Skip to Main Content
Idaho State University home

Glossary

Filter:
# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z All
M
M
MAC
MAN
MD5
MDC
Meg
MEP
MER
Mgt
MHS
MHz
MI
MIB
MLS
MOA
Mod
MOE
MOP
MOU
MRK
MRT
MSE
MTR
MTT
Mu
MUD
MUX
Mw
MUD
  • /muhd/ n. [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] A class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the U. K. , made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U. S. ; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth o