The The Message Articles Hat

The Message was Comms Plus! relaunched. Ostensibly a quarterly, it had much the same subject material as its predecessor, although it did broaden its remit to reviewing "cyberpunk" novels and suchlike.

Blane Bramble's regular column on MUDs (which he insisted on calling "MUGs") was continued, but after a few issues appears to have been dropped: although issue 5's article ends with a trailer for issue 6's, I don't believe the follow-up was ever published (but I could well be wrong). Still, at least they tried...
Mortar Board Multi User Games
Bramble, B.
The Message, page 13,
Autumn, 1991.
A selection of short news items about the various MUDs available in the UK at the time. MUD2 is not among them.
Mortar Board Multi User Games
Bramble, B.
The Message, page 15,
Spring, 1992.
A review of MUD2, which was back online after being dumped from BT's VAX cluster. The review is not particularly in-depth, but then it was immediately preceded in the magazine by the first part of Paola Kathuria's article, which gives the full story.
Mortar Board Line Games
Bramble, B.
The Message, page 15,
Winter, 1992.
Blane's column didn't appear in the Summer issue, and the Autumn one sort of slipped until Winter. Nevertheless, he's back in the swing of things with some news items on the various UK MUDs, which he follows up with a taxonomy of MUDs (sorry, "MUGs"). In this, he defines five generations of games, and invites comment. The fact that one of the examples of a trail-blazing generation 5 game was Blane's own Prodigy, and that the new functionality described was the same as that explored some 12 or 13 years earlier in MUD v2, stung me into responding. My letter was printed in the next issue.
Mortar Board Line Games
Bartle, R.
The Message, page 12,
Summer, 1993.
Another slippage meant we didn't get a Spring 1993 issue, so my reply to the previous column didn't appear until 6 months later instead of 3. It was edited down (I included a hierarchy of inheritences from my Interactive Multi-User Computer Games report, for example), but not badly so. Needless to say, I ensured that MUD2 was the example of most-advanced MUD under my alternative system... Blane made some attempt to address the points I raised in his article in the same issue, but was a little faint-hearted about it.
Mortar Board Line Games
Bramble, B.
The Message, pages 12 and 13,
Summer, 1993.
Issue 5's column sees a mild defence of issue 4's "generations" taxonomy, then continues with a look at what the future holds for "MUGs". Apparently, it's graphics...


Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)
21st January 1999: message.htm