Dragon Media

DikuMud was originally developed by Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. A small bit of background of DikuMud, according to Sebastian Hammer:

The game originated at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (in Danish: Datalogisk Institut ved K|benhavns Universitet; or, amongst friends: DIKU) The foundations of the code were laid out in March of 1990. Our background (Mud-wise) was primarily Abermud (LpMud was just emerging at the time), and our object was to make a better AberMud. We wanted to make it fast, compact and CPU-efficient. (more…)

I claim that SvenskMud is a virtual community. This conclusion should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read the previous nine chapters of this Ph.D. thesis. Judged by the six criteria for community that I have suggested, SvenskMud is a more central member of the community category than most other virtual communities that have been described in the research literature. However it is still obviously a less central member than presentday rural communities with their long time horizons and many tight ties between members. Created in a society that is moving from  Gemeinschaft and towards  Gesellschaft, SvenskMud represents an attempt to recreate  Gemeinschaft in cyberspace. It simultaneously recreates both a place and a type of relationship that was typical of such places:

•  The SvenskMud world is created in the image of a former, simpler age. It is based on a medieval/pre-modern world, incorporating traditional symbols of pre-modern communities such as guilds, churches, chapels, village pubs and so on. Symptomatically, there is only one town in the SvenskMud world, Eriksros, and (more…)

Over the last few years since I opened Southlands, we have had to deal with the unfortunate truth that we will, very likely, never have a huge playerbase. While at first this bothered me, over time, I’ve come to accept and even embrace our small mud status, to the point that I’d not want more than twenty-five to thirty players on at a time.

The reason for this is quite simple.

Family Community.

I’m proud that we’ve built up an OOC community of friends who happen to enjoy the same flavor and style of roleplay environment. In our case, less code, more RP. We’ve built this community in a few ways, and I’ll go into those as well as what less code and more RP means. (more…)