So in the very early days of the Internet, all games were merely text and symbols, which encouraged a rich community to form focused heavily on writing. Gameplay in these games focuses on written output and a night of gameplay may mean a bunch of different sessions of collaborative, improv storytelling.
MUDs: multi-user dungeons. Basically collaborative D&D. The focus is more on RPG/MMO style content where bashing and combat are just as importantly as story, though you can find some incredibly story-focused MUDs. I personally suggest Aetolia – not only is long-form roleplay (eg writing a paragraph at a time) the norm, they even have mechanics like a random RP roulette where you get paired up with someone in a room to just start writing at each other.
MUSH: these are similar to MUDs but tend to feature one-off overarching stories and more strict roleplay. Many players roll up a new character for a MUSH and play it until they die (where it’s mourned and deleted). These are more like D&D campaigns vs an MMO’s persistent nature you find in a MUD.
MOOs: this is heavily focused on story and often includes commands accessible to all users for lots of customizing characters and modifying environments. Yes, one of the coolest parts of text games is that you are basically acting out a screenplay and you can adjust the descriptions or room or clothing or character to reflect changes in in plot. MOOs focus heavily on letting players have just as much control over the game world as devs.
All in all, this genre is a goldmine for aspiring writers – it’s like a virtual writer colony where you will constantly bounce ideas off of others and learn new concepts to improve your own writing. I highly suggest giving this a check out of you’re interested in improving your writing and feel like you need more. It’ll also help you a lot with describing rooms, sensory details, dialog and emotes just from the gameplay.
Good follow up reading:
a little bit of everything all of the time 
Great article reference. Julian Dibbell, the writer of A Rape in Cyberspace, wrote a lot of articles in the late 90s/early 00s that I thought were really good and interesting. If you haven’t seen his other stuff, I suggest this free collection of his work:
http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/
Aside from that already-mentioned one, I highly recommend Unpacking My Record Collection. Additionally, The Life Of A Chinese Gold Farmer gets into a WoW cultural touchstone.
Great links – going to check these out! I miss the old mud dev forums. I think they were called Terra Nova? Mudconnector and one of the other ranking sites had forums as well. Mihaley, IRE creator (and very rarely sometimes Genesis proxies – Genesis made Avalon, which inspired IRE) was such a shit head in those, just rude little brat lol.
I remember getting into an internet slap fight with Bartle over his types because as a neurodivergent kid the taxonomy made no sense. It depended on day and mood when I was playing the game!
My absolute favorite post from those old forums is a writeup someone made about the ascent of players through games. It was focused on MUDs and co, but I think that experiential concept can apply to game design itself.
They outlined how players start as newbies and how that first experience is wonder and excitement and love for all the potential they are imagining. I wrote about this in my newb moments post.
As we play more, we deepen and broaden our understanding – it’s really an analog for getting older.
The most interesting points i found in this great, lost text were about how gameplay changes.
We go from learning to teaching to creating. We start our learning the game world and then want to add our mark on it, so we do mentoring or tutoring, all common things in the MUD progression of responsibility.
Then we begin to learn macro, such as how trade and caravans work, so you become an aide to the Trade ministry. Or how hosting events, so you become and aide to culture ministry – I’m using IRE terms, but many MUDs and co had similar concepts.
It was a gradual onboarding to the WORLD, because they were more than games.
The next stage was leadership. Players step into roles where they lead orgs, help shape storylines, etc. We begin to leave our mark on the world. There’s also much more meta awareness of how the game works and plays – the concept of legacy takes hold.
The final step is to become a creator – instead of shaping the world’s as a player, certain people feel a need to go on and make their own worlds.
I started this blog when I was at a leadership level – it’s interesting looking back that I had so many game creation ideas. Now that I’m starting to experiment with my own game creation, it’s interesting how well this old, lost blog post mapped out my own creative arc.
Rambled a lot here, sorry.
Ha, the Bartle categorizations and the Bartle test(s)–I remember me and friends of mine enjoying taking the various tests to tell us what proportion of Killer, Achiever, Explorer or Socializer we were.
I agree that the categorizations were too simplistic and static–as you noted, people’s play styles and priorities can shift, sometimes rapidly. That said, I thought then and still think it was an interesting look at archetypes. Maybe a single person isn’t any one thing (or one combo, as those tests usually tossed out results like ASK), but those are decent archetypes for MUD players (based on my experiences) even if players flit from archetype to archetype. I did notice, though, that various friends (and enemies!) of mine did often seem to prioritize killing or being the “biggest” character or figuring out how systems worked (and trying to break them). I was more like you–sometimes I cared about blasting through levels, sometimes I wanted to murder my fellow players and sometimes I just wanted to hang out and chat.
As for the gameplay evolution you mentioned, it’s interesting how that also kind of reads like a narrative arc–you could squint and see it as the Hero’s Journey or something, a common arc for a protagonist in a story. I guess that makes sense–MUDs, as your post talks about, are a form of collaborative storytelling. Player and gameplay arcs being similar to narrative arcs feels appropriate.
How interesting you saw the heroic journey there! I was thinking the same but oh, no, that’s too pretentious. I do think that’s the overall conclusion of my comment – MUDs and co are amazing because they mimic RL, including all the fucking ups and downs. I do think the eventual fate of really good muds players is to become creators. But one person’s anecdote does not make data! What’s your story?
Hmm, muds. My story. Maybe this is grist for (finally) a new post on my blog. I’ve never really written much about blogs, even though I played them continuously for about 18 years. Roughly 1992-2010. That’s comparable to how long I’ve played WoW (and WoW hasn’t been completely continuous).
*never really written much about MUDs
I couldn’t find an edit button.
Yeah this medium is kinda subpar.
Wild to see upvotes from (thought) long dead accounts.
I do like how it retains draft comments through a page refresh.