As I was being paid good money to do this, I set about the task seriously. I played every game I could find, taking copious notes and logs, and I interviewed (in the game or via email) as many of the authors as I could get hold of. I asked on Usenet for "industry figures" to volunteer to be asked questions, and (amazingly!) a good few replied; some quite interesting discussions resulted. I also scoured every public posting from people who played or wrote MUDs, looking for useful (and quotable!) opinions, and I went back over my extensive magazine archive to find press reaction to particular games.

I finished it in June, sent it to BT, they paid me promptly, and I believe they may even have read it. I don't know if it had any impact on the organisation's view of on-line games, but it would be nice to delude myself into believing so. I had earlier told BT that I'd like to make the report publicly available, given that I was getting co-operation from lots of people who'd be interested in seeing the result, and they agreed with two provisos: I removed the contact list; I waited a while. I decided that 6 months from delivery was sufficient a definition of "a while", and released it in December.

I was quite pleased by the final paper, although of course it dated rather quickly. Doing something similar now would be much, much harder, given the number of Internet MUDs kicking around the place. It's interesting to note how the ready availablity of off-the-peg MUDs has tended to stifle creativity somewhat. It used to be that if you wanted to write a MUD, you had to write a server first. Nowadays, you just have to write a database, and if it doesn't do what you want, well, would you necessarily know anyway?