Part One: The Play’s the Thing

1. Glossary

Admin

An individual avatar or player of a virtual space who has been granted special powers within the space in order to administrate some aspect of it. Short, of course, for administrator.
See also Immortal, God, Wizard.

Anonymity

A state in which your identity and past history is completely unknown. In a virtual space, avatars are only anonymous under one of the following circumstances: a) they are able to change identities easily, b) the avatar is new to the space, or c) the space is so large that in any given group of people, a given avatar is not likely to be known.
See also Pseudonymity, Profile, Name.

Area

A term for a collection of rooms that share a common theme, generally by the same author. Areas usually also imply a collection of other statistics and data beyond the mere description of the map.
See also Zone, Yell Zone, Room.

Area file

The file in which an area is stored: a template-based text file that may or may not be compiled into binary data before use in a mud server.

ASCII

In mud terms, shorthand for text-only display. When one refers to ASCII graphics, one means crude graphics formed out of typographical characters.

Attributes

The collection of tangible and intangible qualities that make up an avatar.
See also Tangible attributes, Intangible attributes, Avatar.

Avatar

The virtual incarnation of a participant in a virtual space; the character, figure, or persona they inhabit the virtual space with and present to the other participants.

Bandwidth

Connections over the Internet imply data transmission. But wires can only handle a certain volume of data in a given time. The term for this is bandwidth. In general, the bandwidth required by a server is the average bandwidth usage per player, multiplied by the number of players at peak usage times.

BSX mud

A type of mud written by Bram Stolks that supports simple graphics on the X-Windows platform using a markup language.
See also Markup language.

Cartoon

A simplified and abstracted visual representation of something, which selects specific elements to magnify and therefore emphasize.

Character advancement

The common goal-oriented practice of increasing tangible attributes and available commands for an avatar, usually as part of a game framework.
See also Tangible attributes, Goal-oriented or GoP, Avatar

Chat

An embedded real-time communication system via the Internet. Muds frequently embed chat systems within their framework, and for some muds, chat is the whole point of existing.

Chat box

An interface method for presenting textual output in a graphical environment, a chat box is a typically modal interface that aggregates all the text output from the server into a scrolling text box. In many graphical muds, a chat box serves to essentially display all the output of the mud except for special effects and a graphical depiction of the spatial relationship between avatars and the world.
See also Text bubble

Chat room

A chat room is a non-spatial environment wherein multiple participants may type and have their text reflected out to all other participants. The sine qua non of chat rooms is Internet Relay Chat, usually termed IRC.
See also IRC.

Churn

Churn or churn rate is a term from service industries. It refers to the amount of users of the service who are choosing not to continue subscribing to the service, versus the amount of newly acquired users and the amount of returning users. There are several different ways of measuring churn, but in general, a positive churn rate indicates that your user base is growing, and a negative one means that your base is shrinking. Clearly, nobody wants to keep a negative churn rate for long, as it is unsustainable and may result in shutting the service down.

Client

For the purposes of this book, a client is a piece of software that connects to a server. It serves as front-end for the server’s output, essentially a display mechanism. Generally, clients have very little smarts to them. Clients do not have to be graphical—a common type of text-based client are Telnet clients, which are implementations of a text-based client that uses the Telnet protocol defined in an Internet RFC.
See also Telnet, Client-server, Server

Client-server

A relationship in which piece of software is run remotely on a server, but users do not interact with the server directly. Instead, they connect via a client, a mediating piece of software that opens a remote connection to the server and displays the server’s output.
See also Client, Server, Peer to peer, and Distributed server

Closure

Marshall McLuhan’s term for the act of filling in gaps and details in an iconic or abstracted representation of something. When we see two dots and a curved line as a face, we are committing an act of closure.
See also Cool media

Codebase

The common term for the standardized code distributions of various types of mud. When one refers to the Merc codebase, one means servers based on the publicly released version of the source code.

Contextual exit

In a room-based environment, exits are logical connections between rooms. By convention, most exits represent spatiality by representing cardinal directions. A contextual exit is one where the exit does not represent a cardinal direction, but rather a subtler sort of spatiality, such as “towards the church” or “into the room.”

Continuous map

This is a sort of map where the virtual world is represented on a coordinate space, as opposed to using a node-based (e.g. room-based) system with exits that merely mimic spatiality. A room-based system can contain continuous maps within each node (as in the example of EverQuest).
See also Room-based map.

Cool media

Marshall McLuhan terms media that require a high degree of closure cool media.

Corpse

On most muds, when an avatar dies, a new object is created and left behind at the location of the avatar’s death, to represent the avatar’s corpse. Of course, the avatar is also generally reincarnated immediately. This leads to the interesting phenomenon of a given player having two bodies (or more, if they are unfortunate enough to die a lot) at once.

Cross-gender play

The phenomenon of a player using an avatar of a different gender than their gender in real life. One often speaks of avatars being “male presenting” or “female presenting” in order to clarify that one cannot assume that the avatar’s gender matches that of the human behind it.

Culling

Design pattern
Distributed server
Driver
Dynamic load balancing
Emote
Exit
Fastwalk
Female-presenting
Furry
Game master
Global namespace
Goal-oriented
God
GoP
Gossip
Grief player
Groundhog day
Handle
Hex grid
Hypertext
Iconic vs representational
Identity
Immortal
Intangible attributes
Interactivity
IRC
Latency
Level
Locker
LPMud
Male-presenting
Markup language
MMORPG
Mob, mobile
Monty Haul
MOO
MUD
MUSH
Name
Nanny
Netsex
Network layer
Newbie
Nick
Node
Object ID
Object primitives
Packet
Packet handler
Paperdoll
Peer to peer
Persistence
Persistence database
Persistent world
PK
Player
Player housing
Profile
Pseudonymity
PvP
Repop
Reset
Rnum
Role-playing
Roleplaying game or RPG
Room
Room-based map
Say
Server
Server mirroring
Server process
Session-based game
Stock mud
Tangible attributes
TCP/IP
Telepresence
Telnet
Template
Template database
Text bubble
Tile-based
Tinysex
UDP
Virtual reality
Virtual sociopath
Vividness
Vnum
VRML
Whisper
Wilderness system
Wizard
World state
Writing space
XP
Yell
Yell zone
Zone