A Bibliography of Text-Based Virtual Environments

The term MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon, and was coined after Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote their first on-line multi-user interactive adventure game in 1979. Since that time, MUDs have become enormously popular, primarily as games, but also as social environments and, more recently, communication tools. Various types have evolved, including MUSH, MUSE, MOO, MUCK, diku-MUD, lp-MUD, and others.

A description of their differences may be found in the documents referenced below. See particularly, J. Smith's FAQ documents.

All of these have in common the property of being text-based virtual environments providing multi-user, real-time interaction. The term MUD is usually used generically to refer to all such environments. There are literally hundreds of MUDS operating on the Internet. A large list of them can be found in Scott Goehring's ``Totally Unofficial List of Internet Muds.''

Typically MOOs are recognized to be a more sophisticated implementation of the MUD by their Object Oriented Nature (MOO = MUD: Object Orient) - though such a statement is likely to generate fierce debate in some quarters.

For purposes of this web site we adopted the generic M** when referring to the multi-user environment.

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