8

WIZARDS AND WITCHES

MUD's multi-user capabilities set it aside from normal adventure games. There are many of these features, for example communication, interaction by way of giving, stealing, kissing and of course the great favourite, killing your fellow players. These are the reasonably direct consequences of having more than one person playing in the same world at the same time. The most significant development, however, is in an entirely different vein. It is the concept of a wizard/witch.

Since 'wizard/witch' is a bit of a mouthful, and since MUD players are too fastidious to tolerate the type mismatch involved in calling a male a witch or a female a wizard, the MUDspeke term 'wiz' has been coined to mean wizard/witch generically. You never know, by 1999 it might have got into the OED. It's possible to make wiz in four or five games if you get absolutely all the treasure. Indeed, you can make it in only one game if you don't mind kicking the beggar 102,400 times! Once you've reached wiz, however, the game changes.

It's not fair to say the game actually changes, it's still the same MUD, it's just that once you re a wiz it takes on a new perspective. If MUD were an ordinary adventure, you could expect at this point some kind of 'endgame', and that would be it. But MUD is not an ordinary adventure, and reaching wiz is where the fun really begins! When you're a wiz, you have power. You can do virtually anything. A forbidding array of commands lies at your fingertips. These are so virulent that it's easy to crash the game if you're not careful. Once people make it to wiz in the early versions of MUD, for the next couple of days the game crashes with monotonous regularity until they learn the ropes. Fortunately, one of the first commands they learn is how to reset the game so that they can unscrew all the problems they've caused!

Of course, in any commercial version of MUD this sort of thing has to be toned down a bit, otherwise you'd get people from rival games companies making wiz and keeping your world in a perpetual state of destruction. Since MUD has no competition as yet, though, this fragility is left unchecked to give the 'mortals' (non-wiz) a little more incentive to get those few elusive points that they need to reach the top.

Most wiz commands remain in the commercial MUD, however. Some are powerful, yet not dangerous, for example SNOOP. This enables you to see what is on the screen of any mortal you choose, exactly as it appears to them. In effect, everything MUD sends to their terminal is copied and sent to yours too (in addition to the stuff you'd normally get). Of course, you can't snoop on someone who is snooping on someone else, otherwise it's possible to get into a sort of feedback loop, which wouldn't do the game much good at all! SNOOP is one of the most popular wiz commands, and it's normal for wizzes to be snooping on a mortal full- time. The reason it's so good is that there's a certain wicked human fascination for watching other people making complete idiots of themselves as they try to go about doing things completely the wrong way.

Other reasonably safe commands include the ability to pick up or drop objects anywhere you like without having to move there. And if a wizard did feel the need to make an appearance, he could materialise instantaneously rather than take the normal walking sort of route which mortals are obliged to use. There are a few rooms, in fact, which are impossible to reach except by teleportation. These are the STORE, full of useful spare items which you might want players to come across (like zombies, for example); HOME, the wiz room where you can sit and SNOOP on mortals without their even knowing you're in the game (since HOME is cloaked from their view); LIMBO, an exit-less room which corresponds to a sort of 'sin-bin', a place to dump mortals who are annoying you to cool off, leaving them to languish until you deign to release them; and XMASBX, which contains all you need for a merry Christmas, and which wizzes distribute to players when they feel the seasonal urge to do a bit of goodwill to all mankind.

These abilities are reasonably harmless; tormenting mortals by sitting around in HOME, SNOOPing on them and dropping strange objects in the room you think they're about to enter is the sort of fun thing wizzes do all the time. Some of the things they can do are not harmless, though. Primary among these is the FOD. This stands for Finger Of Death, and what it does is more or less obvious from that! Once you're FODed you're DEAD DEAD, ie. you lose all your points, your persona is destroyed, and you have to start again from scratch. Wizzes mainly FOD each other, since they can come back straight away using a password on wiz mode. Once you've made wiz, you just say the password and you're back to wiz again. Sometimes, though, if mortals really play up a lot and pester you despite your ominous warnings of the dark and mysterious things you're going to do to them, you might use your FOD on them as a last resort.

Wizzes, although all-powerful, are meant to be generally benign. Most of what is done to mortals is really just to tease them, and they are generally rewarded by a few points or some treasure once the wiz has finished play. Mortals don't have much say in the matter, naturally, but are spurred on by the knowledge that when they finally make wiz, they'll be able to dish out similar treatment to hapless, innocent victims!

There is an unwritten code of conduct which wizzes follow, and which works because the wizzes were once mortals themselves. Wizzes know all too well what it's like to be summoned to a cold, dark room and left alone with hehehe ringing in their ears. They know the disappointment of forging through the swamp for half an hour only to find that someone has swapped the incredibly valuable crown in the centre for a fake one. They've felt the pangs of outrage from being attacked by a souped-up bunny rabbit which it takes fifteen minutes to kill. In short, they know when to stop.

Wizards should be treated with respect without being fawning. Most wizards will be happy to assist a mortal who is in desperate trouble or who finds a needed item which is beyond mortal grasp. However, nothing annoys a wizard more than a mortal begging for treasure because he or she can't work out how to find it, or asking to be transported to a different area of MUD because the player is too lazy (or scared) to make the journey alone. A wizard is not a Santa Claus nor a taxi service; on the other hand, wizards are (usually!) benign and they listen to reasonable requests for help from hardworking players, as well as preventing them from doing something disastrous now and then.

The wiz-code makes for a very flexible system, and it gives wizards a lot of freedom. A certain amount of trust is involved between each wizard and the game's owners. Mortals can complain to 'higher' authorities if they feel they've suffered unjustly at the hands of a wizard, and if that wiz's name becomes associated with unfair play, then he or she will certainly face severe reprimands. It's a system that looks very open to abuse, but on the whole it seems to work well.

A total exceeding fifty thousand hours of play has been spent on MUD, and if any single point arises from that it's that wizzes make the game. They rule it, they stamp their personalities on it, and they give mortals something to aim for, a goal, a purpose, something which explains why they're in there hacking and slaying. Without wizzes, MUD would only be half the fun that it is with them. If MUD does nothing else for multi-user adventure games except for evolving the concept of a wiz, it should always be remembered.