[Jazuela]

Butler, I'm having trouble comprehending your posts. You flit from one thought to the other and seem to be talking about commercial development of the gaming industry rather than the attraction of people to MUDs, specifically.

It's pretty simple, but you're making it complex and weaving some overly creative, overly complex "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist.

The #1 reason why MUD players, play MUDs, is that they are TEXT. That is the REASON they play MUDs, as opposed to any other type of game. For the same reason Graphics game players play graphics games: because they have graphics.

Adding graphics to text games will not attract people who are looking specifically for text games. In fact, it will likely scare away anyone who is specifically looking for a text game. And when all those graphics gamers show up, comparing graphics games to text games, all the existing text gamers will shout a collective STFU NOOB and shove those graphics gamers away, because they are interfering with the gaming, with all their whining about how there's no graphics.

The fact that there's no graphics is the POINT of text games. That is why they have the audience they have, at the present time.

Furthermore, text games are a niche market, by definition. They can expand and contract, but motly (not exclusively) by the number of people who are looking, very specifically, for text games. The biggest attraction to any individual text game, will be by members of the existing text game community and not from outside it.

There are tens of thousands of text gamers in the world. And yes, many of us are getting older. Our children, however, are just getting started. They know about muds because their parents have gone on about their adventures in text-based fantasy land, and show up sometimes out of sheer morbid curiosity - and sometimes by sincere interest.

Some games don't WANT to be massively populated, and would actually suffer such a fate. Consider also that most MUDs are not commercial enterprises and are prevented by copyright of their code from ever being commercial enterprises. So they can't tap into the market of people who pay for games. They don't have the resources because they are not allowed to charge their players money to play, and therefore as a gaming entity, they have no income with which to create commercial advertisements.

Most of the MUDding industry is driven by word of mouth, and by posts on forums such as this, and occasionally, a gaming magazine writer will take a trip down nostaligia avenue and visit the old warhorses of the computer-accessed gaming world, and re-visit our little corner and come out with a new article.

There are very few commercial text-based muds, and those that do exist, don't seem to be going anywhere any time soon. And so - I'm not worried. I don't see a problem. Not because I'm naive or because I have my head stuck in the sand. But because I have been gaming both commercial and non-commercial games for well over 20 years and have watched the trends, and have a pretty good idea as to where the genre is going. And - where it isn't going.