MUDs

This blog post basically sums up an article that we read as a part of our reading and am mainly doing it as, personally, while the article was interesting, I feel that it was long and drawn out and could be summed up much better. The article in question is 'Players Who Suit MUDs' by Richard A. Bartle where he discusses the different types of players in MUDs (Multi-User Domains) - the early form of game that would later become MMORPGs.


So... here goes the summary of the article. The article breaks the people who play these games into 4 categories; Killers, Socialisers, Explorers and Achievers and talks about how they interact with the game world and how they interact with each other. Achievers are people who play the game to get something out of it in-game such as getting the strongest weapons, the strongest armour, finding something really 'rare'. Explorers are people who play the game so that they can see the world the game is set in and experience the story of the game. Socialisers are people who like playing games to interact with others and chat with them - they prefer the people in-game rather than the game itself. Finally, Killers are people who enjoy going round and killing other players and duelling with them - this can be linked with 'griefing' people (annoying them).


So that's the 4 types of players the article then talks about how they interact with each other and how the numbers of each type of player changes the number of another. It basically says that Killers and Achievers go hand-in-hand and as one goes up the other goes down and vice-versa but can also go and down with each other at the same time. Killers and Socialisers also go hand-in-hand but more dramatically as socialisers can easily get annoyed as their fellow players kill each other and socialisers can easily overwhelm killers. Explorers and Killers interact but less and it causes a more minimal outcome in the number of players, however, Explorers will have more of an effect on killers than the other way around due to explorers not caring how they do and rather on just playing.

The best way to show all the relationships is by the diagram shown below. Red is for decreasing numbers and green for increasing.

 

Ultimately, this is the entire article in a nut-shell - the writer simply goes into more longer explanations but generally as long as you understand the 4 types of players and what they do how they interact and compliment and annoy each other should be apparent.

So anyways, that's my blog post on people who play MUDs so 'til next time - that's all folks!