[the_logos]

Yeah, I didn't look into the game at all.

My definition of MUD is based on what the essence of the thing is. It's a shared, real-time, semi-persistent simulation of a world (whether fictional or not, and however primitive that simulation is....very in all cases but more in some than others). The server-side is the important part in terms of the essence of the 'thing.' The client is a dumb process to display data that the server tells it to display. Whether that data is all text, 2d graphics, 3d graphics, a mixture of the above, etc, is secondary to what the core 'thing' is. The common consumer doesn't distinguish though, and abstracts the 'thing' to a higher level wherein the display mechanism is as important as the simulation itself.

Anyway, this conversation dates back 15+ years (not involving MMO, as that term isn't 15 years old, but asking whether stuff like Habitat was a MUD due to representing the "world" graphically) and it's really getting old! Whatever an MMO or MUD is, most people wouldn't recognize the latter and would not play Lusternia or Aardwolf or whatever and think of it as the same 'thing' as WoW (however wrong I think they are). Are they wrong? I don't care! I just want to get on with being productive, and insisting that people think of them as the same thing is like insisting that people not tell you that two cars each going 60 mph are going 120 mph relative to each other, because they are really going 119.99999999999 (close enough) mph due to theory of relativity. It might be true but it just doesn't matter for most situations.

--matt