Anna Log/MUXing
NEW TO
MUX'ING?
The old internet never died.
Some of us are still writing inside it.
INTERACTIVE FICTION · LIVE
WELCOME TO THE OTHER INTERNET
MU* · MUSH · MUX · COLLABORATIVE INTERACTIVE FICTION
Before social media became feeds, before virtual worlds became stores, people were already building persistent worlds out of words.
- START HERE
- WHAT IS MU*
- HISTORY
- HOW PLAY WORKS
- CONNECT
- THE WORLDS
SO WHAT IS THIS?
A MUX, MUSH, MUD, or MU* is a shared text world. You connect to it, create a character, enter rooms and places built by other people, and write scenes together in real time.
There is no graphics engine deciding what you can see. There is no dialogue wheel deciding what you can say. The world exists in description, conversation, action, memory, consequence, and the imaginations of the people connected to it.
Think of tabletop roleplaying, collaborative fiction, chat, improvisational theatre, and a persistent online world having a very strange child sometime in the early internet.
Night City MUX does that inside the world of Cyberpunk. Anna Log is one character living inside that shared fiction.
WORDS BECOME PLACES
A MU* world is made from interconnected locations called rooms. A room might be a nightclub, an alley, a spacecraft bridge, an apartment, a ruined city block, a desert highway, or an entire conceptual environment.
Characters move through those places. Players describe what their characters do. Other players respond. Conversations become scenes. Scenes create relationships, enemies, businesses, rumors, history and sometimes permanent changes to the world itself.
ROOMS
Persistent places built from description.
CHARACTERS
People with identity, history, goals and consequences.
POSES
Written action, dialogue and reaction.
CONTINUITY
What happens today can matter tomorrow.
A VERY OLD KIND OF VIRTUAL WORLD
The family begins with the text-based multiplayer worlds of the late 1970s and 1980s: MUDs — Multi-User Dungeons. Early systems combined exploration, communication, programming and shared virtual space.
From that lineage came systems increasingly interested not only in games, but in building and social interaction. TinyMUD appeared in 1989. TinyMUSH and related descendants pushed the form toward richer description, character play and collaborative storytelling.
MUSHes, MUXes and other MU* descendants became home to original worlds, licensed-world fan communities, universities, programmers, writers, roleplayers and people who simply wanted to build strange places together.
THE FAMILY TREE, VERY SIMPLIFIED
MUD → TinyMUD → TinyMUSH / MUSH → TinyMUX / PennMUSH / other MU* systems
The technology is old. The idea isn't. A persistent world made collaboratively by the people inhabiting it is still a remarkably powerful medium.
YOU WRITE. SOMEONE WRITES BACK.
You connect with a MU* client and log into your character. The client looks a little like a terminal or chat program because, fundamentally, that is what it is.
Jig-Jig Street never quite dries. Neon bleeds across wet pavement.
Anna leans against the side of the van, listening to the bass leaking
through the wall behind her.
Kole glances toward the club door. "You actually planning to go in?"
Anna looks at him. "Eventually."
That exchange might involve two players or ten. It might last twenty minutes or six hours. It might be casual conversation, a concert, a gunfight, politics, romance, investigation, business, horror, or something nobody planned until somebody typed one unexpected sentence.
There is usually a distinction between IC — in character — and OOC — out of character. The people writing cooperate OOC so their characters are free to disagree, collide, lie, love, fail and generally make a mess IC.
GET CONNECTED
You need a MU* client. For Windows, we recommend BeipMU. It is free, actively maintained, and particularly good at handling the persistent windows, pages, channels and custom displays common to MU* worlds.
02 · GET THE NIGHT CITY CLIENT TEMPLATE
A preconfigured BeipMU setup intended for Night City MUX. Basic worlds, windows and client organization are already laid out so you do not have to start from a blank client.
03 · ENTER NIGHT CITY
Connect, create or log into your character, and start looking around. You do not need to understand everything before you arrive.
WHAT CAN PEOPLE BUILD WITH THIS?
Almost anything that can survive being made from language.
Cyberpunk cities. Space stations. Fantasy kingdoms. Alternate histories. Political worlds. Horror settings. Superheroes. Original science fiction. Small communities with twenty years of accumulated history. Entire civilizations that exist nowhere except in a database and in the memories of the people who wrote them.
The interesting part is not that one person can create a world.
Writers have always done that.
The interesting part is what happens when dozens of creative people
agree to live inside one together.
NIGHT CITY MUX
Cyberpunk collaborative roleplay in Night City. Characters, locations, businesses, relationships and plots are created and developed through shared play.
Anna Log is one of those characters.
THERE IS NO CUTSCENE.
Nobody has written what happens next yet. That's your part.