MudGamers one month on

It’s been one month since I put together MudGamers.com so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how the site has developed and what I have learned from the exercise so far.

Looking at the numbers, the site has 114 registered members and 31 listed games, of which 7 are using the Flash client.

Here are a few of the things that have struck me about the exercise, in no particular order.

WordPress

WordPress is much more versatile than I thought. I’d only ever used wordpress for this blog (which is pretty vanilla as you can probably tell) so I was really surprised at how easily I could use it to power a site like MudGamers. I only really needed a few plugins and a bit of editing of php and css files to give what I think is a reasonably functional site. I like the look of it but I would prefer something more professional, and were I to do this more seriously I would look at using Flash for the frontend.

The MUD Community

I hadn’t appreciated until now quite how niche and hobbyist MUDs have become. I was honestly surprised at the overwhelming indifference a lot of people have to what I was trying to do. It’s not like I feel I have some secret recipe for mud success or anything, I guess I was just working from the premise that people running muds want to reach a wider audience and attract new players, although in many cases this is clearly not so.

I also found that a lot of people were reluctant to make the changes necessary on their servers to enable Flash access to their games. There were also some rather alarmist views on the security implications of Flash from people that obviously didn’t have a very good understanding of the technology involved.

The Joy of Votes

Voting sites seem to affect users in much the same way as Pavlov’s dog. You put them in front of a voting site and they just can’t help but line up to promote their own mud. Regular voting has been the number one feature request for MudGamers, it’s like they just have to do it every day.

The only thing more enticing to the Pavlovian Mudder than being able to vote up their own game is of course the prospect of being able to vote down everyone elses. I reckon if I took the MudGamers rating system and expanded it so you could rate every game once a day, I’d be onto a winner

Conclusions

I am going to leave MudGamers up as a website for now, but I certainly won’t be spending much more of my time trying to promote an idea that has at best minority interest from within an already minority community. A month ago I was prepared to spend time and money on marketing MudGamers to reach the audience that I believe is there for text games, but I no longer feel it would be worth it.

I still believe that the basic idea of packaging text games into a more accessible form for modern gamers and building a community portal around a selection of games is a good one. However I will now be focusing my efforts on building around a small core of quality games rather than trying to reach out to an indifferent MUD community.

Look out for something in the future featuring Maiden Desmodus that integrates text and browser/Flash gaming within a single community site. I feel there is a lot of potential for innovation in areas such as cross genre interaction, for example I plan for Maiden Desmodus to integrate a graphical turn based strategy game with the faction conflict of the MUD. I would also like to introduce cross game rankings and shared microtransaction systems across multiple games sharing the same portal.

To me text games aren’t just a hobby, or a way to learn to code, or something to pose about on message boards. I want to express my ideas by making quality games that people enjoy playing and I choose to do that with MUDs.