172 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
similarities, although the extent to which D&D games were a for-
mative influence on early MUD-thought is contentious.^2
These days, MUD is more commonly glossed as ‘Multi-User
Dimension’, to get away from the ‘monster and combat’ (or ‘hack ’n
slash’) associations of the earlier label. Although the virtual equiv-
alents of the older games by no means exclude fantasy play literally
of a ‘dungeon and dragon’ kind, most computer-mediated virtual
worlds are very different in subject-matter, and some have little or
no fantasy element at all. Some MUDs are games, in which points
are scored and there are winners and losers; but many foster col-
laborative role-playing activities of an educational, professional,
commercial, or social kind. A group of people may get together
for social chat, as they do in a synchronous chatgroup (chapter 5);
the difference is that, if they form a MUD, they talk in a world
that they have created for themselves, and adopt personae which
fit into this world. The notion has been applied within the edu-
cational domain, for example, where groups have constructed
MUDs in order to engage in a discussion of academic research
or college teaching practice, or to facilitate staff–student interac-
tion. An entire teaching situation might be created within a MUD
- whether for seven-year-olds or seventeen-year-olds. The virtual
world might be a campus, classroom, or business centre; it might
be fictitious or an accurate re-creation of a part of the real world.
But whether the purpose is combat or conversation, destruction
or debate, research or recreation, MUDs have all had one thing in
common: they are interactive databases which create vivid environ-
ments in which users interact in real time. And they have all been
text-based.
The first MUD was devised in 1979–80, designed by British com-
puter scientists Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University
of Essex, UK. As the MUD idea caught on, variants developed, and
with it a proliferation of acronyms. They include:
LPMUDs,basedontheLPCprogramminglanguage(theLPis
from Swedish computer scientist Lars Pensjo, who developed ̈(^2) See the discussion of MUD history at, for example,
http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/lpb/muddex/mudline.html.