I loved the tabletop game I was in running Changeling: The Dreaming so much (this was 1997) that I thought, "Hey, I wonder if they make MUDs, but, like, for roleplaying? Then I could play Changeling whenever the hell I want, and I don't have to wait for my lazy friend to run his game." It turns out they DID make roleplaying MUDs! I liked RP MU*s so much, I wrote a college paper about them at a time when such things were pretty unusual.
I started because I was a teenager in 1996 and didn't know any IRL players and it was more fun than BBS games.
I worked all night at an extremely undemanding job, in front of a PC, and I was bored. A friend was like "I stay up all night playiing this text game, come try it" and I was like "sounds fake but ok".
@kanye-qwest said in What drew you to MU*?:
I worked all night at an extremely undemanding job, in front of a PC, and I was bored. A friend was like "I stay up all night playiing this text game, come try it" and I was like "sounds fake but ok".
That's similar to my experience. I worked the late-night shift at the college computer lab. We couldn't install video games, and there wasn't much of an internet to surf at the time, but I could MU from a terminal window.
@egg said in What drew you to MU*?:
I loved the tabletop game I was in running Changeling: The Dreaming so much (this was 1997) that I thought, "Hey, I wonder if they make MUDs, but, like, for roleplaying? Then I could play Changeling whenever the hell I want, and I don't have to wait for my lazy friend to run his game." It turns out they DID make roleplaying MUDs! I liked RP MU*s so much, I wrote a college paper about them at a time when such things were pretty unusual.
I was playing on Vampire Wars off and on from the age of 13 to the age of 17, and had wandered off to RP chat rooms (chatalot dot com, yo), and peeked back in to VWs at like 17?? And friends there were like: Lavian! You like RP come play on this MUSH! It's vampire but with more roleplay.
Okay.
...hey where are the mobs?
Wait, I'm not being murdered instantly just because someone finds me annoying?
Then I found other mushes. XD
I was reading the Wheel of Time books at the time and my roommate noticed. He told he there was a MUD about the setting, which I had assumed was similar to Medievia IV - mobs, levels, etc.
Then I got on there and Ororo Sedai (white haired, she controlled the weather - it was a simpler time...) asked me to go become a Warder. I was like... sure, those are badass! But I had to find a guy who recruited them? Whaaat?
And so it began.
@cobaltasaurus "Hey, where are the mobs?!" Yes, can relate. 
@stabeest said in What drew you to MU*?:
I've been involved in IRC roleplay since I was about 16 years old. I spent years playing on play by email games and forum games as well. I started RPing because I love to tell stories. I have since I first started playing with Barbies and acting out elaborate fantasy scenarios with them. I guess I never really grew out of playing pretend, but until I discovered the internet, it was all just inside my head or written down in these notebooks that I would FILL with world-building notes.
Then I discovered people telling stories on IRC and the rest is history. It's been twenty years now. I've taken breaks here and there for sometimes years at a time, but I always come back because there are always stories that I want to tell, characters that I want to explore.
I found MUs thanks to my best friend who knew I needed an outlet and thought this could be a good one. And it absolutely has been, no matter what has happened. I've met some wonderful people. I met my partner. I've told some stories that have been just beautiful. While some might find it terrifying to think of moving into a MU without any friends, I find that exciting. New people mean new stories to tell. That's all that this is about for me.
Man I was also into my Barbies way later than most kids but they lived ELABORATE COMPLICATED LIVES. I think mine were more 'Beverly Hills 90210' than high fantasy but I was 11, I had time to grow.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/a7rrmy/a_letter_to_blizzard_entertainment/
I read this this morning while taking my morning constitutional and I thought -- Yeah, this is how I feel about blizzard.
Then I thought longer and realized, Yeah, this is how I feel about Mu*s. This thread made me step back and want to think about what drew me in in the first place and why that draw and pull is no longer present.
Think I'm going to write an open letter to Mu*dom.
@bobgoblin Mind you, I'm not saying the following applies to you.
Sometimes it's not so much that a company, a hobby or an activity is different - or at least that it's changing at a rate or in a way it didn't use to - but more that we are different people now than when we started. We have expectations, standards or even personalities and lives no longer compatible with things we used to love a while ago.
I feel that way in regards to Blizzard specifically. It's quite possible what irks me now is stuff I would have loved eight years ago. That same principle could perhaps apply to MU* for some folks.
@arkandel I agree. And honestly reevaluating that has helped me get a lot more patience and personal fun back.
@arkandel I think that in these cases though (MMOs and MUSHes), the activity itself is very different than it was 15, 20 years ago.
With MMOs we've gone from a subscription model to a micro-transaction model. You also have a vast gulf between people who are just starting and the dinos who have been there forever. These kinds of things fundamentally shift the way the game is played. The influx of "casual" gamers to the video game industry has changed things as well.
I think a lot of that applies to MUSHes too. Sure, I like different things now than I did decades ago. But the games are different too. There are fewer games to choose from, less random RP, more "appointment RP", more metaplot, stuff like that.
@faraday said in What drew you to MU*?:
@arkandel I think that in these cases though (MMOs and MUSHes), the activity itself is very different than it was 15, 20 years ago.
Oh, for sure. And MU* are different, too, although for obvious reasons those changes are a bit less visible at a glance.
What I'm saying though is that I would probably have loved today's WoW back then the same way I did when I first encountered its vanilla version.
Today it's not doing it, or not to the same degree, because I am not the same person any more and I don't live the same life I did then.
@arkandel said in What drew you to MU*?:
And MU* are different, too, although for obvious reasons those changes are a bit less visible at a glance.
I think a big part of MU*dom being different is that we're all, most of us anyway, old now. We've been doing this for around or over a decade (in many cases much more than that). When you do the same sort of thing for that length of time, it can easily grow stale no matter how much Special Sauce you put into it to make it better. Especially when it's similar, not the same obviously, but similar groups doing the same basic stuff over and over.
I don't think a letter to the MU* community would help with some of its more intractable problems: the people causing the issues know what they're doing and don't care that it bothers reasonable people. And the staff letting them get away with it ultimately don't care, either. There are low- or no-drama games out there, play on one of those or try your hand at running your own.
@paris And this little corner of a tiny corner most certainly isn't the MU* Community. We will laugh at you.
I also feel like game culture varies pretty drastically, particularly between subgenres (WoD vs the players that populated the BSG games I was on for a long time vs the L&L crowd vs the Pern crowd that used to be bigger...etc). Certain types of RP are common in one that seem like a fucking revelation in another. That letter to Blizzard has some universal components to it but you wouldn't write the same one to Nintendo or Bioware. I feel like the same applies, only moreso, because MUs have more abstract goals bottomline than the kind of focus a corporation needs to have.
@paris said in What drew you to MU*?:
I don't think a letter to the MU* community would help with some of its more intractable problems: the people causing the issues know what they're doing and don't care that it bothers reasonable people. And the staff letting them get away with it ultimately don't care, either. There are low- or no-drama games out there, play on one of those or try your hand at running your own.
Choosing your game - and its staff - was always part of the hobby. In fact things are dramatically better these days than they used to be, both because there are outlets where bad apples get fingers pointed at them but also because it's easier to find sane game-runners through word of mouth.
Not that running into someone badshit enough, combined with uncaring staff, can't burn an individual out. Of course it can, and has. All I'm saying is this has always been the case, but perhaps at the time we hadn't accumulated enough what-the-fucks to go over our threshold yet.
@arkandel said in What drew you to MU*?:
easier to find sane game-runners through word of mouth
Well. It's easier to find decent game-runners. Nobody that thinks "Yeah, I'm going to invite dozens of people into my living room to shit all over my furnishings. That's a grand idea." Is 100% sane.
I'm not sure that I would want to encourage mu players to treat of the staff of the games they run with the same entitlement that some people have towards the big gaming corporations about games they bought.
If for no other reason that by and large those corporations just do not care institutionally, they're easy to scream at, villify, ect. Most gamerunners do indeed care, can be easily frustrated and demoralized by entitled people screaming at them that the game isn't what "I (didn't) pay for".
The sheer level of extreme ugliness that I have seen directed at game runners is not something that I would want to encourage. Even remotely. At all.
it's okay to express frustrations, I mean sometimes that input is taken seriously and considered and that can help the game as a whole. I think we already have a big issue with people being unable to separate "what I want" from "good for all."
I loved the tabletop game I was in running Changeling: The Dreaming so much (this was 1997) that I thought, "Hey, I wonder if they make MUDs, but, like, for roleplaying? Then I could play Changeling whenever the hell I want, and I don't have to wait for my lazy friend to run his game." It turns out they DID make roleplaying MUDs! I liked RP MU*s so much, I wrote a college paper about them at a time when such things were pretty unusual.
