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[valrus]

• Players themselves can roleplay with extremely high fidelity. Not all MUDs do this, but being able to say, "Drof readjusts his glasses nervously, and says, 'Well, I'm not sure about that'" is MUCH MORE POWERFUL than a /dance emote.

This brings up a related thing, which really cuts to the heart, I think, of why I loved MUDs.  Depending on the MUD, the players themselves had various degrees of access to and ability to manipulate the fundamental stuff that the game was made of: text.  (I tended to play MUSHes, where I think you had a lot more freedom in that regard; what I say might not apply so much to more dungeon-crawler MUDs.)

You could make things exist in the world pretty much by describing them, and build parts of the game that were essentially your own subgame, and do this using your basic language skills.  I had tried and bounced off some early 3d game-making experiences due to their low quality-to-effort ratio, but building experiences with MUDs (whether that be RP experiences or worlds or bots) was pretty immediately rewarding.

In that way, the successor to MUDs wasn't MMORPGs but Minecraft.  (Well, maybe with Second Life in between; I don't know much about SL.)  MUDs and Minecraft were games in which the main way you interacted with the gameworld is by manipulation of the medium that the gameworld is made of, and they let people have multiplayer experiences in a shared, co-created world without a high entry barrier to creating that world.

[Jordgubben]

It's not totally fair to say MUDs were just substitutes. First there is a population of players who can't play 3D games (vision deficient players). Second there is people who prefer play muds rather than graphical mmorpg for various reasons.

This is really at the heart of why I started this thread. What benefits from game design can we get from text-based?

Cost reduction is risk reduction. Most movies start out as text-only (a script, often based on a book).

That said, finding benefits with text-only as the final delivery format is harder. Printed books still sell though.

[Drof]

You could make things exist in the world pretty much by describing them, and build parts of the game that were essentially your own subgame, and do this using your basic language skills.  I had tried and bounced off some early 3d game-making experiences due to their low quality-to-effort ratio, but building experiences with MUDs (whether that be RP experiences or worlds or bots) was pretty immediately rewarding.

By extension, this is related to tabletop roleplaying as well. Problem is that there was too much missing from MUDs compared to TRPG that MUDs fell by the wayside. There are plenty of reasons but I think the most significant is that it takes too long to type things.

I really liked the idea of an authored multiplayer experience. I played a MOO where game masters could open up a character's bio and listen to any thoughts the player said with the 'think' command and set up scenarios. Of course, players would do plenty of roleplaying just with themselves when GMs weren't around, but it meant that a GM could lead players to each other, or create events through prophecies. There's something really exciting about a D&D-like experience where it really feels like you're in a world which isn't just revolving around you.

It's difficult to do much when typing takes so long too. Most MUDs I played also didn't have any indication if another player was typing or not, which definitely didn't help. It's probably wishful thinking, but if text-to-speech ever becomes available, that could make things much simpler. On the other hand, we usually hold writing up to a much higher standard than what is typically found in a TRPG.