Dec the halls for Christmas

CHRISTMASTIDE is generally regarded by MUD players as a fun time for one and all. No-one goes about maliciously attacking other players (especially if there is a wiz watching to stop them!), and even the most paranoid of players have been known to join in for a chorus of The Twelve Days of Christmas without fear of someone stealing their broadsword while they stand still for long in the same place. The roots of this tradition lie in the days when MUD was enjoyed by a select band of students only, and the outside world had barely heard of the game. Then, at the end of term, with all assignments out of the way and three days before they went home, the MUD devotees would all get together for an afternoon-long session of good cheer, before they disappeared off to their respective parental homes in sunny Huddersfield or wherever for a month of MUDlessness.

In order to promote goodwill to all mankind, MUD has a special room called the Christmas Box (or XMASBX in it abbreviated form), which only wizards and witches can enter, as it lies in its own half-world, inaccessible from the domain of mortals. For 50 weeks of the year the room is left unvisited, gathering dust and forgotten by one and all. Only for the middle two weeks of December do memories stir, and a wiz will venture into the XMASBX to see if all is well. And then, mortals will notice a subtle change in the game...

The XMASBX, you see, contains everything you need for a merry Christmas, and the wizs liberally distribute the loot around The Land for players to stumble across and drop in the swamp, in order to score the generous number of points which the presents are worth. Everything you are likely to need to make Christmas festive is there. There is holly ("not decking the hall"), a candle, a snowman ("trying very hard not to melt"), a cracker, and a wealth of other things. Of course there is a beautiful Christmas tree, decorated in pretty lights and baubles, which usually winds up stuck in the pine forests to the south of MUD, where unsuspecting adventurers suddenly fimd it looming through the trees at them.

Some of the objects (all of which have been there for at least three years) have uses other than merely being treasure. The Christmas bell which "plays its old farniliar carols here" can actually be hit, sending a -D-O-N-G- reverberating throughout The Land. If you don't want to DONG it, you can DING it, and everyone gets a -D-l-N-G- echoing on their screen. Sometimes some quite tuneful-looking melodies can be played, until someone on 110 baud who can't get a word in edgeways manages to steal the wretched item and drop it in the swamp out of harm's way!

In its usual endearingly skewed way, MUD's Christmas Carol book isn't quite what it should be, containing such masterpieces as "Once in Royal boughs of holly", "I saw three french hens come sailing by" and "oh silent night of first noel". There is plenty of Christmas fare (well, it would be if it let you eat it!) including plum pudding, mince pies, and a shocking-pink mousse (not to be confused with the mouse although since the mouse is made of sugar perhaps confusing them is OK after all!).

The final foodstuff likely to be met is the turkey, only it's not dead and spends most of its time running around in a mad panic trying to stay that way. Other mobiles include Santa Claus ("ho ho ho") plus sleigh, and his reindeer (which, of course, glows in the dark!). The reindeer parodies MUD's oldest object, the ox, and has the same description except for instead of it being a sturdy ox lumbering past you nearby, it's a reindeer.

Some other "normal" objects you find in the game are extra-significant at Christmas, too. The ivy which entwines itself round the bird-bath in the pine forest is usually moved to somewhere more prominent. Also likely to be placed where people can find it is the mistletoe (yes, you CAN kiss under it...), although that happens less often since the mistletoe is the last object required to gain access to MUD's greatest treasure trove, the druids' chamber beneath the ring of stones far away on the island. If people get hold of the mistletoe they can rush off to the island and drag home a sack of riches. Unless the wiz who moved it spots them, of course, in which case they might find the dragon has something to say about it...

Also at Christmas, you get more people imbibing of the rum, which is stored in the smugglers' cave near the beach. Naturally this has an intoxicating effect on players, and they will occasionally issue loud HlC's, or stagger backwards into some strange room, or drop asleep. It wears off after a while, or if you're sick, but at Christmas it's quite likely that at least half the players will wander around in a blitzed state kissing bunny rabbits and trying to eat lit torches.

The final Christmassy effect in MUD, which rears its head around this time of year, is the snow. Normally, MUD has a fairly regular pattern of sunshine for around thirty minutes, followed by rain for about ten. The rain prevents your carrying out certain actions, like sailing at sea, and swells the river so you can't cross (which can cut off if you had to get the mistletoe, incidentally). At yuletide, however, the wizs who are full of the spirit of Christmas usually switch on the snow, which is just like the rain but lasts for longer. This can be something of a surprise to the morlals, who know exactly what rain is but don't really know what to make of snow. It's quite amusing watching them talk to each other ("What's this snow?" "Don't know, I just saw Father Christmas go by, and someone has given me this cracker...").

There is another Christmas-derived feature in MUD, which now has a more general appeal - the "spectacular". A spectacular (pronounced "specktackerler", after the welsh wizard, Evil, who coined the phrase but couldn't say it properly) is one almighty carnage, but tremendous fun! The idea is that you get as many people playing at once as you can manage (36 maximum), and put them all in together. You then "wizard lock" the game, to stop anyone else getting in, and give the word. Thereupon, they chase about after each other, killing and shouting and screaming as they go, until all but one is dead. This person is the winner, and receives 1000 points for every mortal who started the spectacular, plus some extra if the game crashed as a result of the actions of one of the spectating wizards.

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SPECTACULARS have aided many people, but not all have reached wiz as a result. This is often because the battles were won by someone who already had a wiz persona, but was playing as a mortal for the sheer thrill of the kill (makes a nice change from being benevolent). A quick perusal of MUD's graveyard will reveal only one person who made it as a result - Felicity the witch. Her tombstone reads: "A spectacular life led me here", and it did. The extra points were just about enough to get her to witch. Of course, for every success story there is a failure, and another player with a similar score to start with came second by a hair's breadth. And he lost the second spectacular by a similar margin, too, after killing 50% of the other players single-handed! Almost makes you believe in fate, doesn't it?

Spectaculars are terrific to play, but hellishly difficult to organise! Quite apart from getting the players to come along at the same time (assuming the computer is up, too!) you have to re-arrange the locations of objects and things so that the fast typers don't get to the goodies first. Also, introducing the odd "new" monster, and hyping-up some of the old ones, can take time, if you want to do it right. Finding six different yet logical places to put the spare swords can be quite an exercise in itself! Still, the overall effect is well worth it (I hope!).

What normally happens is that the internal players get two or three terminals each (this being OK since everyone else has gone home for the hols) and go in with a like number of mortals. Two of them follow the third around, and when they meet someone they all join in the fray. Sometimes different players will gang up, so there might be gangs of six or eight scouring the countryside looking for hidden individuals. Externals, being slower moving, are quite often caught this way, although as the spectacular progresses the larger teams tend to get broken up by attacks on some of the "followers", and in the resulting attempt to rally forces other members of the group are picked off.

Wizs watching the game take a great delight in seeing what is happening. They cheer the brave ones, boo the cowards, and if people are scurrying around deep underground hoping everyone else will do the job for them, the wizs are likely to pick them up by the scruff of the neck and drop them in the thick of things - asleep! Everyone's game is logged into a different file, and at the end of the day these are printed off and a "report" is compiled, saying who was done over by whom at what time. The shortest period of time spent in a spectacular is reputed to be three seconds, when one of Gwyn the wizard's mortal personae typed EAST at the start instead of WEST, and left MUD into VALLEY, only to learn that he couldn't return...

Most of the hacking and slaying in spectaculars goes on in the mainland, but eventually there are only a few players left and they find it increasingly hard to catch each other (although the WHO command during a spectacular tells you what room your prey is in, instead of just what their name is). At this point, the wizards collar the survivors and move them to the ship. They also give them all weapons, in order to promote good bloodshed, and let them loose. The ship being only about nine rooms in total, this leaves little chance to escape, but it can be quite cramped. Recent spectaculars' endings have been moved to the island, further out to sea, where there is twice as much space and people get more say in who kills them!

Spectaculars now take place fairly often, late one evening at the end of term when Essex University s computer can take the load without inconveniencing anyone else. It's interesting to observe that they are quite different from the events which inspired their conception, and which still take place every Christmas in MUD. The year of feuding, fighting, paranoia is forgotten for just a few brief days prior to December 25th, and MUD players get together bound by a wave of camaraderie reminiscent of those First World War films where the Tommies and the Hun meet in No-Man's Land for a few, fleeting hours. A shame that it doesn't last the whole year round, but, as any wiz will tell you, there's only a certain amount of being nice that a body can stand, and two weeks seems quite long enough to last most MUD players for the rest of the year!

Merry Christmas, Happy new Year, and if you get a DECsystem-10 (cost: half a million quid) in your stocking let me know and I'll send you a tape with MUD on (and a begging letter!).

For those readers with a Commodore 64 and modem. MUD is now running on Compunet.

Readers without access to Compunet can get details of how to access MUD from Richard Bartle, Department of Computer Science, Essex University, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ. Remember to enclose an SAE.