http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreading/~3/226277456/more-than-mu

I ended up reading this fine blog due to a link from a commenter on this site, and from there started exploring various other types of “Interactive Fiction” (IF), that being a general term for the type of games that includes MUDs.

Its interesting just how isolated the MUD community is. Really, I have had almost no experience with the other types of IF.

For example, I didn’t even know what a roguelike is until I started playing Legerdemain, which was a fantasticly novel experience for me. To a MUDder, this is a graphical, single-player MUD. Graphical only in that there is a colorful ascii representation of your world, and MUD-like only in the similiar set of text-based commands. The biggest draw was the way exploration works, and I only stopped playing when the difficulty started wearing me down. I doubt this will be my last run-in with roguelikes.

Of course, the type of IF that everyone is familiar with is games like Zork (basically a single-player, turn-based MUD), which I did enjoy greatly at some time long past. What’s interesting is that there is still a community for this and new games that are released. And I, someone who has dedicated years of my free time to games that are effectively the same thing, have played none of them.

Assuming I’m not simply daft and that the separation of these communities extends beyond my own personal ignorance, my first response to it is that this is a problem. I want to see communities for lovers of all forms of interactive fiction. If there are any, I want to see what they’re like and why I haven’t heard of them. If there are not, I want to take a shot at creating one.

Getting my feet wet in the roguelike world seems like a good start. I’m thinking about writing my experience on this site, but I don’t have a good feel for if my readers would be interested in hearing about it, since its not MUD-related. But I do think you should be interested! Are you?