LegendMUD

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LegendMUD
LegendMUD Logo.png
Developer Project community
Producers Ruth Williams
Todd McKimmey
Mike Weatherbee
Designers Raph and Kristen Koster, Rick and Sherry Delashmit [1]
Engine DikuMUD
Platform Platform independent
Release1994
Genre Historical fantasy MUD
Mode Multiplayer

LegendMUD is a text-only MUD game founded by a group of friends including virtual world designer Raph Koster. It features historically significant story elements and award-winning [2] [3] gameplay. It opened publicly on February 14, 1994. [4] [2] It has received critical praise for its research and attention to detail in reconstructing past cultures within the game context. [5]

Contents

Game characteristics

A screenshot of LegendMUD's login screen LegendMUD login screenshot.png
A screenshot of LegendMUD's login screen

The thematic structure of LegendMUD is based on a literal interpretation of historical legend, with content based on real locales at various points in history, but with mythological elements included as concrete reality. [4] [5] LegendMUD was derived from DikuMUD. At present, it features over 8,000 rooms contained within 60 areas. [4]

LegendMUD features several innovations, one of which was that players were not required to select a character class, such as mage or warrior. [1] Rather, a skill system is used, which has been noted as extensive and original. [5] The player selects a hometown affecting the types of skills which are then possible to learn. For example, a character from the industrial period in San Francisco has the opportunity to learn about guns, but cannot learn magic. In contrast, a character from ancient period Ireland is capable of learning druidic skills, but can never learn about more modern ideas such as field surgery. [5]

To further innovate on the learning of skills, the character must through interaction with non-player characters learn whatever that NPC had to teach, with some of these requiring a small form of quest.

History

In October 1995, LegendMUD was selected as The Mud Connector's Mud of the Month. [3]

"A Story About a Tree"

Koster wrote "A Story About a Tree", a short essay and epitaph about the reported real-world death of a Norwegian LegendMUD player named Karyn and the manner in which the game's community grieved. [6] Richard Bartle considered the incident to be a key event in the development of virtual worlds' ethics, similar to "A Rape in Cyberspace". [7] The 'death' demonstrated that people can develop feelings for each other via the virtual world medium, thus experiencing real emotions about somebody they've never met, even an entirely fictional persona. "A Story About a Tree" is considered as a major counterargument against the "it's just a game" point of view on virtual worlds. Furthermore, it showcased that while being a very real object of grief to one party, it can indeed remain just a game for another. [7]

While working on a documentary film about virtual reality in 2002, Tracy Spaight was spurred to investigate Koster's story after a conversation with Bartle. Spaight found that Karyn had been using a photo of 1995 Frøken Norge (now called Miss Norway) finalist Trine Solberg Lepperød. Lepperød told Spaight that this photo had not been published and she did not know how Karyn could have acquired it, adding "I was scared by all these letters this 'Karyn' person got, since the picture is of me and I am alive!" [6]

Spaight was unable to corroborate the circumstances of Karyn's death, reported as a crash on the E6 highway near Skogn between a Volkswagen and a test driven Porsche 911 that killed three people on 29 January 1998. He found that although a crash did occur there on that date, it involved a car and a truck and killed one older woman. In addition, though Karyn spoke Norwegian and claimed to be using her real-life name, her name would be very unusual in Norway. [6]

Spaight ultimately speculates that Karyn may have been a male player experimenting with a female gender presentation who decided to discontinue that experiment, using a faked death to do so. After publishing his investigation to Salon.com , Spaight claimed to have identified a male player with Karyn but was unable to make contact. He reiterates that Karyn's actions "invite players to reflect on how their words and actions in a virtual world can affect real people in the real world." [6]

References

  1. 1 2 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds . New Riders. p. 21. ISBN   0-13-101816-7. That people did play is a tribute to the game's design team, led by Raph Koster. Raph had a background in virtual world design, having worked on 1992's Worlds of Carnage (the first DikuMUD to have an embedded scripting language) before moving on to found LegendMUD in 1994 with Kristen Koster (his wife), Rick Delashmit, and others. [...] LegendMUD was itself an innovative game, boasting a number of features to promote role-playing that had never been implemented before. For example, unlike other DikuMUD derivatives, LegendMUD was classless (players don't elect to be fighters, magic-users, healers, thieves, or whatever); this concept was to shape the design of Ultima Online powerfully. The wide-ranging playing experience of the designers meant that they could draw on ideas from many other codebases, too.
  2. 1 2 Scott, Ryan (April 2006). "The CGW Interview: Raph Koster". Computer Gaming World. No. 261. p. 37. Archived from the original on 2008-11-23. 1994: The award-winning LegendMUD, codesigned by Koster, launches (www.legendmud.org – still active today).
  3. 1 2 "October '95 Mud of the Month". The Mud Connector . Archived from the original on 2010-01-03. Retrieved 2010-04-07.
  4. 1 2 3 "LegendMUD: An Overview". LegendMUD Official Website. Archived from the original on August 4, 2008. Retrieved April 14, 2010. LegendMUD is a text-based virtual world, or MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) based on "the world the way they thought it was". It's history with a twist: the game's world and its areas are based on real places on earth, but whatever the people of that age believed in is real on Legend. [...] LegendMUD opened officially on February 14, 1994, and has been operating continually since then. It was derived from DikuMUD, though it has been heavily modified over the years to the point where its codebase is now almost completely customized. As of Spring 2007, Legend has over 8,000 rooms making up over 60 areas.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Towers, J. Tarin; Badertscher, Ken; Cunningham, Wayne; Buskirk, Laura (1996). Yahoo! Wild Web Rides. IDG Books Worldwide Inc. pp. 162–163. ISBN   0-7645-7003-X. LegendMUD allows you to adventure through several ancient lands and historical eras to experience the world as the people of the past viewed it. This is travel through history the way it was meant to be! You can choose from several great time periods like Celtic Ireland, medieval Germany, and even an Arabian nights setting. Your hometown will affect your stats and determine what your character can learn based on the beliefs of the population at the time. Those of a more ancient period are more adept at magic, while abilities in a later industrial era will lean toward technology. ¶ Don't worry about being stuck exclusively in the time period you've chosen – no doubt you'll want to explore all areas of this great MUD. Luckily, it allows time travel between eras so you won't miss a thing! The skills available for your character are numerous and original, and the combat is fast and exhilarating. If you get stuck on something, there's a universal chat channel you can use to ask for help from the midsized player base. You usually end up getting the helpfiles recited back to you, but the players are certainly not a rude bunch. Also, make sure you rent instead of typing quit or you'll drop all your stuff. Equipment is level restrictive, so don't expect to be hanging on to very fancy weapons at the first level. ¶ It would be really great if more coders took the immense time and effort to study cultures of the past and put them into virtual worlds like this one. LegendMUD seems to be doing well and is becoming more popular all the time. There's no doubt we'll soon see more time periods. And there's an added benefit with this game – you can always justify the time you waste mudding by telling yourself and others that it's educational.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Spaight, Tracy (2003). "Who killed Miss Norway?". N.Y.L. Sch. Law Review. 49.
  7. 1 2 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds . New Riders. pp. "Chapter 8. Coda: Ethical Considerations", "Yourself". ISBN   0-13-101816-7.
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