What is a MU*?

Arkandel

I like Faraday's list the best.

But if I really think about it when I think MU for me anyway the root is text based. Not video or picture or visual in the actually seeing it vs mind's eye thing.

Let's work with that.

Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.

Is it no longer a MU*?

il-volpe

I'm kinda puzzled as to what one needs to do to make it accessible for blind players. My first 'MUD' was LambdaMOO, and one of my first MU* friends is blind. He uses a screen-reader, the MOO didn't do anything about it.

I think MUSHes do need to think about accessibility, in numerous ways. I am pretty sure the player demographic has a disproportionately high percentage of disabled people. I don't think not doing this makes the game not-a-MU, but it does kinda make the designers dicks.

Juniper

@arkandel said in What is a MU*?:

@mietze said in What is a MU*?:
Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.

Is it no longer a MU*?

I would view the image of the Blue Hearts bar as an enhancement on top of the text game.

I propose that if it is possible to play the game via text only while ignoring any enhancements, it is a MU*. If interacting with graphical components is necessary to play, then it is not a MU*.

mietze

@arkandel no, as long as the text is there as the prime focus that would still ping as mu to me. If the interactions between characters and in story requires me to view pictures then that's where it falls off for me.

Its like the difference between a book and a movie, both are stories but one relies primary on visual, the other on text. Even though books can incorporate pictures, and movies can utilize text in their storytelling. There's even hybrids, like graphic novels, or what I've seen from many rpg video games as an observer (hubby and friends), where you do get to choose some of the direction of the text and that may be how the story is communicated if the studio didn't have a big voice actor budget, but the primary immersion is in the graphics.

Mushing for as long as I can remember has incorporated visuals sometimes, long before wiki people would make websites for characters or groups. So its not the fact that there are viewable images as the focus of the interaction.

Tinuviel

@arkandel said in What is a MU*?:

Is it no longer a MU*?

As has been said above, what is and isn't a MU* isn't necessarily something one can point at and delineate. I know that WoW isn't a MU*. I know that Firan is was a MU*.

It's like trying to explain the difference between dogs and cats without an innate knowledge of their biology. I know what a cat is because I know what a cat is.

faraday

@arkandel said in What is a MU*?:

Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.
Is it no longer a MU*?

I'm still not sure what you're going for, since again it's going to depend on your definition.

@Lotherio didn't consider Ares a MU from the get-go because it doesn't have softcode.

Someone else might or might not consider it a MU depending on whether the image replaced the text aspect.

Based on my original list, nowhere in there was "text only" one of my criteria. And in fact Ares does show pictures alongside the scenes (albeit for characters, not locations... that's more from convention than any technological limitation though; many MUs take place in settings where photos are not readily available so it's just not as much of a Thing.)

Derp

@arkandel said in What is a MU*?:

Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.

How have I never seen this?

Is this an out of the box behavior or does it require custom code outside of just -- finding the picture?

Waaaaaant.

faraday

@il-volpe said in What is a MU*?:

I'm kinda puzzled as to what one needs to do to make it accessible for blind players. My first 'MUD' was LambdaMOO, and one of my first MU* friends is blind. He uses a screen-reader, the MOO didn't do anything about it.

Accessibility for the vision-impaired isn't a yes/no but more of a grading scale.

It's unlikely (but I guess not impossible) that a text-based game would be so inaccessible as to get an "F", but that doesn't mean there's nothing more we can do.

For instance, Ares has a 'screenreader' mode which, when activated, strips off the border lines before and after commands. This prevents the screen reader from having to read out "equals equals equals dash..." a bazillion times. It also condenses combat output so you aren't spammed quite so much. Things like that.

I've also done my best to make the web portal compatible with screen readers through aria markings and such. It's still a bit lacking because that's not my field of expertise and accessibility is hard, but I did at least try.

Ominous

@l-b-heuschkel said in What is a MU*?:

On a game such as WoW, you can roleplay around the story, but the story marches on no matter what you do, and without taking your actions into consideration.

What about Asheron's Call where the actions of players did affect the story on minor levels?

Quinn

To me a MUSH is basically just cooperative storytelling in a text-based medium. I guess it could have pictures or some visual aspect, but at its core you need the people to drive the story and make things happen and interact with one another.

Whereas a MUD is a hack and slash that sure you could do some RP with other people, but you could also just go around killing orcs or whatever and never have to interact with another person if you didn't want to. You could be the only one playing the game and it wouldn't matter because you're not telling a story you're playing one.

Lotherio

@faraday said in What is a MU*?:

@Lotherio didn't consider Ares a MU from the get-go because it doesn't have softcode.

I do consider it progression. Something newer, something fresher (to quote Jack Skellington); next gen. I feel it/felt it could bridge that gap somewhere with the forum play which has always been fairly popular but too slow for me. I know lots of forum folks have had a 'slow' style of play (3-4 huge pose bombs a day) that would help bring some to live text based play that haven't bridged the gap. Some old MUers might come back into the fold that way, I've met a few old mu folks that left Mu* due to the dramas associated with it in favor of forum play.

faraday

@lotherio said in What is a MU*?:

I do consider it progression. Something newer, something fresher (to quote Jack Skellington); next gen.

Yeah but at the end of the day, a name is just a marketing tool. It's telling the consumers what to expect.

The very first version of Ares - which had no web portal - was virtually indistinguishable from PennMUSH to a player (on purpose). Some players thought it was PennMUSH. They don't care how the code is loaded behind the scenes. They care how they play the game.

You could use a PennMUSH server to make a MUD. You could run a MUSH-style game on TinyMUD. For me the game types are more about the player experience than the underlying tech. And since no two MUSHes (or MUDs or MMOs or video games in general) have exactly the same player experience anyway, there's some inherent variation.

But again, that's just me. There's no universal definition.

@ominous said in What is a MU*?:

What about Asheron's Call where the actions of players did affect the story on minor levels?

You're still not writing the story, you're participating in it. The story is already written by the game designers. It's the difference between writing a novel and reading through a choose-your-own-adventure story.

Grayson

A MU*, to me, is multi-user, real-time and text-based.

That's it, that's the whole definition.

Anything added on top of that is just gravy.

Lotherio

@faraday I can go with branding. You should, I feel, I need. I feel invalidated due to my concept, I need to accept terminology and vernacular change and I have to accept that too.

The small computer I hold in my hands can be called a smart phone I suppose though I don't use it as a phone. I'll have to accept I'm old and the more customizable (via softcode for me) thing I'm used to can be old timey text box telnet game. It can be on my shelf of games still played on telnet like freechess.org (yes, I know I can play FICS with a browser, I still telnet).

Coin

I skipped to the end.

Uh. Pretty sure at this point in the game, a MU is "a text-based online roleplaying game that people call a MU". Like, the actual definition of the word is contextual; like @faraday said when she talked about naming AresMUSH. It's a MU because we, the MU-ing community, call it a MU and decide it is.

Why is, what's it called, WantonWicked not a MU? Because their community doesn't call it one.

That's it, pretty much.

Ganymede

@coin

As Sunny said, the Potter Stewart rule applies here.

il-volpe

Hmmm. I find I feel that having a grid is a defining element of MU-ness. They were created to have multi-player Zork.

Sunny

@il-volpe said in What is a MU*?:

Hmmm. I find I feel that having a grid is a defining element of MU-ness. They were created to have multi-player Zork.

I disagree. There's several games that I would consider MUs that don't have grids, they just have lists of rooms to pick from or some similar accommodations.