As a long time player of MUD's I have had much experience of the things that occur on them. However, I nearly always play them in a manner that Bartle (1994) calls the achiever style, ignoring story or social interaction in favour of building my character and reaching goals. In particular, although I appreciate the occasional interesting room of an area I have never taken the time to really look at the complete story that may exist in an area. Having seen some of the points in the articles about MU*s I decided to take the time to actually explore an areas story.

The area I chose to explore was the Counterweight Continent on the Discworld MUD. An area that, excluding a couple of leveling spots, I generally avoided as it had multiple local laws that made it inconvenient. Based on old asian tradition the Counterweight Continent featured laws against killing old people, speaking foreign languages, carrying weapons and attacking people. It also featured a set of 5 warring families that the players could align themselves with. I decided to work on aligning myself with a house and finding out their history.

Where normally I would drop by the dojo to kill off the monks who trained there, I instead went to the library to examine the history of the houses. All of the houses had suitable pools of history from the oldest house Hong that based it's traditions on a slightly psychotic version of the Art of War to the new house Fang that followed trends and frequently redecorated its area of the city. I then looked up the current house rivalries, choosing to ally myself with a house by killing off the servants of its rivals, since my character was quite incapable of the crafting routes to house entrance.

It was an interesting and different experience to my normal killing and leveling routine and served to supply me with some extra background to my playing. However, it still seemed to be an experience that had less of a long term ability to entertain me.