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Short for multi-user dungeon (or sometimes dimension)
A mud is in essence a large, structure real-time chat room, in which
participants, usually referred to as players, take part in role playing
games. Typically, a player will -+adopt a character taken from a
sword-and-sorcery list of knights, dwarves, princesses and dragons. Once
logged on to the system, players navigate through locations that might
include rooms, forests or tunnels; negotiate a variety of traps and puzzles;
grapple with the intricacies of the local bartering systems; and, generally,
spend a long time doing nothing much.
Muds were for many
years the leading cause of computer addiction among students, for whom such
fantasy worlds represented an attractive alternative to lectures. These
days, simpler chat rooms and instant messaging probably account for more
wasted hours on campus, but research into muds and their
object-oriented cousins, called moos, continues as the interest in
online virtual worlds grows. The flexibility offered by moo
languages has encouraged many people to immerse themselves more fully in
these environments, perhaps by adopting a different gender, a different
personality or even a different species. Such behaviour has inevitably
attracted the attention of social scientists and behavioural psychologists,
several of whom have written scholarly books attempting to explain it. More
useful works have examined the possible extension of mud and moo
technology into education, teleworking and even medicine. |
