View Single Post
Old 09-19-2009, 03:07 AM   #15
prof1515
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Illinois
Posts: 791
prof1515 will become famous soon enoughprof1515 will become famous soon enough
Send a message via AIM to prof1515 Send a message via Yahoo to prof1515
Re: Muds only appeal to certain types of people.

It doesn't matter where in the world you are since MUDs are accessible online, not geographically. What matters is what vocabulary you have in the language that the MUD uses. Language has everything to do with MUDs. If you don't know the word for an action, how can you type it? Even if you have some knowledge of English vocabulary it may not be the right words for the commands. Furthermore, one of the few places to find an inventory of various MUDs are sites like this one. While English proficiency continues to spread throughout the world there still exists those who do not have the vocabulary to functionally participate in English-based MUDs.

In response to your original musing about why people don't play, I can suggest two things. First, MUDs are not , on the whole, graphical and shiny and mainly commercialized. MUDS are not produced by major software companies and don't have huge marketing budgets. They're also not visible in stores where people can see them nor are they reviewed by mainstream media very often. People tend to gravitate toward shiny, new and sensory experiences. MUDs seem plain, old and are not purely sensory (since they require more than merely the senses to interpret and play) nor can they find out about them via many other ways than reading.

The second reason that a lot of people don't know about MUDs because the community is very disorganized and over the years has squandered any chance they had to establish themselves mainstream. For some, it's a good thing while for others it's not. Some MUDs appeal to a small niche market while others seek a broader appeal. Unfortunately, it's been my observation that the innovations primarily come from the niche markets, not the more commercially-feasible games (unlike graphicals where innovation tends to drive the market) resulting in games with the greatest capability to advertise also being amongst the least impressive. The one thing that many MUDs have in their favor is the ability to play for free but those games inevitably don't have the financial capability to overshadow the commercial ones. When graphical games were still far more limited and crude, MUDs had a greater chance of establishing a presence in gaming (though admittedly I doubt they could ever compete with graphicals in the long run for the reasons I stated in the previous paragraph). Now, the gap in awareness is probably too big to overcome given the differences in graphical versus text-based experiences.

It was a H&S and back then there was greater distinction between RP and H&S; many of the latter had no pretensions about role-play. There was no requirement or even need for a character description. What good did a description do the character if the only goal was to kill things and level?
prof1515 is offline   Reply With Quote