slash diku genre have moved into these kinds 
of games.  It's a natural progression, and the same one that happened 
when television became widely available.  There are still people who 
prefer to read books, and there will always be people who prefer to play 
text muds -- but graphical muds remove many of the people who played for 
just the interaction, or just the power-leveling aspects.  Those who 
like using their imagination to picture the world are still out there.

The second, and more serious IMHO, problem is the wide variety of easy 
to install and run codebases out there, combined with the incredible 
ease of setting up your own unix machine on the internet these days. 
When I first started playing muds (1993 or thereabouts), the only people 
who had muds were friends of sysadmins at universities, as they were the 
ones who could get access to a (usually shared) machine on the internet. 
 There were very few downloadable codebases, and most of them were 
either very buggy, very spartan, or both.  Thus, it took a large amount 
of work to get a mud up and running.

Once you had a game going, and got wizards to help build things, and 
players... you had invested a LOT of time and effort.  It was much 
easier to try and join an existing mud to create new areas or new code, 
than to try and find a way to start your own... so as a result, most 
muds immediately attracted a decent staff of developers, and started 
doing unique and original things.

By 1996, it was very easy to download a mud and set it up.  There were 
lots of stock muds which all had the same areas, sometimes slightly 
rearranged... but it was the old "humpback bridge" problem.  Every mud 
felt like every other one, because everyone who had access to a machine 
could download their own instead of working with other people to help 
improve an established game.

By 1998, home servers were possible.  Now, you didn't even need a 
friendly sys-admin to host the game.  You could download CookieCutterMUD 
from the net onto your new linux box, compile, change the login screen, 
and poof!  Stick yourself on the mud-connector and people would start 
wandering in.

I find it very interesting that most of the ads now seem to be emphasing 
how many years a game has been established.  People are tired of playing 
through the same set of stock areas, and seeing the same **OBLITERATES** 
messages.  The muds that are still doing well are the ones that continue 
to evolve, and that have been around long enough so that the wizards 
work well together and aren't afraid to try totally new ideas.

As for Role Playing... I think RP muds have always been a minority 
compared to hack-n-slash games.  So, on the plus side, having many of 
the power-mudders run off to Everquest/Star Wars Galaxies/etc means the 
ratio of RP people in the mud community is on the rise... but since the 
whole community is shrinking, it isn't enough to offset the change.  A 
good mud usually (I've found) has a mix of RP and HS characters.  They 
both tend to drive different parts of the game, and as long as the 
griefers are kept under control, it works out well.

I think the mud universe is due for a renewal of sorts.  If these text 
games continue to improve and more of the cookie-cutters fall away, they 
will be a bastion for those who grow weary of the graphical games, as 
they are currently all just as repetitive.  Of those that I've tried, 
only Dark Age of Camelot really had any role playing, and then only on 
the declared RP servers.  I had high hopes for one called Midgaard, but 
the company funding it pulled the plug to concentrate on Anarchy Online.

In the meantime, I'll continue to plug away at my own mud, and play the 
venerable BatMUD (14 years old I think, and over 400 players most of the 
time).  RP isn't dead... it's just hard to spot the gold with all the 
dead twigs and dirt piled up over it. :)