Escape From Underground

I spent an hour tonight on a popular text MUD, just checking it out. 50 players online and a vibrant Web-based community.

Awful.

Underground, dark caves, and you can't move a single room without being attacked by racially-tinged subhumans. Everything I hated about these primitive worlds way back in the 1980s.

I find the racialism especially distressing. Killing an imp or a troll is acceptable because although humanoid they're not really fully human, not as human as the rest of us. And we know where this comes from, or to phrase it more neutrally, if we have a sense of history we know what history this echoes.

Gary and I founded SmartMonsters because we saw potential in the medium to be more than this. Let's not privilege violence as the primary path to experience; let's place the violence we do explore into social contexts which are at least somewhat less mindless; let's write well and recruit people who write really well; let's explore what writerly technical practices make sense in this medium; let's develop rich computer code which enables player subjectivity in ways Modernist fiction couldn't imagine; let's bring the friggin' world out from friggin' underground, ferheavensake.

What if what players really want is simply to Blow Crap Up?

Or is this all that they know exists?