Links
This page has two sorts of links: links useful to those interested in mud and online world design specifically, and links that are about game design in general. I’ve tried to give some indication of what’s at the other end of the link, in most cases. I’ve also included at a bottom a list of books that I thought were relevant, after many requests.
Unfortunately, this page always suffers from link rot. I hope to go through and find working links for much of this material. If you happen to have working sources for these, please let me know!
Studies and histories of specific online worlds
- Habitat
- The Habitat Papers are fairly extensive, and below I have called out only some of the more key ones.
- Doug Crockford’s Habitat is a good jumping off point for exploring the writings about Habitat.
- Oracle Layza’s Tales is a collection of anecdotes by a Habitat admin
- Habitat Anecdotes is a paper by Randy Farmer covering costs, player types, virtual economics, and more
- Social Dimensions of Habitat’s Citizenry is also by Farmer, and covers the social makeup of the players. It is interesting to compare his breakdown of player types to Richard Bartle’s.
- The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat was first presented at The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990, and is a very good starting point for studying Habitat.
- Habitat is a page run out of Japan that offers screenshots of the game
- The Habitat Papers are fairly extensive, and below I have called out only some of the more key ones.
- Text muds
- The Mud Tree is Martin Keegan’s attempt at a taxonomy of mud code bases.
- The TinyTIM TIMeline is a history of TinyTIM, one of the best-established and longest running social muds.
- The MUDDex has several items on it of historical interest, including:
- A history of TinyMUDs
- the notes of the 1st Ad Hoc Virtual Reality Conference
- The Black Rose incident, which is often cited as an example of administrative dilemmas.
- The FTP directory /users/mud at ftp.iol.ie has a number of interesting things by Richard Bartle, some of which may be on his site as well:
- An interview with Richard Bartle
- Bartle’s bibliography of mud-related material in print
- Bartle’s review of muds available circa 1990
- An early history of muds
- On his site, Richard Bartle has page of links to material about specific muds.
- The Palace
- Life at the Palace: a Cyberpsychology Case Study is an extensive and detailed study of the graphical chat space The Palace.
- Ultima Online
- Killers Have More Fun is an article by Dr. Amy Jo Kim about Ultima Online, originally published in WIRED.
- The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online Zach Simpson’s GDC white paper on UO’s economy.
- Bloody Ethics, by Lev Grossman, is an article originally published in the Village Voice on the development of law and social structure in UO. Also available here and here.
- Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article Pimps and Dragons: How an online world survived a social breakdown. Also available here. There’s also this brief interview with the author.
- EverQuest
- The Norrathian Scrolls are an attempt at a demographic study of EverQuest players, by Nicholas Yee.
- Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, by Edward Castronova, is an economic analysis of EQ.
Papers, essays, references, and other research materials
- Richard Bartle’s homepage has a multitude of good material on it. Some of the more notable material includes:
- Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs is the definitive discussion player types
- Bad Ideas for Multiplayer Games is very true–and the mistakes keep getting made anyway.
- The Future of Virtual Reality is an eloquent explanation of why text muds (and books!) will never die.
- An archive of writings by others on muds including
- Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game, the original paper by Lebling, Blank, and Anderson
- Literary Role-Play in Cyberspace by Phil Goetz
- Sandy Antunes’ interesting article on Leaping Into Cross-Gender Role-Play.
- Richard’s MUD Philosophy
- The Arch-Wizard Archives contains Michael Lawrie’s “Confessions of an Arch-wizard” which is a seminal document on how to administrate muds.
- The MUD Encyclopedia contains definitions of many words used in mud design
- The Journal of MUD Research is a refereed academic journal on muds.
- Run by Lydia Leong, aka Amberyl, The MUD Resource Collection provides a massive collection of mud-related resources
- The writings of Julian Dibbell include:
- A Rape in Cyberspace, which is a must-read for anyone involved with virtual worlds. It’s also now the first chapter of his book My Tiny Life.
- MUD Money: A Talk on Virtual Value and, Incidentally, the Value of the Virtual is one of the few looks at online game economies out there.
- Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms has a few items of interest to mud designers:
- A chapter from Virtual Communities that deals with muds
- An essay entitled “Virtual Communities, Phony Civil Society?” which has interesting implications for those interested in virtual societies.
- Another essay, by Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson, entitled “Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?” that covers similar territory.
- The fantastic Papers – [ Synchronous Communications | VR | 3D ] page indexes and lists abstracts for a virtual mountain of important papers on muds, including work by Elizabeth Reid, Julian Dibbell, Richard MacKinnon, Richard Bartle, Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, and others.
- The Text-Based Virtual Reality page is a similar index, but lacks the abstracts.
- Jen Clodius has a great page of her cultural anthropology work on muds.
- Elizabeth Reid Steere’s Work on Internet Culture includes her important thesis on “Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities”
- The Virtual Community Workshop was an online course on virtual communities that offered a very interesting reading list on the topic.
- A good master list for seeking out material on MOOs (user-extensible muds) can be found at MOO Resources Around the Web.
Mud design links
- The MUD-Dev mailing list was, simply put, the best place to go on the Internet for mud design discussion. A complete archive of the now defunct list is hosted here in ZIP form.
- A text-mud company that has developed a fantastic series of articles is Skotos.
- Biting the Hand is Jessica Mulligan’s long-running column on the commercial online game industry.
- Thinking Virtually is a column written for RPGNet by Shannon Appelcline.
- Notes from the Dawn of Time is written by Richard Bartle and covers engineering issues.
- Triumphs, Trials, and Trivialities is another good column series by Shannon Appelcline.
- Building Stories, Telling Games is a series of articles by Travis Casey, 20-year roleplaying veteran.
- There are several “magazine” or webzine sites that cover mud design issues.
- Imaginary Realities is a monthly “magazine” that covers mud design issues among other things.
- The Mud Journal has some interesting articles on it.
- How to Make Good Quests is a MUD-Adapted version of the classic document for adventure game design.
- Marian Griffith’s Roleplaying page includes her !Overlord Project, which is a collaborative design for a roleplaying-focused mud.
- Another mailing list which may be of interest is the VWorlds-Biz mailing list, which focuses on uses on virtual spaces as a business.
- Tenarius’ Player Wimping Guidebook is a good article, if a bit vitriolic at times, on the perils of weakening player capabilities or wiping player data, past launch of your mud.
- Mu’s Unbelievably Long and Disjointed Ramblings About RPG Design by Howard Collins, is a lengthy set of pages that in my opinion is chock-full of good common sense.
General game design sites and documents
- Items by Chris Crawford:
- His seminal book The Art of Computer Game Design
- Various writings of his on game design
- GameDev‘s library of game design links.
- Gamasutra is a game development industry hangout that often features game design articles.
Books
- Online specific
- Otherwise interesting or useful
- Fiction
