Story time, children! Everyone pull up your cushions and sit in a semicircle!

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a massively multiplayer online game. No, really. No one had figured out how to make pictures move with button presses for a bunch of people at once, but they did have words. So, some guys found a way to let people type letters and words to help play pretend with other people on their computer screens.

The first iteration of these were called MUDs, short for multi-user dungeons. Essentially a cross between a D&D game and a choose your own adventure book, these games used relatively simple commands to allow players to explore a world, collect items and equipment, and actually party up to kill everything that moved. It wasn't that far removed from today's World Of Warcraft or EverQuest, but with more reading, more difficult mapping, and the convenience of just rolling a striking character, setting up a macro to follow the party's tank, and letting everyone else do the work while you went and had a sandwich.

Fun, but monotonous, MUDs eventually grew up into more interactive and creatively stimulative forms. Their names varied based on their coding, but MUSEs, MUSHes, MUCKs, and MUXes were pretty much all the same thing.

MUCKs were the first particularly popular spin-off of the MUD, but I never played on any MUCKs, and they're traditionally chock-full of furries anyway, so we'll move on to MUSHes. MUSH, which some backronym to stand for multi-user shared hack, it was originally just a play on the word "mud," much like its brother the MUCK. Gameplay on MUSHes was a lot less structured, primarily taking the form of "pose" roleplay.

Characters would act out whatever they were doing, and then it would be up to the other characters in the scene or being interacted with to pose in turn, until everyone got angry at everyone else and logged out in rage. Then it would all be adopted as the MUSHes' overarcing story canon! Hooray! Most MUSHes, at least that I ran into, were loosely themed after existing fictional universes (Pern, anime in general, Battlestar Galactica), so imagine a horrible cross between LARPing, bad fanfiction, and an AOL chatroom, and you've pretty much got the gist.

MUSEs and MUXes tended to be a little more structured, with systems and commands in place on many of them to facilitate dice-roll or other stat-based roleplaying systems, making them a major draw for tabletop roleplayers. Those more inclined to Dungeons & Dragons still stuck to the MUDs, which were still going strong, but MUSHes based on games like White Wolf's World Of Darkness series, the Battletech universe, and many a permutation of GURPS were easy to find and easy to play.

The neat thing about the post-MUD MU*s (and some later MUDS) was the level of user input they invited, if not demanded. Game worlds, including all the items, locations, and non-player characters, were all created and coded by real people. Getting in on the ground floor of a MUSE could almost guarantee you a job writing something, be it actual code or the easier job of typing up the descriptions people saw when they looked at things or entered a new room. Essentially collaborative gamemaking, it was kind of a shame when things got prettified and dumbed down once Ultima Online rolled onto the scene.

Some MU*s still persist to this day, if you feel like tracking down a client to play them, but for the most part, their value lies in little more than nostalgia. They're still furry hives, too, for those furs who haven't found Furcadia or DeviantArt. Explore at your own risk.



(Every kind of picture I could think of that might have been relevant to this post literally made me feel ill. It didn't help that about halfway through the article, I was listening to the part of this week's HAWPcast with the furry/inflation talk and I just started hating the internet and everything in it after remembering the times I found each on my own.)