12

WHO'S WHO IN MUD

The whole point about multi-player adventures is that you're playing in the same game as other people, possibly complete strangers in real life, but whom you encounter during play and with whom you are likely to engage in conversation. If you spend a fair amount of time in the game chatting to other players, then, as with other similar forms of social interaction (school, work, holiday), you will strike up friendships and get to know folk.

You'll also get to hear of certain other players quite a lot, by virtue of their interesting behaviour. If you see someone acting really strangely, then you'll naturally want to talk to other people about them; if something terrible happens to another player, you'll want to pass on the bad (or good!) news; if a wiz is a soft touch, your friends should know, and similarly if they FODded you for merely daring to utter a meek request for a lit brand, you may wish to warn your acquaintances!

In MUD, with its strange ability to magnify the personalities of those who play, there are plenty of people to talk about. Stories about individuals are passed on, rumours circulate, myths form, and eventu- ally certain players become part and parcel of the game itself, blending in with the unique MUD atmosphere almost as if they had been programmed in!

This short set of biographies introduces you to some of MUD's classic players, who have made their mark in MUD's folklore for one reason or another, and whose names live on, even, as is the case with some of them, if they haven't actually been able to play for years. They are all wizzes: the reason is that you have to play for quite a while for people to get to know your person- ality, and even longer for them to relate stories about your endeavours to each other (rather in the manner of Anglo-saxon bards, who wrote ballads about deeds of derring-do, to be sung in the mead hall on cold, dark nights, perpetuating the names of heroes long since departed). So to become some kind of legendary figure, you have to play for many hours; if you do play for that long then either you'll eventually make it up to wiz, or you're incredibly thick, or extremely unlucky!

The reason some of these people have two names is because you're allowed two as a wiz. One is normally your real name, the other the one which you used to work up to wiz. For some, the personalities are distinct (Sue the Witch is much nastier playing as Endora), but for most they're just synonyms. Here is an assortment of MUD players for you.

SUE THE WITCH

There cannot be the slightest doubt in anyone's mind about MUD's greatest player - Sue the Witch, also known as Endora. Sue played MUD all the hours God sent. As soon as MUD became playable at around I am (at Essex University), Sue went into the Land. Sue would remain there for as long as possible before the need to sleep overcame all. Sue did this every night, too! It was a matter of concern if neither Sue nor Endora appeared - people began to wonder what had happened. She might have been playing incognito as a mortal, of course, but sometimes it was more serious (Sue missed a couple of days after a riding accident). Such is Sue's dedication and enthusiasm for the game that it took her only four weeks to become a witch, from a complete novice. Sue was killed on several occasions, too, and had to restart from nothing. She had an intimate knowledge of the way MUD functioned, and must have tried out virtually every command (swinging the cat in a small room, setting fire to the keg of gunpowder, lighting a torch with a dragon, etc.). Few other people will have ever seen the message you get when you attempt to, say, walk the wolf, because they have never tried it.

The other wizzes didn't always see eye to eye with Sue, because she had so much experience at play that if another wiz slipped up, Sue would tick them off about it, and often appeared quite bossy! The mortals, however, loved her! She knew just the right kind of hints to give that didn't exactly spell out the solution to a problem but rather pointed the way to a solution (well what do you think you do to idols?!). Sue also protected them from the ravages of supernatural intervention (I've just been attacked by the shark - in the forest!). It was mainly Sue's uncanny knack of making the game fun to play that earned her the reputation of epitomising the Essex MUD.

JEZ THE WIZARD

Jez the Wizard, or Zaphod as he is occasionally known, was MUD's first external MUD wiz (an external is someone who is playing MUD from a site removed from the host system). Being one of those people who has contacts absolutely everywhere, he heard of MUD fairly soon after Essex University opened it to the public and he took to it like a duck to water. After several months of glorious bloodletting, and suitably impressive tele- phone bills, this precocious seventeen-year-old (as he was then) made it up to wiz. Now he is MUD's most senior active wizard after Richard Bartle, and along with Sue is trusted enough to be allowed to use an arch-wizard persona called DEBUGGER. This is a very powerful character, used only for debugging purposes (surprise!), to fix problems like people forgetting passwords, or some drunk wiz causing chaos (yes, it does happen!).

Jez has a huge circle of friends in the modem-using community (you might call them 'hackers' if you didn't know the proper meaning of the word), and he must have told just about all of them about MUD. It was mainly due to his influence, and that of one of his close friends, Thor (also a wiz), that MUD caught on in the outside world. People took his advice, tried the game, liked it, and told their friends. Whenever they looked in, Jez was in there to greet them with a cheery H i ya, and eventually people got to know him more as Jez than by his real name, Jeremy. Nowadays, if he doesn't sign his letters 'Jez', most people do a double-take before they remember who he is! Talk about games taking over lives.

Jez, in fact, follows all the goings-on in MUD with the devotion of a soap-opera fan. Probably more so, as he's actually in a position to alter the plot! So he knows the last time Egor played and why he's not around at the moment. He knows what it was that made Sue and Kronos fall out (and was the one who patched it up again). If there's anything approaching a scandal, Jez is there, ears flapping, hoping to pick up some titbit of information which he can then loudly publicise!

It follows, then, that Jez is immensely popular! There's nothing people like more than a good gossip, and Jez is the one to see about that! Even the people who are the butt of his stories tend not to mind, because he does it all very nicely, and besides, it's not long before he's dragging someone else's name through the dirt. Or through the mud, perhaps.

EGOR THE WIZARD

The second external player to make it to wiz was Egor. Egor has been fascinated by computers ever since his father bought him an electronics kit when he was eight. By the age of eleven he'd constructed his own computer.

Egor is brilliant at discovering any 'bugs' lurking in MUD - but before dutifully reporting them he exploits them to the maximum. One day he discovered a back- door method of logging in as another persona (normally all personas are password protected). He instantly logged in as Jez (his usual sparring partner), went round MUD for half an hour, insulting everyone, killing off novices and generally behaving like an oaf before quitting the game. When the real Jez rolled up an hour later he was almost lynched by a collection of furious players!

Another 'bug' which Egor exploited is the fact that wizards can pick up any object in the game and imbue it with fighting characteristics. Thus if you suddenly find yourself attacked by the sundial you'll know a wizard is playing tricks. One night Egor did this with the river which flows through the Land. Then he teleported into a room full of mortals shouting 'Oh no! It's that Killer River again!'. The terrified and bewildered mortals then witnessed a titanic struggle between Egor the Wizard and the river before the river finally 'expired' and Egor proudly announced 'Phew! I saved you!'.

While working his way up as a mortal, Egor found after thirty-six hours of continuous play even he couldn't keep his eyes open. But unable to bear the thought of missing out on the game, he wrote a little program to run round the fixed points of VALLEY, doing specific things which earned a few points and SAVEing his character (as has been pointed out, you could theoretically become a wizard by kicking the beggar for hours on end), while he went to bed. He thought his behaviour would go undetected because almost always when MUD is running at Essex, the players go there rather than the VALLEY. However, his sneaky ploy was uncovered by a local wiz having a snoop, and when Egor returned to his terminal, refreshed from a few hours' sleep, he discovered that some pretty unpleasant things had been done to him by the wiz, who strongly disapproved of this 'unsporting behaviour'. It was Egor, too, who forced Richard Bartle to amend MUD so that people couldn't quit in the middle of a fight as he discovered that if something unpleasant happened to him (such as getting on the wrong side of the dragon), he could rescue himself by QUITting.

FELICITY AND CYNTHIA

Felicity and Cynthia were the names chosen by Mark Longley, an internal to Essex University and an addict of science fiction books (he reads about one a day). He picked these names because they were the two most terrible names he could think of at the time (Christabel was too long, and someone was already using Charlene). The idea was that people would find the names such dreadful cliches that they would avoid him at all costs. So successful was his ploy that most people couldn't bear to talk to him even at a distance, and they dropped the obnoxious, lengthy versions in favour of the more favourable Fliss and Cinth, depending on which he was using at the time. Indeed, the reason MUD has a flower in it was because you could then pick it up, give it to him, and say Hiya, Cinth!.

After winning MUD's very first spectacular (see the following chapter), and getting 25,000 points for so doing, Fliss soon made it to witch, and became one of the kindest, most responsible wizzes of all time. It is common knowledge that Sue's great success as a witch is based on her trying to follow Fliss's lead. Asking yourself 'What would Fliss have done in this situ- ation?' can be a good way to see sense (although Fliss himself would probably find that highly amusing!).

Mark left the University a couple of years ago, but Fliss and Cinth still get mentioned from time to time, and there's always the entry in the graveyard. What does it say? 'A spectacular life lead me here', of course!

FOXY THE WIZARD

The name of Foxy the Wizard lives on in MUD not because of the way he made it to wiz, but because of the way he didn't. Also an internal to the University, Foxy spent many long hours clawing his way up through the ranks. He always behaved impeccably, only killing people in self-defence (well, nearly always!), and he knew the game inside out by virtue of enormous MUD sessions lasting all weekend. Everyone agreed that if anyone deserved to reach wiz at all, then that person was Foxy. It was merely a case of mistaken identity, then, one assumes, when five people ambushed him in the graveyard and killed him when he had less than 300 to go of the 102,400 points needed to reach wiz. The self-control exhibited by Foxy in not jumping from the nearest tall building, or sending letter bombs to all concerned, earned him great respect. He didn't shed a tear, just started again from scratch with great dignity and killed three or four of the rotten so-and-sos instead with a handy sword, thoughtfully provided by a sympathetic wizard.

His eventual rise to immortality was not, it turns out, via the normal channels; rather he was elected to wiz for his work on ROCK, MUD's version of ITV's Fraggle Rock TV show. Real name Phil Fox, he's now a teacher at a nearby school, and occasionally returns to hack and slay in MUD.

EVIL THE WIZARD

Evil the Wizard was the first person to work his way up to that immortal status, rather than be made one straight away for debugging purposes. He also set a trend, since followed by three other Welsh wizards (despite being called Phil Scott in real life!). A surprising number of MUD devotees are of Welsh extraction, although only four have made it to wiz so far at Essex; it must be their barbarian blood (the nationality breakdown of Essex University wizards in late 1984 was forty English, five Scottish, four Welsh, one Irish, one American, one Czech and one Malasian!).

Evil made it to wiz in real style. His thorough knqwledge of the finer details of the MUD world is unsurpassed, except by Richard Bartle and probably Sue, and he must still be about the only player who figured out by himself what you're supposed to do with the ox (stroke it, take it to the sacrificial blade, stroke it, kill it with the blade, stroke it again, then drop it in the swamp for the points!). If you wanted to get to any room from any other, no matter how far away, he could give you the shortest route almost instantly. This was despite the fact that he laboured under a tremendous disability; east-west dyslexia.

It is for this that Evil is best known. His entire in- the-head map of MUD, and all those he wrote down on paper, were flipped east for west. His misapprehension extended to commands, so if he wanted to go west from the start, which is to the left, he'd think it was to the right, and that the command for going to the right was west. So he'd get it correct, but in the wrong way! So absolutely everything was inverted, in a kind of 'Evil through the looking-glass'. Indeed, when Richard Bartle finally found out about his error he put a looking-glass in MUD to celebrate! Evil didn't realise his mistake for years after he'd made it to wiz, and if people used left/right descriptions of rooms instead of west/east, he just thought they were barmy. Only when Richard drew a map of MUD on a blackboard did he finally discover his gaffe, and to this day thinks a subtle change in the physics of the universe caused everyone in the world to swap east for west in their heads except for him, who remained unaffected due to his enormous and obvious intelligence.

These, then, are a few brief sketches of players in the Essex MUD. MUDS will always have their resident personalities no matter where they are or who runs them, because people are the game. That's what lifts MUD above the rest of the world's computer games, the real-live people who play. Anyone who has played in the Essex MUD, the Oslo MUD, the Compunet MUD and the short-lived Dundee MUD, will tell you that, although they are identical programs, they 'play' quite differently. People brought up on Compunet MUD are horrified by Essex's large number of killings - they're much friendlier when they pay to play the game. Essex people are astonished by the easy-going wizzes in Oslo, who have even been known temporarily to promote mortals so they can see what it's like being a wiz (gasp!). The players make the game.

That's not the full story, though, because just as people can make an impact on MUD, so MUD feeds back into their lives. Not only does Jez have a new name, but MUD is what brought Evil back to do his exams after he decided to take five weeks unscheduled leave f~om the University. Felicity's one-a-day SF book habit was only abated for those days he played MUD - it saved him hundreds of pounds! Sue, however, may be suffering from an overdose of MUD, so it's not always a guaranteed Good Thing. Just most of the time!