MUDs in the broad sense. There are few to no text MUDs aimed at an Asian audience that I'm aware of.

--matt

I am all for internationalization and localization of all computer applications, to present as much of the content as possible in a speaker's native language.

The problem is: that isn't enough in a lot of cases. MUDs/MUSHes for example. The key part of the game is in the social communication. Either folks all have to speak/type the same language, or you have to have some realtime translation software (which IMHO doesn't work well yet), or people can't interact. This is what Gromble was talking about. When you get a bunch of people in the same room who need to interact, you have to fall back on a single language. For now, it's English. Maybe in the future, it'll become Chinese.

This reminds me of India. English is not the first language of most, but it is the second language of many. Given that the individual states speak different languages with different character sets, English seems (to this humble observer) to have become the language that glues the country together.

This is not to say there isn't a market for MUDs that only use Chinese. It's just the realization that English right now is one of the best multinational common languages.

Some MUDs actually use roguelike design as a jump off point for the gameplay of their MUD.

Not a bad way to go if you are trying to emulate a text action-rpg... depending on how well you execute.

Re: Future MUD directions
 

Babelfish translation isn't that good. In many cases the translations aren't useful but only give you an idea what a text is about. However I think supporting additional charsets is very important for communication within the game. Just because room descriptions might be in English doesn't mean the players wouldn't prefer to communicate with friends using another language.

While it is true that MUDs can improve your English it isn't something that makes people want to play them. People want to be entertained and enjoy whatever game they play. There are many games to chose from. Many graphical games have very high quality and are fun. A text game would need to be very well made to "compete".

I don't know how to make MUDs more popular. However I think there are things that could be improved:
In the end I think MUDs shouldn't be seen only as text games but also include the graphical MUDs. They should probably have their place on the mud lists as well. I don't say that the text games have lost the war(was there ever one? :rolleyes:), but I think it is about time everyone start to cooperate. Text, graphics, sound - does it really matter that much? It is all different ways to express the same genre we enjoy to work on: MUDs.

Re: Future MUD directions
 

Yeah. Supposedly there are *better* systems than Bablefish, but guess what? They are all used by high level government officials and cost so much you couldn't ever use them. They also deal with "spoken" language, not text. We badly need something adaptive for this. And that unfortunately is likely to require at least one server for every 50-100 people, at a guess, to work right. Worse, the server would probably make what ever they use to run MMOs on the server end look average in price. For now, there just isn't a useful, fast or accurate translation system, so you end up hard coding stuff, then hoping the human translator wasn't a complete dip****. Like one person mentioned up the thread a bit, you are *maybe* better watching Anime with subtitles, but personally I find them damned distracting in some cases, and its not like, unless you learn the language *properly* they don't screw them up as much or more than redoing the dialog in English. And some songs they translate from them... Gah! Its like listening to someone that intentionally dug through a dictionary for the most indirect and vague word possible in each case, then pounded it into the worst possible English sentence structure. Something that should have come out as, "I wander in the deep forest.", might end up being, "In the not shallow trees I vacation."... I mean WTF?? I sometimes can't believe Japanese people mangle their own works that badly when translating, never mind some half wit working for an English company. And again, subtitles are "not" any better.

Put simply, text is an imprecise media. That is what some people, sometimes infuriatingly, like about it. Translation is *supposed* to be as precise as possible, but usually isn't. The result is all too often like having a blind person *feel* a replica of the Mona Lisa and then *translate* that into a copy of Dogs Playing Poker. We need better language systems. We also need better AI imho, but that is a similar can of worms. Mean while, MMOs *are* getting the later, since its a lot easier to code AI to handle *physics*, than text, and... well, they have the same problem MUDs do with the language part.

Re: Future MUD directions
 

When I was rearranging the forums on Sunday just after the new software went live, I was contemplating adding a forum for "MUD Awareness" (MUD promotion is taken for specific MUDs) with the theme being how we can attract new folks who haven't played MUDs before to the genre. Have a few more thoughts on this but I'll save them for an introductory post in that forum.