Davisb135

Haha, thanks. I wish I'd come up with that. It's from Gunpei Yokoi of Nintendo fame.

Having stepped away from MUDs ourselves for years, it's been interesting to see what the community has been cooking up in terms of UI/UX, Evennia, MUDlet, TUIs, etc.

That's fair. We leaned on LLMs to help draft parts of the paper but disclosed it in the acknowledgements section. We didn't appreciate the amount of work this "hobby" experiment would require, and so looked for ways to help get this out the door.

That's a cool project, thanks for sharing!

Not Hitchhiker's specifically, we'd considered another existing one but as soon as we started digging into IP law related to MUDs, we decided if we're going to do it, we'll just start our own from scratch.

That's a good idea, thanks! We'd only considered the web app + using a client.

Thanks! Yeah, it started with a friend's idea to take a MUD we played in the 90s / early 2000s that had been open sourced and adapt it to mobile games. He's a middle school teacher and wanted to introduce the next generations to MUDs.

We then decided to pivot and thought, what if this would be a good eval environment for LLMs from the simplistic standpoint of, text is their native environment.

Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.

I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.

One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?