A little irrelevant, but I need to vent about something MUD adjacent.
I really wish MUDs were still a thing. The text-based roleplaying communities were largely swallowed by Discord, where as before they existed scattered over proboards, jcink, and a few others.
Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting. To boot, even when a better ecosystem is invented, players refuse to give it a shot even if directly invited, because they got comfortable with Discord's terribleness.
It's so frustrating, and I don't know how to voice it, or even what can be done.
I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.
One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?
I honestly worry that the relevance of text-based systems is largely tied with literacy and how it interacts with the player's imagination -- something largely in decline, at least in the US.
A little irrelevant, but I need to vent about something MUD adjacent.
I really wish MUDs were still a thing. The text-based roleplaying communities were largely swallowed by Discord, where as before they existed scattered over proboards, jcink, and a few others.
Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting. To boot, even when a better ecosystem is invented, players refuse to give it a shot even if directly invited, because they got comfortable with Discord's terribleness.
It's so frustrating, and I don't know how to voice it, or even what can be done.
I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.
One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?
I honestly worry that the relevance of text-based systems is largely tied with literacy and how it interacts with the player's imagination -- something largely in decline, at least in the US.
Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.
That’s a fun design that brings back some old memories.