Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!pk2
From: pk2@ukc.ac.uk (P.Kathuria)
Newsgroups: news.groups,alt.mud
Subject: Re: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: rec.games.mud
Message-ID: <3777@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 2 Feb 90 19:27:08 GMT
References: <9510@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: paola@zen.co.uk
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Lines: 54

In article <9510@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> bee@cs.purdue.edu 
  (Zaphod Beeblebrox) writes:
>This is an Official Call For Discussion for creating the newsgroup
>rec.games.mud.  MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon, developed at CMU.

Although I am in strong favour of a group devoted to multi-user adventure
games, I feel that I should put a few things straight.  Even though a
a game was developed at CMU I doubt that it was the first.  The first 
multi-user dungeon game was developed about 10 years ago at Essex University,
England (Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw being the only two names I can
remember of the writers).

Bartle then went onto to form MUSE in 1985, a company which offered the
first commercial game and has taken MUD (multi-user dungeon) as the
registered trademark. The commercial version (MUD-2) is available outside
the UK too.  Since then, many games have appeared in the UK, most of them
are paying games.  To my knowledge there are at least three different 
multi-user games available free in the UK over the academic network (MIST, 
aberMUD and VAXMUD) although there is always a multitude of people trying
to write their own games.  I mention MUSE because the version of aberMUD
that is available through the IBM PC User Group's Connect service, is known 
as aberMUAG (multi-user adventure game); I suspect that the name change is 
to not create any legal problems regarding "MUD".

I know that there is a community of muag-ers in the UK; we have an annual
Adventure Convention (where old and new games are taken, and techniques
for writing games are discussed) and a new magazine devoted to comms has
two regular writers on multi-user games/comms (I'm one of them).  I also
know that many of the people in the multi-user community don't
necessarily have write access to Usenet, which is why I have taken it
upon myself to write this article.

>There are several of these around the country, most notably at
>Carnegie Mellon (tinyMUD; telnet daisy.learning.cs.cmu.edu 4201), and
>at the University of Oklahoma (tinyHELL; telnet uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu
>6250).

Hopefully I have made my point that "the country" doesn't have the monopoly 
on multi-user games.  I think that many in the UK would like a group to
discuss multi-user games (although I know that only a minority will have
the facilities to vote), especially since all the bulletin boards I use
have popular mud folders.

I suggest that the group be called rec.games.muag or rec.games.multi-user
to avoid using "mud".  I have seen later articles where rec.games.frp.dungeon
has been suggested as a name and I think that it should be pointed out that 
not all multi-user adventure games have dungeons in them or bear any
resemblance to D&D.

Paola Kathuria

[news is dead at zen so I'm using my old university account to read/write
news, please send any replies to paola@zen.co.uk since I rarely log onto
ukc]