Richard A. Bartle: Miscellaneous Articles

Miscellaneous Articles

Published articles on MUDs and MUD-related matters from miscellaneous sources. All these have been scanned from the original copies in my possession, or copied from transient web pages.

	Essex Shows How to Play the Game Lally, I. Wivenhoe, pages 1 and 3, 7^th June, 1984. Wivenhoe is the name by which the official, weekly newspaper of the University of Essex used to be known (it's now Wyvern. While the students are taking their examintions, little else goes on in the University, so they were desperate enough to lead with an article on MUD instead. Other than the awful photograph of me, the article was pretty well identical to what appeared that week's Essex County Standard news report from the University. This re-use of limited resources is not unusual: a second photograph taken at the same session ended up in a later Computing: The magazine article.
	MUD Glorious Mud The Gnome Prestel, pages 258 ga to go, 30^th August, 1985. The Gnome at Home ran a very classy BBS in the early- and mid-1980s, and was a popular contributor to the Prestel viewdata system. He wrote this very influential (because all his readers had, by definition, the modems necessary to play) review of MUD for his weekly column there; we got quite a few new players from it, too. A couple of years later I was interviewed live on Prestel for over an hour, but sadly I only have copies of the questions asked, not the answers I gave, so there's not much to be gained by reproducing them here.
	Series 2, Programme 2 Woolley, B. The Net, BBC2, 22^nd September, 1995. I've been on several TV and radio shows about MUDs, but this is the only one for which I have a transcript. The Net was a valiant effort by the BBC to put together a non-kid's programme about the Internet. It was actually quite good, but could never quite shake off the anorak image of Internet/computer nerds which critics were quick to hold up. The second show of series 2 had a major 10-minute piece on MUDs (the basic format was to have three such stories per edition - I've only scanned the MUD one). This was an ambitious attempt to give viewers a feel for what playing a MUD is like, which almost, almost came off. I think what finally let it down was the dialogue between the characters - they used real MUD players rather than actors and their words were unscripted. The result is dreadful... My own apperance was somewhat embarrassing; I was dressed in my PhD gowns, the conceit being that they were filming "within" a MUD, so everyone wore masks except me (as I play as myself - I just wore a "costume"). They did 3 takes of me saying different things each time, and used the first section of the third of these. Talker author Simon Marsh also spoke, and although we had an amicable disagreement about what a MUD is (I believe they're liberating in a way nothing else is; he regards them more as a part of reality than an extension of it) this doesn't really come over in the final cut - thank goodness!
	What is MUD? Jenkins, D. Wireplay, October, 1997. This is the review of MUD2 which Wireplay put up when the game was first launched. The idea was to educate the Duke Nuke'Em and Diablo players into the culture of a world that was written before most of them were born; I don't know if many people actually read it, though (even at Wireplay, given that the title of the page upon which it appeared was "Wireplay News - XL's EF2000 tips")...