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Old 07-16-2010, 04:27 AM   #6
silvarilon
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Re: MUD - What do you think it should stand for?

Dislike for D&D isn't the issue. Games that have no relation to D&D being linked to it is the issue.

If I was making a game about heroes that travel through a structure, room by room, fighting opponents, then the association would be fine. It may be an above-ground forest and not a classic "dungeon", but the connotations are appropriate for the style of game I'd be building.

If I was making a game where characters have relatively little need to explore the environment, and are interacting in non-combat ways with the environment and other inhabitants of the world (AI or other players) then "dungeon" really implies the wrong sort of game.

Ironclaw Online, as an example, is a political renaissance-themed game, about joining guilds, building alliances, playing politics, and socially choosing sides. Although you can pull out a sword and attack someone, that's not the point of the game (And you'd get arrested unless you, y'know, played politics to avoid getting accused, or get let off the charge.) Although the game world is made out of a series of interconnected "rooms", there would be no need to walk into the cathedral unless your character wanted to pray or do some other religious action. There would be no need to explore unless you wanted to (because the cathedral is marked on the map), you could, theoretically, play the game fine without exploring more than five or so rooms. So when we talk about a "dungeon", we're giving the impression that the game is structured, vaguely, along D&D lines where you move from room to room, defeating opponents or other players. In games where the gameplay and philosophy is very dissimilar to that, "dungeon" is a misleading term.

I'm not arguing it should be changed, I'm happy enough with the meaningless term "MUD", as Ide points out. That's a "game type" name in its own right, these days, regardless of what it originally stood for. Similarly, I'm happy for MUX to refer to either rules-light, or socially-focussed MUDs (and for MUX to be a subset of MUD.) The MUD/MUX distinction solves the above problem.

Personally, I don't much care. I'll call my game either ICO, Ironclaw Online, "a MUD", "a MUX", or "a prose text roleplaying game" depending on who I'm talking to, and which term they are most likely to understand.
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