Friday Lifeform/Game Blogging: MUD, MUD Glorious MUD
Picture courtesy Reefpix, Australia
So I was watching last night’s BBC2 Newsnight, with Jeremy Paxman trying to get to grips with MUDs and their internal economy. Apart from the mild amusement of seeing Paxo’s lantern-jawed, be-suited, yet mercifully facially indistinct avatar, I was underwhelmed by the report, but it did get me thinking.
I’ve never been inclined to get involved with MUDS, even though the idea of being a free agent in an alternate reality is very seductive. This is due mostly to the sad lack of imagination in world-building and avatar design – god, so many tedious castles, elves, unicorns, wizards and orcs. Elves and and wizards seem to be the ‘Brads and Jennifers’ envisioned by cyberpunk, the chav avatar of choice.
But what would appeal to me in a MUD? Back along in the very early nineties, when we were still playing with the Amstrad, my sons and I (pre-adolescent then) designed our perfect game. We wanted it to allow the player to drive in the analogue of a real car around a real city with all the stoplights, traffic and other hazards, but that would allow you to also do things like race, go underwater and fly. A total immersion experience.
Of course we went nowhere with it- even if we’d had the programming ability the technology wasn’t up to it then. But I can tell my grandchildren how we very nearly designed GTA …
I had another game for the first Playstation, piloting a submarine around various reefs, evading obstacles and sharks, to pick up treasure from wrecks. I can’t remember the name, though I loved it despite its limitations. What I want is that game, times infinity, in MUD form. A GTA of the deep oceans, but without the weapons. Will someone somewhere please design an undersea MUD?
I’m sure there must be many many, other marine biologists manque, who like me would drool at the idea of being a fish, or a squid, or even a polychaete worm or a blue whale. We could have the Marianas trench – hell, we could have as many trenches as we like. And hammerhead sharks, and seamounts, and black smokers and methane lakes and mud volcanoes and cold seeps… picking up points for successful predation and predator evasion along the way. We could model the environment on Attenborough’s Blue Planet series … it really would be a total immersion game. I’m excited just thinking about it.
Any games programmer who wants the idea can have it ( presuming, with my usual arrogance and a half-assed google, that no-one else has had the idea) under the usual Creative Commons doodah. But I get first pick of avatars and first go on the game. It seems only fair. I bags Architeuthis Princeps. though isn’t that a little obvious? Perhaps I should plump for something a bit more obscure? Wrasse are nice…
NB: This is emphatically NOT what I want.
Virtual sea monkeys for PS2
