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Old 01-10-2011, 05:02 AM   #5
Parhelion
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Name: Sarah
Location: Tempe, AZ
Home MUD: Ethos
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Re: Social Media/Facebook Use Survey - Please Read!

Yes and no. There ARE several games that technically classify as MUDs, or fall under similar categories, that not only exist but have actively thrived outside of the TMS-TMC-ole'-Kyndig Circle of Trust. While I'm not certain of its status today, Gemstone comes to mind as one such game.

This is sort of inaccurate.

To be honest, nobody in their right mind would have looked at Farmville 10 years ago and said, "Wow, THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!!" Farmville succeeds because of what Facebook enables, and it was, in my opinion, one of the first "pretty" game-like applications to really hit Facebook. Prior to it, all you had to play were things like MafiaWars and VampireWars or whatever, and it was boring.

Secondly, MUDs may evolve to take on different shapes. It is not the intent of this thread to start a battle on what a MUD should or should not be, but it is entirely feasible to run a "MUD" engine that had a simple complete graphical front-end. Nobody's expecting a huge explosion in development because of traffic from FB and Twitter, but that is not a reason to dismiss it out of hand, nor is it a reason not to look into learning how to use these technologies to the greatest benefit of each game.

If there is a reason to dismiss FB and Twitter or not, the numbers will talk.

That is why I need every game to respond, or at least try, and encourage their players to do the same -- even if they had NO success what-so-ever. It may be that Facebook and Twitter would be a complete waste of time and energy for developers of traditional MUDs, or it may be that nobody's succeeded because of "you're doing it wrong!". It may provide marginal benefits that are worth the effort for an administrator to make, and identifying what those benefits are is the point of this survey.
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