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Old 03-07-2011, 07:27 AM   #1
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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The inevitability of GUIs in text-based mudding

I know Newworlds and I have disagreed on this issue in the past, but a recent post brought it to mind again, and I think it'd make a good point of discussion.

Last week one of your players released a few more graphical MUSHclient plugins specifically tailored to your mud. I think we're seeing a gradual shift towards graphical interfaces, much like we did towards ANSI colour many years ago - you can either embrace it or ignore it, but you really can't stop it, because sound and graphics are handled by the client. And mud clients are becoming more and more powerful.

A game is far more than just an interface though, and personally I think that even a hardcore roleplaying mud could benefit greatly from an attractive GUI. If you really want to stress the text-based nature of the game you could design the GUI to look like an open book, with a parchment-coloured background and an old-fashioned font. Perhaps the players could even flick through the pages to view an annotated map, or check their score (designed to look like a traditional pen&paper RPG character sheet), and so on, with all of the OOC information being kept out of the main "page" of what would effectively become an interactive novel.

But I don't think you can escape it. Remember those roleplaying muds that refused to add colour (because "books aren't written in multicoloured text")? Well these days their players just set the colour in the client. It's nothing more than an inconvenience, another hoop for new players to jump through. A decade from now, perhaps players will have the same attitude towards muds that don't offer a GUI.
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