Why Is MUD So Addictive?

It's 3am on a Saturday morning. All the 'normal' people you know are in bed or out getting wasted. Yet you are sitting in your bedroom in a state of reverence, transfixed upon your monitor as you type line after line of meaningless text into your keyboard. You know in the back of your mind that in a distant dimension called Real Life you promised your boss that you would come into work this weekend, and yet you cannot bring yourself to go to bed. You've been playing for oooh, seven or eight hours now, and there's a new reset in just under three quarters of an hour. You'll quit after that. Just one ... more reset ...

Sound familiar? Of course it does - it happens every week. Granted that was a somewhat extreme example, but more or less every MUD player is an addict, some more than others. In approximately 10 years of playing PC games, none of the games I have played come close to creating the sense of entrapment and powerlessness to stop playing that MUD does. But why do we dedicate so much of our time to what the layman can describe as a glorified chat room or a slightly more colourful DOS box? Every time you play MUD, you let a third of a day slip through your fingers almost without noticing - but why? So you can finally kill the loud-mouthed PK that's been plaguing your MUD life for so long? So you can reach warlock, or round your mage's score off neatly at 150k? So you can find out how to do the keep without the gargoyles, or find out what ring3 does, or get the mistletoe out of the goblin realm when all the methods you currently know have been screwed up due to swamping? Only you know, and only you care. So why do you continue to play it?

The answer: you don't play it. You use it. And it uses you. Because, by definition, MUD is not a game - it is a drug. Not the most dangerous of all drugs, obviously, otherwise it would be outlawed - but it certainly has many of the characteristics that can be expected of any Class A or B substance. It alters your mind, it effortlessly compels you to continue playing, and if for whatever reason you can't play you begin to get withdrawal symptoms - you only have to look at how impatient and irritated people seem on the Wireplay chat rooms every time the server has been down for more than a couple of hours. The fact that you are running up 3-digit monthly phone bills (or at least you were before BT ushered in the golden age of free calls and serious lag) and not seeing your friends and family nearly as much as you used to is not enough to stop you. It can even have the effect that you have to stop yourself from saying ‘say’ before everything in real life conversation after a long period of play ...

People who take drugs often do so because they want to momentarily escape from reality, or alter their mind so reality can seem more tolerable. And what can be more unreal than a fantasy world populated by goblins, dwarfs, dragons, wizards and other facially-hirsute and pointy-hatted entities, in which you can cast spells, use magic items and do pretty much whatever you feel like? This links, if somewhat tenuously (ok, there’s only a link if you REALLY want it to be there), with the subject of what is justifiable - in real life when someone is pissing you off you wouldn't even consider killing them (I hope!). In MUD the only law (apart from what the wizzes (supposedly) enforce) is moral law, so doing what you believe is justifiable is a much simpler way of resolving problems and disputes than in real life. So if you feel a persona (not the player, for fear of sounding like a total mentalist) is totally deserving of a knife through the head, go nuts. You can take your pent-up anger out on what is essentially a set of numbers and stats which make up a persona file. You are not physically hurting anyone, but because the persona you are attacking is controlled by a real person, a killer can subconsciously get great pleasure from it. This also helps explain the PK mentality - although the argument has been done to death and I won't even go there.

Also, one of the most important factors of the addictiveness of something is the reward that comes from it. Many single player games successfully make levels rewarding to a degree by keeping the difficulty curve right, but ultimately there is little satisfaction upon completing a single-player game - what happens afterwards? You get a video clip which you are likely to skip straight past. Even winning a round of a multi-player game such as Quake 3 or Half Life fails to give the player anything worthwhile other than short-term satisfaction. MUD, however, promises - and delivers - the ultimate reward of omnipotence and immortality upon completion, which few players can deny wanting. People will not necessarily spend half their lives playing purely to achieve this, but it does provide a framework whereby the other parts of the game will seem worth their while.

Obviously, reward doesn’t only come in the form of reaching wiz. For a total newbie, reaching protector for the first time seems a great challenge (as long as people don’t tell them about sip dj or the spring, or that certain vegetable that I can’t even bring myself to write about in a public article) - and few players can deny having been ecstatic when for the first time in their MUD life their score hit 4 digits. And such is the difficulty curve of MUD that from a certain point, reaching any level for the first time - whether it be superhero, sorcerer or mage - will seem equally challenging and satisfying to reach as any other. But although levels are universal, there are other goals and targets that will appeal specifically to various types of player. I will go over the various types in greater detail further on, but these are the basic facts:

It is easy to see how the game is addictive to achievers: attach a number to everything - highest reset score with/without killing, lowest number of games for a necro or warlock, highest score ever - and the achiever will constantly try to out-do themselves with better and better scores. Similarly, killers will try to find more and more effective methods of killing, and again will try and see how many kills or points gained from kills they can rack up in a reset. Socialisers are easy to explain - simply put 2 of them in the tearoom and they’ll continue to talk for hours. However, while there is much in the game that is designed to appeal to explorers - obscure items and rooms, large areas to map, verbose room descriptions to read, sillies - these provide little to no instant gratification, which forms the whole basis of addictiveness - which explains the comparatively low numbers of true explorers.

Instant gratification, as mentioned before, is essential to something being addictive. Cigarettes, alcohol, and harder substances have their effect instantly, and as such leave the user with a desire for more. Scratch cards are addictive because you know that should you win you will immediately have cash - and you need that cash to cover the cost of your constant losing. The lottery, however, is not addictive because the result of buying a ticket is delayed until the next Saturday or Wednesday evening. And so it is with MUD: the most numerous types of players are achievers and killers because these particular methods of play give the user a substantial number of points or simply immaterial (but definitely noticeable) satisfaction.

Another factor is risk incentive. The game is designed so the most potentially dangerous tasks have the highest returns - the dragon, the giants and to some extent the dwarfs are examples of this. Also, as anyone who has made mage will testify, it is very hard to play at this level and therefore the danger of any given task is increased greatly, which excites the player more. Although it can be frustrating to lose a high persona (or whatever passes for a high persona to the player) in an attempt to do such a task, people are often willing to do so. I have played MUDs in which it is possible to get relatively large amounts of points by doing the same thing or largely similar things for ages, and in which there is little else to do, and in which the death of a persona only causes the loss of a very small amount of points - and these MUDs fail to do much to interest the user, who is likely to quit after a few minutes. This links with the subject of reward as explained before - a successful game is one which has a good balance of risk and reward.

The following explains what appeals to the various types of players in such a way as to make the game addictive to them:

Only 8,331 to go ...

It is safe to say that the majority of MUD players are achievers - not necessarily very successful ones, but the focus of many a player - me being no exception - are driven by a number of digits that make up their score. Why is this such an attractive thing to play for? Because part of the reason for MUD being multi-user is players competing against each other - and playing in this way forms ‘friendly rivalries’ between players which to many players is by far preferable to mindless killing as a form of competition. In a (hypothetical) single-user version of MUD, score would be less of an issue - people care much more about things in an environment in which they are competing with other players for a specific goal.

BWA-HA-HA-HA! Eat Valetant, lowly mortal!

Killers kill largely for the same reasons that achievers achieve - the element of competing with other players is still there, and in this case in a much more direct and aggressive approach. Many killers derive a perverse sense of pleasure from inflicting the Not updating persona message upon their hapless victim, and this pleasure would be impossible to achieve in a single-player game against a non-player character - by definition, killers care more about imposing upon others than they do the result of the kill upon their persona. True killers are lower in number than achievers, however (killing purely for points still qualifies as achiever behaviour), because whereas there is a constant supply of points available (OK, fluctuating depending on reset time) it is impossible to rely on there being a player of a high enough level to kill.

Hi!! How are you? Been ages since I last saw you ...

Socialisers who are addicts are not necessarily there for the game - although they will invariably like playing it otherwise they would just hang around chat rooms and the Wireplay forums. A socialiser will often play in short bursts with no inclination of playing ‘seriously’, and then spend much longer sitting in the tearoom. The conversation is often related either directly or loosely to the game; people who only wish to talk about Real Life rarely do so through a medium as specialist as internal MUD communication. Most players, even though the reason they continue to play MUD is totally separate, socialise with other players at least a small amount. For many players who are not socialisers, the game would lack much were it not for the variety of conversation. If all players expressed no personality whatsoever, for many players this would eliminate the purpose of competition - they might as well do so offline in a different game, or not bother at all.

"OK, so if I take the ring9 to the dwarf toilets and put the cape on my head and recite the Litany against Fear ... what do you mean nothing happens?"

We have all been partly explorer at one point in our MUD lives, even if we aren’t today - it is this which makes the game so intriguing and compelling for a new player. ‘Serious’ exploring as outlined in the caption appeals to few people because it very rarely produces any worthwhile knowledge, but as newbies we all enjoyed wandering aimlessly around a strange new world with many distinct areas, and learning the hard way that the vampire is evil beyond human conception. It is only when the newbie gets frustrated at constantly getting lost and killed that they get bored of playing in this way, and even in early stages of their MUD life they may play for several hours at a time doing this, powerless to enter the qq command (or click the relevant icon in pretty mode).
Although many more experienced players are more than happy to play with basic knowledge, or snoop people in an (often successful) attempt to find stuff out, there are people who care much less about points than knowledge. Such players range from those who seek useless knowledge such as how to get to the spider’s lair and do other things which get written out in later versions, to those who seek to find uses for seemingly useless items and to find obscure rooms and treasures. This second approach is often also undertaken by achievers who, with nothing else to do, attempt to find information which may benefit them in future. None of this, however, is addictive - as soon as the newbie-level exploration dies, the whole area of exploration ceases to mean much more than a mildly interesting diversion which occasionally produces a valuable piece of information.

So, given this information, it would probably make sense to come to some conclusion - but let’s face it, I don’t have a PhD in psychology. However, I feel that this article has explored the matter sufficiently to have brought up some interesting points.

Oh, and for the record: I’ve been told that in the past 16 days I’ve played almost a solid week. It’s only because I always log in while browsing and downloading MP3s and patches, honest ... :-)

Further reading

A large part of this document was inspired by Richard Bartle’s Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDS article at: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm which covers the different types of player, the effect of them on the game, and how to tailor a MUD to appeal specifically to a particular type.
I was also inspired to write this by an article appearing a number of years ago in PC Gamer, issue 48, which dealt with the issue of addictiveness in computer games in general. It mainly covered single-player gaming and more mainstream multiplayer games such as Quake, but many of the basic ideas were still there - including the drug analogy.