Echo Station: Galaxy MUSH Multi-User Gaming Explained

Webmaster's Note:
We at Echo Station sincerely encourage our readers to explore this exciting world of gameplay, consisting of the ultimate in creative interaction between game authors, fellow players, and ourselves. This style of gaming truly lets the player set in motion their own choices, and gives the freedom to play a character they create from their own desires. In an environment of pre-packaged, off-the-shelf gaming, we are excited to see this wonderful environment still thriving and growing, with people who wish to use their own creativity, rather than passively clicking through the latest graphics technology. Best of all, this fabulous gaming is totally free of charge, due to the generosity of the administrators of the game.
We are pleased to bring Star Wars: Galaxy MUSH to the Echo Station community.
--Loren Phillips

Before there was Lucasarts' Jedi Knight and the advent of graphical multi-user games, there was a breed of online game called Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. It was a text world, simple and violent, where players connected to slash at monsters with a Dungeons and Dragons sort of glee. Over time, new uses for the game emerged to meet different interests, and MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) was born. MUSHes catered more to the roleplay crowd, who saw the real-time, multi-user and customizable server as a virtual world in which characters could be created, whole genres reproduced, and drama and story played out for free with entire groups separated in space, but not in their love for story.

MUSHes provide an ideal setting to explore the world of Star Wars. Since the Trilogy's appearance on the big screen, fans have found rapport with various favorites, seeing heroes in Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and the thrill of dread in the figure of Darth Vader. The conflict is dramatic and echoes a timelessness that has prompted admirers to expand the genre and live that excitement themselves. Writers wrote, and the young at heart delved into roleplay within this galaxy.

Roleplay MUSHes offer the chance to tap the creative magic of fan fiction and merge it with the interaction of roleplay involving a great variety of other people with similar interests. Those used to writing a complete story from beginning to end, all characters included, might find a MUSH a bit odd. Each player is his or her own character in the general scheme of things, and writes for that character. Since other players have their characters and write from their viewpoint, the result ends up being a cooperative story-telling environment that builds on the pure interaction between the characters. When you have twenty, or so much as fifty players in the story, a lot can happen.

While some players acting out characters on a MUSH enjoy planning a little of the action out-of-character, most of the story progressions take place entirely spontaneously. Plot often arises out of character concept. Players enjoy developing their own characters to the point of realistic response and quick thinking. This is in realtime; playing with an empathetic connection to your creation is almost the rule. Elements such as the character's past, how he was raised, what personal tragedies she has endured, and where the character wishes to go with his life are woven into a virtual figure equipped to react, foray bravely against the Empire, squash arrogant smugglers, and fall in love with the most unlikely of beings.

With the actors set, the stage must rise to the occasion. Administrators and players of MUSHes spend many, many hours weaving every trick in the book into a virtual world that feels enough like Star Wars to gain that held-breath drama one gets when viewing the movies. It's a difficult trick, but good use of description is as important in creating the world as it is in writing about one; they are, essentially, the same thing. MUSHes can be built like buildings, with rooms, exits, special commands to simulate a comlink in someone's virtual hand, or they can describe the vastness of space, the movement of ships through space, and the battles that can make galactic history. It is a drama of words and creative language in this realm, imagery of the imagination instead of sight and sound.

Star Wars has been, for about eight or nine years now, a popular theme for these MUSH games. Back in the beginning, the whole concept of MUSH RP gaming was still in its wild stages, with new concepts appearing even as the games multiplied across the spectrum of available topics. Out of more medieval and fantasy genres was born this branch of science fiction. The urge (and near expectation) to make a Star Wars MUSH that had a lot of blaster shooting, mechanically coded systems to fight with, etc, was tempting from the start, and a lot of the subsequent games created followed that 'simulation style' of online gaming.

Simulation-style gaming pays more attention to what's possible and accurate in the genre, and reproducing that, than just letting go. Dice rolling RPGs are big on this, with complex character generation systems and rules set up to handle conflicts between player characters and any situation that arises. With the advent of MUSHing, it became difficult to maintain the level of control a GM would have over a session. A MUSH became, in short, a 24 hour, 7 days a week tabletop RPG game. Finding GMs to handle such an explosively high number of potential encounters over the course of play is near impossible. You can manage that with code or limits on what players can do on their own, and many MUSHes do just that, but simulating to a certain level loses the feel of many themes in fiction.

Star Wars, definitely, is one of those themes. The movies do not really beg you to examine as closely as Star Trek; one does not worry overmuch about what a hydrospanner actually does, just that it is a tool. The drama is key, the broad feeling of myth and dynamic heroism, of loss and love, growth and experience. Capturing that essence of what makes Star Wars a classic is a tough thing in text, but entirely possible, as the copious books and fan fiction out there can attest to quite ably.

And so a new Star Wars MUSH was born, called Star Wars: Galaxy. My aim was to recreate the drama and feel of the movies, without slapping restrictions on players, bogging things down with a lot of commands to type in, and leaving room for people to create their characters and live in that galaxy far, far away for a few hours a week. The balance of such an endeavor is important. Where in the timeline do you say the action is? Who is alive at that time? What's allowed? Conflict drives story, and too much or too little will definitely kill it.

We decided to wind up the game and start the clock a few hours after Han Solo is rescued from Jabba the Hutt. It felt like a good point of conflict; the Empire is still powerful, the Rebels are still fighting, and a lot the best-loved favorite characters from the screen are alive and well, walking about and interacting with player characters. We borrowed heavily from a lot of different styles of MUSHing, and went with an odd combination. Let the players decide, within accepted theme, timeline and docs, what happens. It is the Law of the Sandbox, where common sense prevails, and if it's more exciting to bend the rules a bit, well, that's fine if everyone thinks it would be cool. Thus story keeps within that crucial Star Wars feel (tribbles don't roll out of Boba Fett's ship, natch) and yet the atmosphere is relaxed enough to allow for imagination.

It has been and continues to be a unique experiment in cooperative storytelling and roleplay, rolled into one. The game certainly caters more to the fans interested in writing than those interested in shooting, and pride in a character action that conveys a chill down the spine or a laugh in the player at the keyboard is highly prized. It's seen the full gambit of tense political intrigue at Palpatine's Court functions, paranoia of COMPNOR, and the easy banter of Rebel pilots in the hangar. SW: Galaxy aims for the movie feel, right on your computer, and then some. The over-reaching battle for freedom as depicted in the films was only a small part of a galaxy teaming with potential, plot, story and interaction. SW: Galaxy MUSH provides the galaxy in which to do it all.

A MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) is a text-based, real-time virtual world. It has been around, in some form, for about 10 years now, before the concept of group graphical games even came on the scene. Other servers, such as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) emphasize combat, fighting designed monsters with some interaction with other real players, but the MUSHes have been the servers to emphasize roleplay, and even beyond into serving as virtual communities in corporations; the online office.

Out of the box, so to speak, the server begins as a single room and a character with the powers to do anything within the MUSH (#1). The server itself is in C and runs on a UNIX machine connected to the Net. There are MUSH servers that run on Windows, OS/2 and Mac, recently released by third parties. People use a web-based Java client or a number of other MUD clients to connect to the MUSH, logging in with their character name and a password, to participate. Being text-based, that is nearly the limit of what can be done. While the server is in C, it supports a higher level language (usually called mushcode) for creating complex systems and customizations of the
world, beyond the one room, one admin you start out with. This language is like a cross between C and Lisp (lot of functions), object-oriented and interpreted.

If you're used to pretty graphics, this may sound somewhat boring. However, MUSH is an ideal place for content; education, writing, roleplay, anything that can be represented by ASCII characters. In the seven years I've been actively working on MUSHes, I've managed to code complex task management systems, bulletin boards, character generation systems (both for original and commercial RPGs), character combat, supply/demand economic systems with trade and currency, space systems with ships and dogfighting...quite a bit. If it can be imagined (text-based), it can be done. Even altering the C code of the server, while available, isn't always needed, as most things can be done with the softcoded mushcode language.

The MUSH is run as a service on a remote machine, like one would run a webserver or some other software package that others could connect to and get information from. For the technical, MUSHes listen in on ports on their machine, and players connect to that specific port to gain access to the game. An important thing to note is that a MUSH server has no known risks to the machine it runs on, in the way of someone using the MUSH gaining illegal access to the server running it. However, as always, if someone codes in a weakness that interacts with the server in some way it's not designed for, yes, that's a risk. Out of the box, though, and used normally, it presents no danger and uses surprisingly few resources. Additionally, since it's all ASCII text traffic, the network load is also negligible for the average game.

Expanding the MUSH world from the first room is a matter of building out, like one would plan the layout of a house. Typically, special characters called Builder Characters are used so that ownership remains clean. Rooms are as one thinks they would be; a space that can contain characters, where actions and talk are limited to those in that 'room'. Rooms have descriptions visible to those who 'look' at it (by typing 'look' while in the room), contents, and even special commands. A library room may be designed to return a list of titles for virtual books when one types the command 'book list'. Rooms are linked together by exits listed in the room. Exits for conventional buildings follow compass directions (to make it easier to get around), but may be entirely customized, depending on what is to be done with that building. In this way, whole worlds can be constructed, tailored to function and theme.

Within this world are the people you're actually building for. People can connect to the MUSH with their Character name and a password, and interact with anyone connected at the time. They can set descriptions of their character on themselves, so that people who 'look Bob' will see what Bob has set himself to look like. There is a huge number of supporting systems for specialized communication here, from channels (chatting no matter where you are located on the MUSH), @mail (internal mail system), bulletin boards for posting, paging (talking to one or a small group privately), etc.

Administration of all of this is handled by two strata of admin: Royalty and Wizards. Royalty (Roys) have the power to examine all the code and characters, teleport to any room, and teleport characters and objects around. This is simply to help fix things or characters. Wizards go beyond that, having the ability to, Matrix-like, change anything and everything, in addition to the Roy powers. Wizards are usually the programmers. There is little reason for a non-programmer to be able change code, as Wizards have the power to cause serious damage to the MUSH if they don't know what they're doing.

The webpage at http://pennmush.tinymush.org/ is a great place to learn details about the server, how to run it, and other neat stuff.

People can connect to a MUSH server with a standard telnet (telnet server port), though it's a whole lot easier and a whole lot prettier to use a program specially made for these games. These clients are many and useful, and a partial list of Windows-based clients is listed below. There is no cost for downloading these clients.

Upon successful connection to the server, instructions are shown on how to create your character at the connection screen. NOTE: Anything enclosed in <>'s is something you need to put in, -without the <>'s-. There is no italics in straight text, so 'create <name> <password>' would be typed as 'create Han_Solo foobar'. If you do not want to create an character right now, or want to show someone the place, type 'connect Guest' to connect to a Guest character. Any variations off the standard way of connecting to a MUSH will be explained in that opening screen, so it's worth pausing and taking a look before diving in.

At the beginning, you are a babe in the woods. You have a body, but how to use it may initially escape you. Most MUSHes take care and effort in making the first 'room' you connect to helpful and instructive, so right from the start it's always advisable to do a little reading. However, if the MUSH makes an assumption that is above your expertise, here is a handy list of things to know to start crawling. Anything to the left is what you would type to get the results on the right:

This "batch of things to look at" is a lot for just being in the first room. Typically, MUSHes are made up of hundreds of rooms, depending on their theme, so once the basics of how to crawl are figured out, it is time to explore.

Well, not quite billions, but rooms will seem to make up a bulk of the game. They can be organized like a building, a city, a spaceship, anything. The keys to navigating are the 'look' command and a basic memory. An example room, when you type 'look' appears like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Central Plaza [OOC Rooms]

You are standing along a dusty intersection of a seething space port on a backwater world called Out-Of-Character. Crowds of derelict beings push through the commerce-clogged streets on errands, some darker than others. The myriad of voices and sounds from the cacophonous mix of aliens and humans blend curiously with the roar of overhead spacecraft. Here, people come from all over the MUSH to rest up, kick back, talk, and find information. You can watch this room without being present. Type '+watch on OOC'; use '+watching' to see who is listening. There is a list of exits below; you can enter any of them by typing the characters inside the <>'s to the right of the brief description.

Contents:
Agenda Machine
Bob
Obvious exits:
PlotHelp <PH> CharHelp <CH> Recruiting <REC> CharGen <CG> Bar <B>
Role-Play Rooms <RP> Locations <LO>
---------------------------------------------------------

--------------------

This is a representation of the main area on Star Wars: Galaxy MUSH, a Star Wars-themed MUSH. The first line is the name of the room; in this case, it has been named the Central Plaza and is a part of the 'OOC Rooms', or the out-of-character area of the MUSH. The text below this name is what would be the physical description of that room if you were to look at it in reality; here, it is virtually described in text. Some rooms, like this one, describe a setting. Others may use the description of the room to explain something in a process, and provide tips and help (as this one does at the bottom of its desc). After the description is the Contents. You can see that there are two other things in the room: something called an Agenda Machine and Bob. (Note: You are typically never going to show up in the room, but you are there and others will see you when they look.)

Things in a room can be anything: another player, an object, something put there by programming. Generally, you can tell something is a player if it shows up in the list when you type WHO all in caps. They may even speak or wave to you. Other things can be objects, and react to you; the variety here is endless and it's difficult to name everything you may find in a room, so experiment a bit.

Items and other players in rooms can be looked at, as you did to see the room itself. Typing 'look Bob' in the above example room will show you Bob's description he has set on himself. Typing 'look me' will show you your description, if you have one set; if you don't, type 'help @desc' for basic instructions on how to describe your character.

Below the room's contents are the exits out of the room. Conventionally, anything enclosed in <>'s here can be typed to go through that exit. In the above example, typing 'b' will move you into the Bar, another room adjacent to the Central Plaza. As the layout of rooms is entirely dependent on those who build the MUSH, attention to the room and its exit listing is important in finding your way around. Many MUSHes provide additional commands for directions, such as +compass; these will be listed in the +help.

The basics have been explained, and some pointers given. From this point, anything goes. The range of what is possible on a MUSH defies full description without limiting to an explanation of one game out of many. Suffice to say that armed with the knowledge in this article, you are ready to find a MUSH of a theme and flavor that interests you and jump in with some measure of confidence in the basics.

(Sheryl Galchutt is a UNIX/NT systems administrator with one foot in the real world and one foot stomping the Internet.)