I honestly can't believe that MUDs are being discussed now, after almost everyone on the net has abandoned them.
It is like watching a debate about whether the Model T is taking humanity in the wrong direction. This debate is even more ridiculous though, because most of the experts with an opinion on this stuff have never even meaningfully participated in the things they are commenting on. Their outsider interpretation is just academese drivel.They wouldn't even know these things if they saw them!
One of the best places to hook up with a MUD on the web would be The Mud Connector , and you can check the population of that site. When I was there, it was at 74,063 members distributed over 1,642 games.
Let's get modern for a moment and look at 2006. Welcome to the land of the MMORPG! World of Warcraft alone has seven million subscribers.
In an old MUD you might see a screen like this. In a modern MMORPG you might see a screen like this.
Even smaller populations like that found on Second Life (where there are only about 873,495 people right now) utterly dwarf MUDs and their ilk. (Second Life is one of the games with US dollars trading hands. When I visited the site said that over $271, 563 US Dollars had been spent in the last 24 hours. This sort of thing was never accomplished in MUDs.)
The program SimLife is just as ridiculously outdated. The writer gets thrown by a word like "orgot", as if she has never heard an imaginary word used during gameplay before or insider terminology. (An orgot is the word for a simulated organism in the game. That's it.)
She acts like this is sophisticated stuff, when it is closer to Pacman than A.L.I.C.E.
Honestly, I don't think I can take information from someone with such culture shock as being worth very much. They are so screwed up by being shifted out of their element that they don't even know what in the heck they are observing.
They also are talking about the perception of technology by children quite awhile ago, I doubt modern children would be so naive about what they were participating in. My nephews and nieces would never, not in a million years, think that an animal on WoW was alive. They know what a program is.
I just had to vent my frustration about this. It seems like the outcry of a bunch of Neo-Luddites.
Technology will not be stopped. Humans will be human whether they are putting on masks and playing imagination in the backyard, or creating a character on WoW. You only bring into the cyber world what you have in you to start with.
There will always be social recluses, philanderers, and people with poor judgement. The web didn't invent them. It just gave them a new place to express themselves.
The tools we use in every day interaction in the flesh are translated and used differently on the web, but they are present.
Humans have had the same pitiful freakouts over every human innovation that they feared they were being left out of. (Craftsman guilds? Oh, those people must have nefarious purposes!)
The key here is balance, not elimination, of types of expression.
Patty
(Obviously cranky about this article.)
