Do give me your feedback and ideas to this piece. HERE

MUD’s (1980’s)

The first MUD named “Dungen” launched in 1978 at Essex University.  MUDs generally took a Dungeons and Dragons style and required users to navigate around a world, slaying monsters.  Despite the fact that you could navigate around these worlds and interact with them, using text, did not functionally aid the development of an online community.  Additionally the ‘aim’ of the game is hardly community building in nature, and with the exception of the text chat functionality MUDs, did not offer additional tools for social interaction.  These environments were more concerned with entertaining rather than providing a subject forum like USENET.  The implication of this is that members were less likely to engage in social interaction and develop a community structure.  Instead players of the MUD tended to concentrate on the quests and slaying monsters in the game.

Subsequent MUDs, after Dungen, often had hundreds of users online at the same time, which is significant at a time of such limited Internet usage.  Just the fact they could play with other people, which had not been possible on such a scale before, made the “massively multiplayer” element appealing.  Considering MUDs today their functionality and numbers pales in comparison to what is now possible, although they do still remain a niche interest of the fantasy fans.  As such, today MUDs represent a limited threat to Habbo.

Despite their somewhat lack of community orientated functionality, MUDs were the first networked gaming environments on the Internet.  These were the precursor to the development of Massively Multiplayer Online Games including Habbo, MMORPG’s and all its sub groups.  As Castronova (2001) rightly points out, MUDs developed the social interaction system (this is the networked infrastructure for many-to-many communication rather than interaction tools that facilitates self-expression) and as such is a key moment in MMOG’s history.