Playing Muds on the Internet [Paperback]

Rawn Shah (Author), Jim Romine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995

Everything you need to know to stay alive, win, outfox, and dethrone experienced Mudders!

Luke Skywalker had Yoda. Now, you have your own cyber-mentor with this behind-the-scenes guide to successfully stalking the dark, haunted corridors of today's most popular online games. This book shows you how to avoid instant death—Muds are notoriously rough on newbies, and you can just forget about asking any of the wizards for tips or strategies. They'd rather blow you away than show you the ropes. You have to learn how to survive in a game against 100 people from all over the world before you jump in and become sword fodder.

This ultimate Mud companion reveals the lore as well as the intricate customs and commands you need to thrive in these imaginary worlds. Playing MUDs on the Internet:

• Shows you where to find Mud games and how to join them
• Describes several Muds in depth and includes maps
• Provides a complete guide to all the commands needed
• Gives you proven hints and strategies for winning
• Warns you about what dangers lie ahead of you and gives you hard-won tips on how to keep your cool and stay alive

Right now, you might not know a Mud game from a mud pie. But with this book, in no time at all, you'll be mudding your way into some really cool adventures in a wild, fast-paced new world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions or Multi-User Dungeons, depending on who you ask) are Internet-based role-playing games that allow you to join players from around the world anytime. If that appeals to you, here's the book to get you started. While it concentrates primarily on adventure/action games, it also contains information on the growing number of socially-oriented games, where interaction among players is more important than slashing monsters. The authors show you where to find games, how to join them and share valuable strategies.

From Library Journal

Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) have become incredibly popular ways for computer users to compete with hundreds of other adventurers in Dungeons & Dragons-type fantasies. MUDs have evolved, thank goodness, into social and educational vehicles, but the core of much MUD escapism is pure and simple role-playing and competing. Here, Shah and Romine essentially explore two MUDs: DikuMUD (created in Copenhagen as a virtual space filled with a number of different rooms and characters) and LPmud, originally a Finnish invention. Thanks to the authors' vast experience with the combative world of MUD, there's plenty of useful advise on how to survive, gain experience, pick up money and weapons, and even avoid death. Attributes are provided for different characters, different techniques are described to battle different opponents, and basic commands are outlined. As a special aid to neophytes, four characters have been especially set up for readers of this book for MUD experiments. If you're ready to spend about a day a week perfecting your skills in this world, this book will help keep your frustration level down and your fantasies alive.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471116335
• ISBN-13: 978-0471116332
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,393,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rawn Shah is an expert in collaboration and social computing methodologies within organizations and on the Web. He is a business transformation consultant in the Social Software Adoption team in IBM where his primary responsibilities involve measuring and determining the business value of collaboration technologies.

He currently writes the "Connected Business" blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/rawnshah/ as well as a technically-oriented blog on social computing on IBM MydeveloperWorks http://bit.ly/rawnshah/.

He is the author of seven books, his latest being "Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs" (Wharton School Publishing, 2010) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0132357798/.

In 1990s and early 2000s He was also a freelance columnist and editor for technical journals such as JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, Windows NT World Japan, IBM developerWorks Web Services zone.

In his spare time he is a third-degree black belt and teaches Japanese swordfighting to middle and high-school students in Tucson.

He can be reached at http://twitter.com/rawn. The contents of this blog are his own ideas and opinions and not that of his employer IBM.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, atmospheric overview of MUDs., July 17, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Playing Muds on the Internet (Paperback)

This book certainly took me back to my days as a University student, idly whisting away some time gathering gold and slaying semi-human creatures while swapping idle banter and tales of daring-do with fellow students halfway across the world. For those "not in the know", MUDs - or multi-user dungeons - are a form of text-based adventure game where the play is not limited to a sole user, but rather may consist of combatants from around the world via the internet. The game is not confined to a pre-designed and static "world", but is rather constantly in a state of upheaval and reconstruction with enhancements and new areas always under development.

The authors are both survivors of the early days of MUDding and have written this book to share their combined experience and knowledge with the ordinary public. Indeed the book is most engrossing as the MUD equivalent of "case studies" are given, both in terms of how various MUDs developed and in terms of previous exploits the authors have had. Useful tips gleaned only from years of experience abound, such as interacting with other characters, soaring the ranks, how to best utilise the set of commands on the MUD, to even such things as assigning macros to programmable function keys to perform useful functions at high speed.

For those who do not have access to a MUD but whose taste is whetted by the prose, a list of anonymous ftp sites is given whereby one may obtain their very own MUD for their own system.

The book is most atmospheric, suiting its topic well, from even the very physical dimensions of the book to the tense and sweaty text contained inside. Any MUD fan or fanatic would do well to obtain this book - not for the bookshelf, but for alongside the very next MUDding session !

David Williams

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jim is the man, June 10, 2005

By 

Stephen T. Hamner "Steve Hamner" (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing Muds on the Internet (Paperback)

Having played MUDs for years with Jim Romine and some other chaps at the University of Arizona in the early 90s, I've seen the kind of damage he can do firsthand. Jim knows the ins and outs of MUDs so completely, it's almost scary to the beginner.

Even though most text-based MUDs have been replaced by games like Everquest or Worlds of Warcraft, text-based games are still out there, and Jim and Rawn's book is an excellent primer on how to go from newbie to elite.

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Piece of Mud History, December 25, 2011

By 

Wanderer (Who cares where I live?) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing Muds on the Internet (Paperback)

As someone that's been into MUD games since their heyday in the mid to late 90s (when this book was published), I have tried to acquire just about every book I can find that talks about this computing genre. Up until recently, I didn't even know that this one existed, but once I did I had to have it.

I can honestly say that this book is definitely one of my favorites so far. It really is a trip down memory lane to peruse the pages of this book and read some of the accounts that the authors provide. I've got experience with a lot of the codebases they discuss in the book and even some of the specific "stock" game areas that are shared across many of the old systems, so reading about them in a book was a definitely cool experience.

If you want to read about this now almost non-existent part of the online gaming world, a world that predated all the MMORPGs and junk that's out there today, you definitely need to give this book a try. The chapter with some of the authors' exploits during their mudding days is worth the price alone, but the rest of it is also extremely interesting and well written all around. Anyone that's ever played a MUD and, especially those who have operated/coded on one, need to check this out.

Highly recommended!