The Confidential Articles Hat

Confidential was the name by which the house magazine of the Special Reserve/Official Secrets mail-order games club was known. It was a little amateurish at times, but nowhere near as bad as Comms Plus!. From April/May 1989 to April/May 1991, it ran a series of MUD-related articles by Pip Cordrey, owner of the MirrorWorld (later IOWA) system. These are mainly puff pieces which extol either the virtues of the games available on IOWA or the contributions made by Cordrey himself to the MUD scene. They're reasonably honest, though, and, to be fair, these are the games that Cordrey knew best.

Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of the first of these articles, which described the MirrorWorld MUD itself; the rest, however, are reproduced here. The series didn't appear in every issue of Confidential, but was fairly regular nonetheless. It ended when Confidential underwent a redesign along with the rest of Special Reserve.
Mortar Board MOSAIC
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, pages 20 and 21,
June/July, 1989.
A description of the MOSAIC project. This was conceived by Cordrey as the next great step in MUD design, and, although it seems a good idea at first glance, it has quite a few holes. The co-ordinate system it espouses would have made a good basis for a neat graphical MUD, but Cordrey always preferred text. Given that, his insistance on building a MUD out of 1m cubes (voxels, anyone?) while not accepting that a co-ordinate system was topologically equivalent to a rigid network of traditional "node" rooms, was rather infuriating... Still, the MOSAIC approach won its fair share of enthusiasts, and elements of it can be detected in MUDs which exist to this day (most notably Avalon).
Footnote: the worthy board game about the environment which the article mentions was actually unplayably bad.
Mortar Board Adventure 89
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 22,
December, 1989/January, 1990.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, a series of annual conventions were held for players and writers of adventure games. They became a focal point for players of MUDs, too, and the bigger MUDs began to take stands at them. Their original home was Sutton Library in South London, but for 1989 this venue was unavailable. Pip Cordrey offered to run it in the garden of his (not inconsiderable!) home, Tilgates, instead. It was a massive success, despite the relative inaccessability of the place. It also marked the end of the pre-Internet period of MUD development. Around 20 different MUDs were represented, almost all of which had their own, unique server code. The variety and invention was staggering. Sadly, Cordrey could not be persuaded to organise an Adventure 90, and attempts by others to organise an Adventure 91 never really got going.
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 22,
February/March, 1990.
An introduction to MUDs (or "Mugs", as these articles prefer). It's OK, and exhibits only a little of Pippin's tendency to describe features of his own stable of games as if they were the industry standard.
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 28,
June/July, 1990.
Another idea for which Pippin clearly sees himself responsible is that of allowing players to add objects to MUDs. These "MUPEGs" are described as having many exciting features, but it's pretty obvious that the ones listed are hypothetical rather than actually implemented - they're very much wishful thinking. The piece of prose quoted as an example "origination sequence" highlights splendidly the reason why players should not be given a free rein to write significant parts of the games they play - it's truly dreadful!
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 14,
August/September, 1990.
This is a review of Empyrion, a game on the IOWA system. It has an interesting SF premise, although the "city under the sea" idea is not especially original. The game itself did attract a few enthusiasts, despite its being prone to crashes, however it died (along with the rest of IOWA) when charging was introduced and the players deserted as one: it was good, but not that good..!
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 25,
August/September, 1990.
Although in the MugScan spot, nowhere does it actually say that Pippin wrote this article, and the fact that it is about a non-IOWA game, Trash, suggests that perhaps he didn't. The MUD it describes has a nice enough idea behind it, but in practice its "humour" was relentlessly unfunny. The game was not a great success, which was doubly disappointing given its direct accessability from Prestel.
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 23,
December, 1990/January, 1991.
This is a review of the game Parody on the IOWA system, although it reads like more of an extract from a help command... There are a number of typographical errors, some of which I have corrected but others of which are beyond redemption. The article contains the usual confident assertions of pre-eminence without much evidence to back them up.
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 26,
February/March, 1991.
A discussion of some of the design decisions which make a MUD good; it's actually quite useful, in this respect. A few of the things mentioned are a little arbitrary (eg. number of rooms per puzzle), and there's a definite IOWA-biased idea of what makes a game hauntingly good, but the overall material is strong enough to stand such minor flaws.
Mortar Board MugScan
Cordrey, P.
Confidential, page 26,
April/May, 1991.
Pippin always argued enthusiastically in favour of what he called "autosets", but which are normally referred to nowadays as "rolling resets". In this article, he describes the concept, and how it is applied in various (IOWA) MUDs. Of these, the premiss for the game Spacers is really rather good; it makes the other systems mentioned look decidedley second-rate by comparison.


Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)
21st January 1999: cnfdntl.htm