Role Playing Games vs MMORPGs, The Text-based Revolution

From the text adventures of "Zork" in the late '70s through early '80s to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like "Everquest" and "World of Warcraft," the Role Playing Game (RPG) has been a cornerstone of the computer entertainment industry. Between the two extremes came Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), modem-access servers that provided Internet-like services and Doors games like "Legend of the Red Dragon" and "Usurper," where BBS users could build their characters and interact with the world and with each other. The rise of the Internet brought us Multi User Domain (MUD) games which were very much the same as the newer MMORPGs, though presented entirely in text. Following in the footsteps of the MUD came the Multi User Shared Hallucination (MUSH) and Multi User Exchange (MUX) which are presented as blank slates where industrious gamers can build their own worlds for presentation to Internet users at large. Of the text-based games persisting today, the best examples lie in games like "FiranMUX" by Stephanie and Adam Dray and "Otherspace" by Wes Platt, where players write the stories of their personal character through interaction with other characters in an atmosphere that can best be described as creating a work of collaborative fiction. "FiranMUX" and other MUSH or MUX games, like Blizzard Entertainment and other corporate maintainers of MMORPGs, provide rich, vast worlds complemented by automated systems for everything from Player vs Player combat to character aging to economy, pregnancy, eating, drinking, even drunkenness (and the corresponding possibility of witnesses who will talk about what you did)! Unlike the commercial MMORPG, "FiranMUX" and similar games provide their services absolutely free of charge, making it their hobby to keep the game running so that players from all over the world can make it their hobby to play. Where the MMORPG focuses on the graphical environment, creating a full and rich world for the player to explore while growing in experience and adding personal statistics by hacking their way through the enemy, "FiranMUX" focuses on the character itself, creating its full and rich world for the player to explore while meeting craftsmen, guards, criminals, commoners, middle class, and nobles - each of whom is another character with its own personality and traits, its own goals and motivations, each of whom is written by another live human somewhere in the world; rather than experience for killing mindless monsters, "FiranMUX" experience can only be gained through these interactions with other players, who vote each week on those characters who they enjoyed playing with the most. Fortunes on "FiranMUX" can be gained and lost through political maneuvering, gambling and adventuring, unlike the MMORPG where money available depends entirely on the level of the monsters slain by the character. In short, where MMORPGs help the player to kill time, "FiranMUX," "Otherspace," and other text-based Role Playing Games help the player to fill their time with the creation of stories, both long and short, which affect not only the player character but also events and the future of the game as a whole.

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