No MMO will ever have graphics as good as the text MUDs I played for years

My friends, you've been had. You've been suckered. A cabal of sirens has made you stupefied and susceptible, bearing impressive names like Unreal Engine 5, Unity, Anvil, Snowdrop. These are distractions: dark paths to divert you from the true way. You don't need nanite-rendered leaves or dappled evening sunlight rendered with lumen. Look away. Look away!

Look away and look back to the last time anything was good: the '90s, when the internet moved too slow to cook your brain and the absolute peak of graphical fidelity was translucent water and the PlayStation 1, whose vertices swam and staggered beneath their own raw aesthetic power. Back then, if you wanted a world—a real world—there was only one place to go: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).

And frankly, my contention is that for all our modern graphical horsepower, that's still the case.

Sacred texts

MUDs, if you're not familiar, are large, shared, entirely text-based worlds where everything is conducted by the input and output of text. Massively multiplayer command lines, of a sort. Want to go somewhere? Prepare to type GO NORTH, GO NORTHWEST, GO NORTH, GO NORTHEAST ad nauseum until you reach your destination.

PvE might, in a generous game, consist of you typing KILL until the deed is done, pausing intermittently to input whatever the appropriate verb is for healing. A less generous game will have you type out the correct verb for every specific type of attack you want to do. As for PvP? Likely a terrifying arms race of custom-made combat scripts based on an ever-shifting sea of variables.

They're complex, in other words. But despite that, it was a MUD—Achaea—that got its hooks into me at the tender age of 13. Not WoW, not EverQuest, not anything else. Achaea was my main game for years, but I moved on to others: Lusternia (no, it's not a XXX game), Aardwolf, a brief flirtation with Discworld, and so on.

The 'why' of it is easy: more than any graphical MMO, these games captured the spirit of tabletop roleplaying—where the gaps in presentation left by dry stat sheets and dice rolls have to be filled by your imagination. MUDs were (and are) nothing but imagination, and their rudimentary presentation left enormous room for players to fill the gaps themselves.

In my heyday, the meat of what I got up to in the MUDs I played didn't consist of relentlessly grinding dev-authored quests (though there was plenty of that), it took place in all the interstices the designers had left and that players had moved to fill. The beauty of text is that there's very little you can't do with it and doing it takes very little time.

Being able to describe yourself any way you liked, to perform any action you could fit into a sentence meant that players I knew made their living as travelling performers, as essayists on in-game lore (this was often tedious), as politicians and diplomats. Also they would quite regularly retreat to somewhere secluded with one another and—sweaty fingers trembling—co-author the most specific smut you can imagine. The internet!

It is, in these circumstances, relatively easy to catch a dev's attention and have them help you roleplay out some kind of in-game event. Perhaps you want to be an archaeologist making a momentous discovery: all you need is someone to type you up a new item, and maybe briefly inhabit a nearby NPC to act out the scene.

And it really did look great, too. Not to turn into a kindergarten teacher, but your imagination is quite powerful, and good writing is timeless in a way no texture or lighting model ever will be.

Left on read

Alas, MUDs are on the downswing. In fairness, they've been that way since at least the late '90s. They were dying even when I was first getting into them, slowly supplanted by MMOs which more closely resembled videogames and less resembled emacs. Where my favourites of yore once had playercounts in the hundreds, now they number in the tens. Some in the single-digits. Though some are doing quite well, I understand.

We'll miss them if they ever go entirely, I think. As tech advances to fill more and more of those gaps which we used to have to fill ourselves, our scope for participation and mental investment in the worlds we spend thousands of hours in diminishes. Or mine does, anyway.

I've tried to get into the WoWs and SWTORs of the world (not FF14, which I believe I need some kind of catboy licence to enter legally), but none of the many characters I've made linger in my mind like the cadaverous freak I used to play in Achaea, and it's Lusternia—not any MMO normal human beings play—that I habitually return to every holiday period. If I'm going to take part in a massive online world, I want to feel like I have the capacity to shape it, if nowhere else than in my own mind.