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Thigpen's MUD page
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The exploration of collaborative information environments ...
So far, MUDs have been surnamed text-based virtual realities but have been used mainly as social cyber-spaces. At work I've been working on MUD's as virtual workspaces or collaborative computing environments. Currently, our MOO shares audio via vat, World Wide Web via Mosaic, and whiteboards via Collage. At the moment we are simply running asynchonous clients from a fancy MOO client called tkmoo. Tkmoo was designed and built by Jay Carlson of JaysHouseMoo and is freely available in our ftp site. Our future goal is to develop a virtual workspace using MOO with a nice Graphic User Interface and clients that are remote controlled from the MOO. Also, a three-dimensional graphic interface can be seen in the near future thanks to development with wt, a cross platform graphics engine.
What the heck is MUD...
The MUD acronym symbolizes the term `Multi-User Dungeon', or better yet, `Multi-User Dimension'. Here's a brief history of MUDs. For more information, look at the MUD archive which has been provided by Lauren P. Burka.
Some examples ...
Here are some local MUDs hosted by the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University:
- MirrorMOO is Robert Leslie's new feat. He has simulated LambdaMOO using DGD, a multi-user network to create lpmoo.
- Infinity was the first MUD started in the College by Robert Leslie near the end of 1992. It is a game that has been running strong and very active ever since.
- InfoPark is a MUD being used by the Systems Group and Crew in the College to coordinate their activities and collaborate with administrators from other sites. Rémy Evard, the leader of the Group, has written a paper for the USENIX Association about using MUDs as a Collaborative Networked Communication tool. This paper has recently been requested for by TIME magazine. Basically, Rémy used Infopark as an example of a serious, non-gaming, systems-tool MUD.
- Jay's House MOO is a variant of MUD which has seeked to pursue research and information collaboration in a social environment. Jay's House runs its own integrated WWW server that acts as an entrance among other things -- well worth a visit. For instance, here's a look at me, Thigpen via the Object Browser. Here's a hyper-text list of who is on.
There are, however, literally thousands of MUDs. For a larger list see Scott Goehring's Totally Unofficial List of Internet Muds or Andrew Wilson's MUDlist.
Some FTP sites ...
Some documentation and papers ...
Some clients ...
Some links to other MUD pages ...
Various things ...
MUDS as Collaborative Information Environments ...
Some newsgroups ...
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thigpen@ccs.neu.edu
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