Why we mud

[paan]

Hi all,

I've been thinking about this for quite some time now.
I am wondering what you guys thing about this thought of my.

Why do we still create mud?
Let me explain.

MUD is a very niche hobby. A big reason for this is that it's rather imposing at first, mainly because of the UI (or lack thereof). And we often hear the argument that mudder sacrifice the UI niceities for gameplay substance. Fair enough.

Now consider a typical diku mud. What if someone were to port over the whole thing and put the same gameplay in another more UI friendly environment? Say, as a facebook game. Should be easy enough. Gamplay is straight forward but we leverage the reach of facebook + and gain some UI improvement. That should attract some new blood to the game and revive the scene. At the same time old school mudders that like the game because of its gameplay /should/ still stick around because the gameplay havent changed.

Why then we don't, as a community, move forward with better UI design. I am aware of some of the effort done to 'prettify' the mud using MSDP, MXP and other similar effort. But why do we still cling on the old telnet interface?

I am not suggesting that we all do facebook games now(it was just an example off the top of my head), I am just wondering why the mud community is not trying other technology to bring the same gameplay experience to the gamers

These thoughts came from my own struggle of working with the challenge of giving the user a better way to manage some complex data, that IMHO can be represented way better if only the game is using some other UI than a telnet/mud prompt.



PS: Hope the post make sense, I have to think a few times about how to word some of the things here.

[ide]

[KaVir]