Dear Fellow MUDers,

I havean idea for a sort of class that could use MUDs. A good MUD will require imagination, a good sense for literature, and an extremely logic train of thought, right? MUDs could be used to train the logistics if the mind, in a sense like we use logic puzzles to train the mind. I was playing some of the old IF games and they are filled with logic and puzzles, and so are MUDs. If we create a learning program on logic using MUDs and similar text-based games, we could perhaps achieve a higher form of logistic learning than we currently can experience. Also, lots of people would get involved because lets face it, MUDs are fun. If they're fun and they train logistics, I think it equals the perfect college/highschool course on logistics.

Yours,

Letum

Well that's certainly an interesting idea, although I'm not sure how well it would apply to a multi-user environment. I'd also be concerned about someone pushing it as an educational tool, unless it was created by someone who was trained in that field of work.

However there have been discussions on MUD-DEV recently about how there seems to be very little on most muds these days which appeals to the EXPLORER Bartle category. It would certainly be interesting to see what those players thought of playing a pure puzzle-oriented mud.

I agree that someone would have to have knowledge in MUDding and teaching to create such a class, but it doesn't neccesarily have to be an entirely puzzle-based MUD, and it doesn't have to be a MUD even. There are some old IF games online like this one you should try: This is a short game, based entirely on a storyline, but still logically complicated. I have gone everywhere and can't figure it out. Although, to have a dedicated class you would have to almost eliminate RP which would be a shame. Still, it's interesting...

-Letum

My first Real leap into the mudding world was when I created a mud based on a short story for my Science Fiction class in High school. My teacher used to us chat rooms, and have people talk to each other 'in character' so I took it a step further.

It was a stock Diku with one area, and a lot of 'scenes'. Pretty much you progressed through the story by going to the next room. But we had some mob scripts that made the mobiles talk to the players, and so you could ask them specific questions.

The idea of using a mud as a virtual meeting place, a virtual classroom, is old. There are many papers on the subject, many extrapolated from Virtual Community type papers. But here is my thought, the effort going into making one of these is not worth the pay-off unless it is set in stone to be a long running system. It took us all semester to duplicate the scenes from one short story (30 or so pages). And we spent a lot of time on it. (20-30 hrs/wk).

So I wish you luck if you work on it, and I look foward to the results.

If your idea is teaching a class in for instance logic or ecology by using a mud or other Multi User environment, I suppose this might raise the interest for the subject considerably. Perhaps more than desireable, the risk is obvious of the pupils going off on a tangent and starting to play the mud for fun. losing sight of the purpose. :-)

But it could be done rather easily. It would of course need a close cooperation between the pedagogue and the mud operator, but the tools are all there. No need to create a specific code for it, as Ashon stated you could use pretty stock code. What you'd need would be a system of pretty advanced scripts to make it interactive, so probably Circle would be a better codebase than Diku, since the DG_scripts are a lot more versatile than the mob_progs in Diku.

In our mud we already have tendencies in the educatory direction, the entire Pre Historic Dimension is based on the map of the Mediterranean area around 2000 BC. There are a number of built-in Quests based on authentic old myths, which need both logic and some knowledge of the mythology to solve. (The myths can be found written down on scrolls in different places in the zones, since we don't really expect our players to do research on internet). :-)

The quests are set up in several steps, where you need to solve one step first to get access to the next. The information needed for the solution can be found in different forms, all over the zones, so you have to travel around quite a bit to get it. Each time you solve a part of a Quest, you get some sort of reward, usually a bonus of experience points (the amount is based on the level of the player and/or the difficulty of the quest). You also get some piece of information that you need to get started on the next step. If you do things in the wrong order, there will be no input at all, so there is no way of solving the final quests without going through all the steps first.

This system could very easily be adapted to educationary purposes, but I guess the Diku and Cirle licence would prevent any commersial use.