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shadowfyr · 01-23-2007, 01:25 PM

Speaking for myself. I play at a mud that is hosted in Sweden or some place, it has seperate channels for talking in non-English, but the entire mud is English anyway. In fact, it has like 3 channels for alternate languages.

As for Chinese... Sadly, Chinese people are more likely to speak English than anyone in the English speaking world is likely to speak Chinese. The reason is real simple, technology *tends* to be spoken about and dealt with in English, and that's not likely to change unless we really frack up and let some other part of the world become the "main" source of new technologies. And not even then, despite how hard everyone from companies outsourcing 90% of it to China and some presidents I could name who seem to want to turn the country Luddite, then wonder why we lost everything...

But, seriously, MUDs are at least partly "technology" oriented by nature, which means the people using them are bound to know English. And, unlike China, its unlikely that any mostly English speaking country is going to wake up tomorrow morning and go, "We need to ban muds, because they sometimes say less than politically acceptable things about our government on there." That can, does, has and for the forseeable future, will, happen in China.

While the idea of making multi-lingual muds is interesting, the simply fact is that English is almost universal due to its ties to technological progress, and thus its damn hard to find anyone in a country whose citizens *have* a computer that doesn't know it. What you do get is places where its not universal, and where there is maybe 1 computer for every 10,000 people, because only the ones that have money have computers, and they also know English. Mind you, this may not be the case 100% of the time, but it is the general trend. On average, if you find someone that owns a computer and has the time to play a mud, they probably know enough English to play the mud and enough desire to learn more while playing.

If the biggest concern is Chinese vs. English, as it would seem to be from the posts here, you may be talking about the one group least likely to need one, and maybe the ones least likely to benefit (or be allowed to by their government) from having one in the first place.

01-23-2007, 01:25 PM	#12
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Speaking for myself. I play at a mud that is hosted in Sweden or some place, it has seperate channels for talking in non-English, but the entire mud is English anyway. In fact, it has like 3 channels for alternate languages. As for Chinese... Sadly, Chinese people are more likely to speak English than anyone in the English speaking world is likely to speak Chinese. The reason is real simple, technology tends to be spoken about and dealt with in English, and that's not likely to change unless we really frack up and let some other part of the world become the "main" source of new technologies. And not even then, despite how hard everyone from companies outsourcing 90% of it to China and some presidents I could name who seem to want to turn the country Luddite, then wonder why we lost everything... But, seriously, MUDs are at least partly "technology" oriented by nature, which means the people using them are bound to know English. And, unlike China, its unlikely that any mostly English speaking country is going to wake up tomorrow morning and go, "We need to ban muds, because they sometimes say less than politically acceptable things about our government on there." That can, does, has and for the forseeable future, will, happen in China. While the idea of making multi-lingual muds is interesting, the simply fact is that English is almost universal due to its ties to technological progress, and thus its damn hard to find anyone in a country whose citizens have a computer that doesn't know it. What you do get is places where its not universal, and where there is maybe 1 computer for every 10,000 people, because only the ones that have money have computers, and they also know English. Mind you, this may not be the case 100% of the time, but it is the general trend. On average, if you find someone that owns a computer and has the time to play a mud, they probably know enough English to play the mud and enough desire to learn more while playing. If the biggest concern is Chinese vs. English, as it would seem to be from the posts here, you may be talking about the one group least likely to need one, and maybe the ones least likely to benefit (or be allowed to by their government) from having one in the first place.