Announcer:          00:00          This episode of Titans of text is dedicated to Jordan Babo; to your health today and your health in the future.

Eric:               00:19          Welcome socializers, explorers, achievers, killers one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Eric Oestrich.

Danny:              00:27          And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld.

Eric:               00:28          And today we have with us Dr. Richard Bartle who needs no introduction. We're going to talk with one of the founding fathers of not only muds but of all online games. It's an honor to welcome you to the podcast, Richard.

Eric:               00:41          What fictional world has left the biggest impression on you?

Richard:            00:47          That would be middle earth, not because it's a particularly wonderful fictional world, but because it showed when I was young what was possible with fictional worlds; that inventing worlds that were fully realized wasn't something that I was wasting my time doing. It was actually possible to create one and gave the impression of being as real as any other world. So that would be the one that would be most impressive, Lord of the Rings, pretty much the same as anyone else, I guess, who's read it. The movies are closer, somewhat different, but the books definitely one for the paracosm fans out there.

Danny:              01:27          Was this something you were, like a hobby of your youth; was wanting to create like a large scale world-building type thing?

Richard:            01:36          Oh yeah, yeah, I did that. Did the whole, you know, the whole time lots of kids create worlds in their minds, but very few of them get to the point where they actually start writing them down, drawing maps, making languages for them and so on. I mean, I did that. I had several of them. Some of them had real world components to them. So I might use the real world as the the setting for some of them, but for other ones it was entirely map-based and I wrote all the actions down as a diary of, of the characters and yeah, why wouldn't I, why doesn't everybody do this?

Danny:              02:15          I can't argue with that because that's pretty much most of my youth as well. Did those worlds contribute towards the worlds that became the early muds?

Richard:            02:26          Yes and no. They did in the sense that I learned some of the things that worked and some of the things that didn't work, they did in the sense that I, through playing my own worlds, got the hang of role playing before role playing had made it as a thing. So they did in those senses, but it wasn't a case of my saying, wow, I really liked that bit out of this world. I'm going to stick that into the world of mud. The game that Roy Trubshaw and I created back 1978

Eric:               03:02          What was it like when mud one and mud two opened? I imagine many of the players at least had a cursory knowledge of text adventure games, but was this new, interconnected social nature blowing minds?

Richard:            03:13          Well, yeah not all of them did know about text adventures, but they did know about MUD when it came around because it was a completely different. It's hard to explain today what it was like playing in one of these virtual worlds when they first appeared because today people have been exposed to them from an early age and they're not going to be as impressed as they would be when you know, be a 20 or something or a 19 or whatever and you suddenly find yourself in this textually realized game world that is full of other people as well and that they're really there and they're not computer controlled. They're actually real people. I mean it was very exciting for people because they just hadn't seen anything like it before. Now today it's hard to imagine what that could have been like when I was young.

Richard:            04:05          I grew up in a small, very small town on the coast, 250 miles from London. And the first time I got to London, I was like 18, and I went down and I was like, Oh wow, this is fantastic. And that's actually Buckingham Palace, that's 10 Downing street when the prime minister lives. Oh, I didn't realize I was so close now. I was absolutely amazed by it. Now my kids because I now live closer to them and they went on school trips to London. So for them it's not something at all. Impressive as it was for me. Yeah. They go down the mall and see Buckingham palace at the end, but they're not going to be as, I've seen that on television as I was because it's already been inculcated into their lives. And so is now with virtual worlds, MMOs, whatever you want to call them. They're part and parcel of people's life. Why were they ever so special? Because before then there was no way that you could share a reality with somebody else. But from then onwards there was, and that makes a big difference.

Danny:              05:15          You've mentioned in the past of maybe, maybe far in the past at this point that, that Roy Trubshaw was mostly interested in the technical aspects of, you know, getting the world working and that you, and this is a very selective quote, turned it into a game. What were the gaps that you filled in for that? Not saying, not diminishing Roy's contribution to these things.

Richard:            05:40          I never would.

Danny:              05:41          Where were the gaps that you filled in for that?

Richard:            05:43          Okay, so yeah, Roy was interested in the the world creation, the physics that he was interested in building the world, how it operated as a world. But he could do content and I was interested in the content, but I could do physics. So we both could do all of it. It's just that we had different interests. What Roy originally envisaged was a world which had rich enough content in it that people would find things interesting to do without the world itself telling them. So that's how reality works. You know, that world that we live in, you don't get points for for doing things. In reality, there's nobody you go up to and press a button and out comes a quest, the interactions that you have with the environment, whether the people are rich enough that they give you goals, they give you objectives and then you can attempt to achieve these objectives and things get in your way and things help and people are getting in the way and people help and so on.

Richard:            06:43          So that's what he was hoping would be the case with mud. However, it turns out that you need a bit more content than we had. The computers that we were using, which were quite powerful by those standards of those days aren't all that powerful by today's standards. And we couldn't do it. I, we didn't have the time, but we did it. We always thought of mud as a game. It just that we always wanted the gameplay to emerge from what players were doing, but because there was no capacity for the content, what we had to do instead then was to turn it into a game by embedding in the physics concepts of points, levels, scoring, things like that. And this is what I did. I added these things to the, the physics of the world so that we got some gameplay that was directing the players because they knew that the idea was to get points, go up levels. So you get more power so you can get more points so you can go more levels. And that was embedded in the code. So what we were hoping for was emergently designed, but we actually eventually had to do was within the world that we have designed explicitly code achievement systems if you like.

Danny:              08:07          So like you've just said the achievement systems that mud and MUD2's design had. Now you, you were involved with on some level MUD2 well into after the advent of the internet, or at least what most people consider the internet, which is the web and websites and people putting content on the web. How did that proliferation of internet access and availability of information, especially to the point of people making walkthrough guides and cheat lists affect your design? Did you change anything or was it just, you know, people that want to look this stuff up will and they'll just essentially cheat themselves out of the experience?

Richard:            08:49          No, we didn't have much problem with that. First of all, when the worldwide web came along and people thought that that was the internet and that's how it all started. Just prior to that mud, not our mud, but muds in general took up about 11% of the transatlantic bits. So about roughly 11% of the internet were muds back then. So when the world wide web came along and all these people came along and started looking at web pages and and so on. These were mainly to start with, they were mainly academic sites and a few adventurous businesses. I think Kellogg's was the first worldwide web I saw advertised on an advert. But after that they became to have a lot of pictures in it and they weren't particularly games oriented. Now back then to access the internet, you still needed a modem. It wasn't all fiber optics are everything and it was very slow.

Richard:            09:48          So people who are playing muds would be playing them still in text. It wasn't till the mid nineties that people were able to work with the idea that soon bandwidth's going to be enough that we'll be able to make a graphical world. We always knew that was going to be them, but we didn't have the the, the bandwidth to do it now. When they started making the graphical worlds yes, that attracted lots and lots of people to playing those worlds because by then the idea was that computer games were graphical. So video games, that's where the video bit comes in. So those people did have those troubles. We didn't ourselves I think come to perhaps three occasions. Somebody wrote a cheat list and hosted it on a website and, I just emailed the person in charge saying that this is an old game. It wasn't designed with the expectation that people would be putting walkthroughs up and it rather spoils the fun of the people who are playing because a lot of them are playing because they like the idea of finding things out. They don't like the idea of somebody else just telling them because they already online. So I did, I read a couple of emails a couple of times and yeah, the hosting people took them down. I don't know if you'll find a walkthrough for MUD2 now, if you were to look on the internet, maybe you will, maybe you won't, but probably not. Or if you do, it won't be very complete one because the people who played it to the level where you do understand that that are typically the kind of people who are going to want to spoil other people's experiences.

Eric:               11:21          With the advent of some of the second generation engines, like LP, MOO and Diku proliferation of muds exploded. What do you think of when the dam broke in the early nineties?

Richard:            11:31          Oh, I thought it was great. We didn't make mud to be a commercial venture. We made mud because we wanted people to be free of the constraints that society and reality in general put on us. So the more of them there were out there, the better. And I still think that the, the more of these virtual worlds that there are the better is for us. More MMOs. Yeah. Because reality sucks. What we were doing was trying to make a world that was, well then we were thinking we were hoping that would be better than reality, but it turned out we didn't have the hardware to do that.

Richard:               12:04          But we were trying to say to people, look, it doesn't matter what fate has dealt you in, in real life. In terms of age, looks, gender, whatever. Here you can be and become whoever you really are and you don't have to listen to that. You can get past all that. You can just play these worlds and be the person you really are. And nevermind what rich kids are doing that because they can live in another world where people do get judged on what they wear and what their accent is and so on.

Richard:            12:37          So we were trying to make a world that a, as an alternative, as a competition to reality. And the more of these that there are, the greater the chance that we're going to get. Ones that really are alternatives to reality so that people really can say, you know what, just stuff that I'm going to go here where my friends are, where I'm respected and where I don't have to listen to people babbling on about nonsense. So we were pleased that that these things took off because we were, because that's, that's what we always wanted. They'd been diluted a lot since then and that's rather frustrating. But that time will come. I'll probably just be dead though, but no, they will come.

Danny:              13:17          As a quick followup to a small thing there. Have, I have to ask, have you ever been to a focused convention for one of these games? Like BlizzCon is mostly, it was mostly about world of Warcraft in the beginning or even like a comic con to watch people like live people immersed in that world. Walking around.

Richard:            13:38          We used to have what we called mud meets where the players of mud would come and meet up in the real world. I mean, there were so many of them. And 30 people at most would show up at the pub or something in London or Edinburgh or something. And then we'd all chat about the game and what we did and so on to each other. So we did, we have had those things before. We didn't use to dress up and so on because that kind of immersiveness isn't the kind that we were interested in. I mean pretending that your i dont know Jaina Proudmoore out of world of Warcraft isn't going to make you who you are. It's just showing other people that you're such a fan of this character and that you've got a wonderful way of presenting yourself as them.

Richard:            14:25          Muds weren't about pretending to be specific other people that are about being yourself now as regards to having been to conventions for other, for, for today's larger MMOs.. I've, yeah, I've been to the Eve online one a couple of times. Not because I'm a player because, because I was invited to speak at them. Haven't been to World of Warcraft, Blizzcon or anything that I've been to some general games conventions, gen con, but I haven't been to any comic cons or anything like that. No. I mean really if you're a 59 year old bloke wandering around these things you do start sort of stand out as being kind of creepy. So I'm a, I wouldn't want to be involved in that anyway unless I was invited to talk at one or something.

Danny:              15:12          Well, yeah, that that, that is true. I, I can, I can understand that sentiment at this point in my life as well. So on MMORPGs or, or the evolution of, of where muds are going into graphical worlds. When they first started being graphical: Runescape, EverQuest in through World of Warcraft, a lot of people recognize these were graphical muds. They, they still had a lot of the same principles as a lot of the, what you might call a hack and slash mud.

Richard:            15:45          There were graphical MUDs to start with. They only got called a MMORPGs because people were starting to come out with these games and saying they were multiplayer and they had like eight players and so on. So we needed a term to say, well, no, actually there's more than eight people in there. So this massively multiplayer term came about. The first person I heard who use it use it was a guy called Clement Chambers who did it for the ultima online people were wanting to launch the game in the UK. And they said what should we call these things and we said not multiplayer, that massively multiplayer. So that's the first thing I heard about it. He told me that and then I heard it a few weeks later, but he didn't invent the term massively multiplayer online role playing games. He was responsible for the massively multiplayer.

Richard:            16:32          I spoke to Richard Garriott about this and because I said I, I'd heard this term before and he said, yeah, yeah. That's probably true. But he was the one who came out with massively multiplayer online role playing game. I thought, yeah, that probably it is that, that that is right. I mean it's one of these things where there's a number of sources. I've heard of other people, the there was a Kingdom of Drakkar and some of the areas where people were discussing what to call these things and came up with similar names. I've spoken to Jessica Mulligan, who's a longstanding person in the MMO industry. And she said she first heard the term back in something like 1991. So it's one of these that's been invented multiple times over and over it. And some, sometimes somehow it stuck.

Richard:            17:16          But anyway, the, the games themselves, they are just, they're just muds. I mean, they're the same thing. Diku muds are the prototype. We're the prototype of EverQuest was extremely related to Diku muds. So much so that when it came out, a lot of the players were thinking, well, Everquest. Seems to be just Diku MUD with a graphical frontend bolted on the front. And since Diku MUD was not free where but it was anyone can use it, but they have to make it available as, so it was not free software, but free licensed kind of software. They were saying, well, EverQuest should actually be be free because if it's using Diku MUD, it should be the Diku MUD code base. It, it ought to accept the condition under which they were given. And there was I was actually threat of legal action, but the other quest people swore an affidavit to say that there is no Diku mud code in EverQuest.

Richard:            18:14          And that was enough for the Diku MUD people. But that's how closely similar they are. There are rumors that there were spelling mistakes in Diku MUD that also made it to other quests. But I've never actually seen any of those. But, well, those are the rumors. But I've spoken to everquest people that said no, we wrote it all from scratch. So, but the thing is that they are extremely close to each other. The Diku muds are EverQuest without the graphics. And world of Warcraft was written by people who run big guilds playing EverQuest. And many of the games that followed World of Warcraft were based on World of Warcraft. So there is an awful lot of Diku MUD in these games. And in fact, some of the things that we saw in these games took quite a while to make it into MMOs, like instancing and phasing, which were present Diku MUD.

Richard:            19:04          So yeah, then there's no question about them that they're the same. It's just the interface is different. One's got a graphical interface which has got a text interface in the future, we'll have them VR MMOs. When these come out, I'm sure there'll be people saying, well, these are completely different to the the ones like world of Warcraft because he's got 3D graphics and World of Warcraft has got 2D graphics or 3d if you put on the glasses, but not actually 3d. And I'm sure that people will be saying that and we'll come up with a completely different term and it'll there'll be people arguing that they aren't. But really it's, it's as if MUDs are black and white movies and today's MMOs are talkies and in the future we'll be getting some color but that's pretty well how we are at the moment.

Danny:              19:51          You know we have, and this is, this is more or less recent for non muds, muds have actually gone through this a few times at some of the larger ones that were around, you know, 20 something years ago World of Warcraft Classic has come out and as well City of Heroes which barely predates world of Warcraft has its public servers a up again, what do you think is driving this return to what is essentially a 15 year old game at this point? Do you feel like the modern versions of MMOs, like current world of Warcraft or take your pick of another one like Aeon or any of the other ones that have come out recently, you think they've lost something, social or exploration or you think that people are trying to return to mechanics or to design that we've just lost over this time?

Richard:            20:42          Yeah. What's happened is they've been diluted. All these quality of life changes, they keep adding things to them, making it so much easier, which widens the audience. But the problem is that it takes away some of the gameplay until eventually people, I mean if you can buy success, well success is meaningless and things like this now. Well Warcraft when it came out was regarded as something of a, what they used to call a care bear game because it wasn't all that difficult. You know, you, your character when it died, got a nasty slap on the wrist, you know, a couple of minutes running back to your corpse. So World of Warcraft itself isn't actually all that hardcore when it, when you consider what some of the of its the ones immediately before it were like. But it does have more of a sense of a world to it, more of a sense of a journey.

Richard:            21:33          It is about leveling up. It's not about the end game. It doesn't have all these quality of life things in the teleporting around immediately. And so on. The looking for group finders daily quests and things. And that means that it's more of an experience than the ones that are just that. I won't even bother reading the text of the quest. I'll just follow the little sign that tells me where to go. The, the, this, this doesn't just happen in games.

Richard:            22:03          I was talking about this at a conference in Hong Kong with an Australian guy and he said, ah, well what you have here is a sports cars. You see in the 1960s, sports cars were good. They were fast, they were nippy, great responsiveness. These, the steering felt like something when you put your foot down on the accelerator, things happened. They looked good. Well, the British and Italian ones that I can't say so much about the American and the German ones, I'm afraid, sorry. But what happened was the people who are buying the sports cars had their sports cars. And so the market was stagnant. So they thought the, the car manufacturer said, well, let's make some more. Let's improve the sports cars. Let's give them power steering. Let's give them more suspension. Probably putting seatbelts in them was a good idea. I will concede that. Let's give them thicker tires. Let's make them a bit bigger. So that they're not so small. Give you a better viewing angle and make it higher up. Let's add some more seats at the back. And so they kept doing this until, and people kept buying them. But in the end, the sports cars were indistinguishable from the regular saloon cars.

Richard:            23:19          And if you wanted a sports car from the 1960s, you had to buy a sports car from the 1960s. And then Mazda, the Japanese company were looking for a new car. And they had this guy there, I think he might be English, who suggested that they look at sports cars. So they did their research and they found out that there was a whole group of people who just wanted a proper sports car, couldn't get one. So they designed the Mazda MX5 was it. So as a return to the aesthetics of the old sports cars and all those people would be waiting for a sports car that really was a sports car bought it, became the best selling sports car ever because they were hankering after the past.

Richard:            24:02          Now with MMOs, I was hoping that someone would design and develop a new MMO that went back to the days of the past. But no one's been doing that. However, unlike an old car factory where you can't suddenly pull out all the components of the machines that make an E type Jaguar with an MMO, you do still have the code from back then and you can modify it and bring it up to scratch and tidy it up and and release it. So that's what seems to happen. And that's why people are going there because that's experience which they wanted. They could no longer get in MMOs because MMOs have been, in order to broaden their appeal to the masses, they lose their appeal to the core gamers. But there are a lot of core gamers. And when you return to the core values and the call the getting those would go back to it. So that's sort of what's happened here. I don't know if any, if anything's going to happen from that, whether there's going to be another revolution where somebody else is going to bring out the game that does everything the core gamers would like, but in an innovative fashion. And I'd like to hope they would. But these things cost so much money to make that someone's going to risk losing a lot if it's not done right.

Eric:               25:17          So I guess sort of on a similar vein let's talk about their survival of dead worlds like years later. So muds sometimes go dark to like hosting fees or staff members lives and, and the community will often make a concerted effort to pull out the code and reverse engineer the games so it can live. It's a conflict when the original jumps back out of the Lazarus pit. How do you feel that this affects the community at large?

Richard:            25:42          So what you're saying here is that a mud or even an MMO has died, but the players managed to resurrect it. The previous owners or current owners that those probably notice that the resurrected version is doing better than they did. So they think, Oh, we'll have a piece of that action. And either they attempt to close the resurrected version down the, the, the clone that's running or they, I'm leaving it up and then bring out the official version and try and Lew everybody over. So that's what you're asking about. And then you're saying, is there a conflict that, well, obviously, and then they can either work with the people which is what Blizzard seems to have done or you can try and shut them down, which can happen. You can turn a blind eye which is usually what happens.

Richard:            26:35          There are some MMOs that were a kind of niche, didn't make a lot of money, but if you are not in the business of making money, you're just doing it for fun or for all because you want your community, then you can, you can carry that on. This has been happening. The the original Mist Online that was closed down, the community rebuilt it in. I think there.com that that got closed down and they rebuilt it in second life. Because of no access to the actual code, but the community kept going on. But what your happen, what happens there is that the community that carries on is like an expatriate community. And if the virtual world were suddenly to reappear in its original form and they went back, they feel like aliens in their own land. If you, if you get what I mean.

Richard:            27:25          As for 'em what should happen? Well if someone has closed down a virtual world, one would hope that they would say to the players, okay, you can run it. You can, you can do it. You like, you know, we shut it down. Obviously we don't want it anymore. So here, knock yourselves out. But if you do make a profit, then kind of, we'd like to see some of it. That's probably the, the ideal thing to happen. But that isn't always will happen. The smaller the virtual world, the greater the chance that it would happen because why would, why would you want to keep hold of the code for a virtual world that's you shut down. And if there are people willing to make a go of it, Meridian 59 was shutdown the players club together and bought the code and then they ran it again for another decade and then had to shut it down again. So these things can happen. With text muds, it's a lot easier to happen because you don't need all the art assets or things like that for it. You can, you, you just need log files and you've got the text as they're so small than, yes, some of them are quite ephemeral, but other ones have been around for 20, 25 years. Get 2000 players every night making money hand over fist.

Danny:              28:41          Both Eric and I are administrators and belong to a group called the MUD Coders Guild, which is pretty much a group of a few hundred odd people. So we're all of us, almost all of us at least, are pretty much making a mud engine from scratch. You know, some of the, some of it is for our own edification like me who ran a mud in the 90s. And I just want to recreate that, you know, with better code. Like we always think we can make a more elegant code than we did back then. And a lot of people do it to learn a new programming language. Do you see a mud as an educational tool for learning programming or learning, writing or learning world-building?

Richard:            29:27          So there are many, many reasons why people create virtual worlds. Muds being virtual worlds are among them and that's one of them. People do make them because they want to teach themselves something to use it as a vehicle to teach somebody else something, whether they're teaching themselves programming or teaching themselves world design is another issue. I mean, I've, I was going through thorough for a talk I gave them couple of months ago. All the reasons that anybody would create a reality and came up with 32 of them. So there are lots of reasons. Essentially it's who's your audience and then it's, are you doing it for the players? Are you doing it objectively or are you doing it subjectively? So if your audience is the players, you're just doing it because you want to make, you want to help the players the people are going to play it.

Richard:            30:22          Well you could be doing cause you wanted to teach them something. You could be doing it because you wanted to give them some kind of freedom. You could be doing it because you want to help them create things. You could be doing it for your players because you want them to treat you like some kind of a God. I mean there's many reasons that you could, you would create it just for the players, but you might not be creating it for the players. You might be creating it for yourself. You might be creating it for society. You might be creating it because you believe that there's a higher power in reality; some kind of deity. And if you create a world and you're doing that deity's bidding, you know, there's all sorts of reasons people could create them and yet creating them because it helps you understand coding or understand particular particular kinds of cutting like language design or database management. That's as good a reason as any. You don't have to have the same reasons to create them and they, they are good at that. They do teach you coding.

Eric:               31:16          What do you feel is needed to bring new blood into mud specifically? Attracting the young away from graphical online worlds.

Richard:            31:23          The strength of mud is their weakness. These worlds are created in the minds of the players. And what players create in their minds is more powerful than what is created for them on the screen and a graphical world. So if you're playing a mud and you see a text description of an immense fire breathing dragon or something in your head, you will construct a vision of that dragon. And that will be accurate to you, which means it's more powerful for you than somebody who draws a dragon or just draws. You spend months rigging and animating a dragon. Your vision of a dragon in your head will be better than theirs because it's specific to you. It's, it's bespoke to you. It's customized. That's if you've got the imagination. If you haven't gotten imagination, yeah. Okay. Go off and play the the graphical worlds.

Richard:            32:22          The thing is muds are more immersive than graphical worlds. They're more thoughtful. They've got so many more commands. You can do more, more verbs because all the output and the input are in the same format, so you don't have to keep adjusting. If you're thinking in words, then you're writing your words, reading your words. You don't have to think in pictures, and I'm commands in WASD. It's all integrated and and it's much easier to get immersed in a mud are much more powerful. We can do so much more in them than you can in a graphical world. You can destroy components. You can build vast realms, but they're text and if you show people text then yeah, it's all right, but I got to read that. I'm not going to read it. So it doesn't matter how good they are. No one's gonna play them if they not gonna read the words.

Richard:            33:11          I every year get my students to play MUD2. I get a class of them about 50, 60 of them and I make them all log into MUD2. And they have a ball. They really love it. You know, they have a whale of a time, they are out there mainly attacking each of the, just out with them exploring the world in an effort to find parts where they're not going to get attack and then getting points and going up levels and they play the game for two, three hours and they let it have a blast. Do they ever play again? No. It's text. That means typing things. So there's your main problem. You've got to find people who are willing to see past the interface in order to gain the benefits of that interface. The power of muds is text, but that's the one area that graphic beats it because it's got immediate impact and text doesn't have immediate impact.

Richard:            34:06          As for how you attract people to it. Well you can get them young. That's always good corrupt the youth. You can find people who are interested in interested in text approach. Then the, a lot of the people who play today is muds, find out about them through word of mouth because they hear from somebody else who's I don't know computing society at the university or something who plays it. But many people just don't know about when they do try them, then there's not always critical mass. There's not always the user experience that they're expecting. People just think that there are, that's being rolled up and they don't treat them as if they're actual genuinely players. And it can be quite intimidating and they can, if they play one and get put off, then they're put off them for life. So what you have to do is to make sure that when they do start playing they play, ones that are welcoming and at a level that isn't off-putting.

Richard:            35:04          So you don't have to know a whole bunch of esoteric commands to do well. So it leads you through. I mean, we've always had this problem. We always knew that there's going to be this problem in the days before we had graphics, we knew there was going to be this problem. Text is the superior medium. People who play text muds will stay for, I mean decades. I've got plays of MUD2 today who were playing 30 years ago. I mean, they stay for a long, long time. But all that means nothing if you can't get them to play in the first place. And big barrier is text, you can fancy it up by putting in graphics and illustrations and so on and you can smarten up the interface or it looks good. People can play with a mouse and so on. But I mean every so often someone comes to me and say, why don't you think of putting mud on a mobile phone?

Richard:            35:55          And the answer is really because you can't read a mobile phone. You can't input the text very well on a mobile phone, you haven't got free form communication, if you want to type anything, if you've lost a third of your screen right there, they're meant to be played by people at keyboards. That said, if you really, really want to get people to play your mud and can't think of anywhere else to go try blind people because they can't see the graphics, but they can read the text and they can read it a lot faster than people who use their eyes to read as well.

Danny:              36:28          I'd like to ask, and this'll be the the crescendo, the end. Are there any projects or by projects, I mean like, you know, game worlds or anything like that out there that are just so overly impressive to you that you're just like, wow, I wish I had thought of that or the most impressive thing out there to you right now.

Richard:            36:54          So you want that to be the crescendo? I'm sorry. No, that none of them do. There's an awful lot of work being put into them or some really nice designs and there's some virtual worlds that I think that's really well done. That's a, that's a gem of a game. But there's none where I think this is astonishingly good. I wish I'd done it. I mean, I wish I'd had the money to do it, but there's none, none like that. No. from my perspective, virtual worlds are nowhere near as good as I thought they would be by now. I was hoping that they'd be far superior to what they were hoping that we'd be able to visit them and be there, but they cost so much to make and they're hard to adjust on the fly. They're so limited because it takes so much to put new characters in.

Richard:            37:42          If you wanted to add a new monster to a MUD, you can do that in two minutes. If you want to add a new monster to a an MMO, Oh yeah. Well, if you can find another monster to reskin or it looks like it, you're in with a chance, but if you want something completely new let's have a, I don't know of a snake with fins. Well, you can't have that because we got to make a snake with fins. See it's stagnating. It will improve the costs over time. The graphics will become available and cheap because once someone's made a snake with fins, anybody who wants to buy it for a dollar can buy it. But until that point, until we have it as easy to design graphical content as it is to design, textual content, progress is going to be slow. We may see something revolutionary, but evolutionary, it's not really going as fast as I was hoping. So the end of your show is sadly it's a bum note as we'd say. It's not really, I'm pessimistic at the moment.

Eric:               38:47          Alright. So that brings us.

Richard:            38:48          Yes on that happy, joyous.

Eric:               38:53          All right. So thank you once again for joining us. Yeah.

Richard:            38:58          Well, my pleasure, and I hope I didn't rant on too long about everything. And I still think that muds are superior to MMOs. Even if the MMO people are the ones you pay my wages and I'll support them. Text over graphics forever, sadly, unless until we were allowed to use tasers on people to make them play. We're in an uphill struggle still. Things like your show will spread the word, keep people talking, maybe get more people involved. So keep at it guys.