Glossary

 
  • Admin
    • An individual avatar or player of a virtual space who has been granted special powers within the space in order to administrate some aspect of it. Short, of course, for administrator.
    • See also Immortal, God, Wizard.
  • Anonymity
    • A state in which your identity and past history is completely unknown. In a virtual space, avatars are only anonymous under one of the following circumstances: a) they are able to change identities easily, b) the avatar is new to the space, or c) the space is so large that in any given group of people, a given avatar is not likely to be known.
    • See also Pseudonymity, Profile, Name.
  • Area
    • A term for a collection of rooms that share a common theme, generally by the same author. Areas usually also imply a collection of other statistics and data beyond the mere description of the map.
    • See also Zone, Yell Zone, Room.
  • Area file
    • The file in which an area is stored: a template-based text file that may or may not be compiled into binary data before use in a mud server.
  • ASCII
    • In mud terms, shorthand for text-only display. When one refers to ASCII graphics, one means crude graphics formed out of typographical characters.
  • Attributes
    • The collection of tangible and intangible qualities that make up an avatar.
    • See also Tangible attributes, Intangible attributes, Avatar.
  • Avatar
    • The virtual incarnation of a participant in a virtual space; the character, figure, or persona they inhabit the virtual space with and present to the other participants.
  • Bandwidth
    • Connections over the Internet imply data transmission. But wires can only handle a certain volume of data in a given time. The term for this is bandwidth. In general, the bandwidth required by a server is the average bandwidth usage per player, multiplied by the number of players at peak usage times.
  • BSX mud
    • A type of mud written by Bram Stolks that supports simple graphics on the X-Windows platform using a markup language.
    • See also Markup language.
  • Cartoon
    • A simplified and abstracted visual representation of something, which selects specific elements to magnify and therefore emphasize.
  • Character advancement
    • The common goal-oriented practice of increasing tangible attributes and available commands for an avatar, usually as part of a game framework.
    • See also Tangible attributes, Goal-oriented or GoP, Avatar
  • Chat
    • An embedded real-time communication system via the Internet. Muds frequently embed chat systems within their framework, and for some muds, chat is the whole point of existing.
  • Chat box
    • An interface method for presenting textual output in a graphical environment, a chat box is a typically modal interface that aggregates all the text output from the server into a scrolling text box. In many graphical muds, a chat box serves to essentially display all the output of the mud except for special effects and a graphical depiction of the spatial relationship between avatars and the world.
    • See also Text bubble
  • Chat room
    • A chat room is a non-spatial environment wherein multiple participants may type and have their text reflected out to all other participants. The sine qua non of chat rooms is Internet Relay Chat, usually termed IRC.
    • See also IRC.
  • Churn
    • Churn or churn rate is a term from service industries. It refers to the amount of users of the service who are choosing not to continue subscribing to the service, versus the amount of newly acquired users and the amount of returning users. There are several different ways of measuring churn, but in general, a positive churn rate indicates that your user base is growing, and a negative one means that your base is shrinking. Clearly, nobody wants to keep a negative churn rate for long, as it is unsustainable and may result in shutting the service down.
  • Client
    • For the purposes of this book, a client is a piece of software that connects to a server. It serves as front-end for the server’s output, essentially a display mechanism. Generally, clients have very little smarts to them. Clients do not have to be graphical—a common type of text-based client are Telnet clients, which are implementations of a text-based client that uses the Telnet protocol defined in an Internet RFC.
    • See also Telnet, Client-server, Server
  • Client-server
    • A relationship in which piece of software is run remotely on a server, but users do not interact with the server directly. Instead, they connect via a client, a mediating piece of software that opens a remote connection to the server and displays the server’s output.
    • See also Client, Server, Peer to peer, and Distributed server
  • Closure
    • Marshall McLuhan’s term for the act of filling in gaps and details in an iconic or abstracted representation of something. When we see two dots and a curved line as a face, we are committing an act of closure.
    • See also Cool media
  • Codebase
    • The common term for the standardized code distributions of various types of mud. When one refers to the Merc codebase, one means servers based on the publicly released version of the source code.
  • Contextual exit
    • In a room-based environment, exits are logical connections between rooms. By convention, most exits represent spatiality by representing cardinal directions. A contextual exit is one where the exit does not represent a cardinal direction, but rather a subtler sort of spatiality, such as “towards the church” or “into the room.”
  • Continuous map
    • This is a sort of map where the virtual world is represented on a coordinate space, as opposed to using a node-based (e.g. room-based) system with exits that merely mimic spatiality. A room-based system can contain continuous maps within each node (as in the example of EverQuest).
    • See also Room-based map.
  • Cool media
    • Marshall McLuhan terms media that require a high degree of closure cool media.
  • Corpse
    • On most muds, when an avatar dies, a new object is created and left behind at the location of the avatar’s death, to represent the avatar’s corpse. Of course, the avatar is also generally reincarnated immediately. This leads to the interesting phenomenon of a given player having two bodies (or more, if they are unfortunate enough to die a lot) at once.
  • Cross-gender play
    • The phenomenon of a player using an avatar of a different gender than their gender in real life. One often speaks of avatars being “male presenting” or “female presenting” in order to clarify that one cannot assume that the avatar’s gender matches that of the human behind it.
  • Culling
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  • Design pattern
  • Distributed server
  • Driver
  • Dynamic load balancing
  • Emote
  • Exit
  • Fastwalk
  • Female-presenting
  • Furry
  • Game master
  • Global namespace
  • Goal-oriented
  • God
  • GoP
  • Gossip
  • Grief player
  • Groundhog day
  • Handle
  • Hex grid
  • Hypertext
  • Iconic vs representational
  • Identity
  • Immortal
  • Intangible attributes
  • Interactivity
  • IRC
  • Latency
  • Level
  • Locker
  • LPMud
  • Male-presenting
  • Markup language
  • MMORPG
  • Mob, mobile
  • Monty Haul
  • MOO
  • MUD
  • MUSH
  • Name
  • Nanny
  • Netsex
  • Network layer
  • Newbie
  • Nick
  • Node
  • Object ID
  • Object primitives
  • Packet
  • Packet handler
  • Paperdoll
  • Peer to peer
  • Persistence
  • Persistence database
  • Persistent world
  • PK
  • Player
  • Player housing
  • Profile
  • Pseudonymity
  • PvP
  • Repop
  • Reset
  • Rnum
  • Role-playing
  • Roleplaying game or RPG
  • Room
  • Room-based map
  • Say
  • Server
  • Server mirroring
  • Server process
  • Session-based game
  • Stock mud
  • Tangible attributes
  • TCP/IP
  • Telepresence
  • Telnet
  • Template
  • Template database
  • Text bubble
  • Tile-based
  • Tinysex
  • UDP
  • Virtual reality
  • Virtual sociopath
  • Vividness
  • Vnum
  • VRML
  • Whisper
  • Wilderness system
  • Wizard
  • World state
  • Writing space
  • XP
  • Yell
  • Yell zone
  • Zone