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Old 02-12-2009, 02:35 AM   #17
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: What defines a "MUD" ?

Completely agreed. Telnet is as irrelevant to being a MUD as having orcs is.

My opinion is that everything from MUD 2 to LamdaMoo to Second Life to WoW is a MUD, but that we run into conflicts here between common usage and usage among those for whom this subject matter is a passion. MUD traditionally encompassed all of the aspects that make up the aforementioned products, but language tends towards convenience, and even though there is certainly not a justifiable line to be drawn that separates Achaea from Eve Online, most games that get talked about fall pretty clearly towards one side or the other (ok, nobody but us really talks about text MUDs, but you know what I mean).

I spent years making a real point of muddling the two terms, using MUD and MMO completely interchangeably, modified by 'text' or 'graphical' ahead of it. So WoW could be called a graphical MUD or a graphical MMO, and Discworld could be a text MMO or a text MUD.

It's pointless at the end of the day. The general populace is never going to recognize most of the games posters here run as anything but a separate category, however much they misunderstand the situation and unless you're talking about games that kind of sit in the middle, I find it's just more convenient to refer to MMOs and MUDs as separate categories, even though I know that they're all the same damn thing with different clients (but of course, WoW has a different client from Everquest just like it has a different client from Gemstone.)

As to where Topmudsites wants to draw the line though, that's a different story with different concerns.

--matt
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