Mudding Is Dead
I’ve had a suspicion for a while that MUDs are a thing of the past. The advent of Everquest that finally evolved into the latest incarnation of MMORPGs World of Warcraft has killed any text-based games that are out there. I love MUDs much more than graphical interfaces. I prefer to read well written descriptions, and picture in my mind what the author is describing over poorly generated graphics that are designed more for speed than quality. Sure, WoW is pretty, but it’s not as pretty as the images that my imagination comes up with.
What finally confirmed to me that MUDding is dead was a conversation that I had with my head creator on my MUD. He had gotten drawn into WoW, and has not logged into the MUD for quite some time. I knew that he had some personal problems, many kids, college, and work to take up his time. He’s done wonderful things for Spear of Insanity, so I wasn’t going to begrudge him his absence. I figured he would be back eventually. Now that he’s playing WoW, I’ve lost all hope of future development on my MUD.
I’m going to keep my MUD running. After all, the world is 90% done, and it’s still playable. The code is well developed, full of features, and very stable. There’s no harm in keeping it running. As a matter of fact, I checked, and the MUD has been running for 89 straight days without a hiccup. Granted, not many people have logged in during that time, but it’s still there.
Someday, I’ll have the time to go in and polish off that last 10% just to say that I have the world done. I’m not sure why I have the motivation to finish it off since no one is playing. I guess it’s because it has been an important part of my life since 1996, and I would like to say that I finished it even though it has taken more than a decade to do so.
R.I.P. MUDs. You’ll be missed.
