Sorry about the outage Wednesday and Thursday. Evidently Dreamhost was having DNS issues and didn’t bother fixing it until the specific request was made. At least the price was right.

Anyway, thinking about Buddhism and its relationship to MMORPGs got me thinking about game design. I’m in no position to write an MMO, of course, but there’s always their smaller ancestor, the MUD. Could it be possible to make a MUD based on Buddhism?

Here’s an outline as far as I got:

• Unlike regular MUDs, your account is not tied to a single character. Characters have a lifespan of only 2 real-life weeks. After this they die of old age.
• Death per-character is permanent, but whenever your character dies you get to start another one.
• Stats are greatly simplified. There may only be three, measured from 1-5, like “Physical,” “Mental,” “Spiritual.” Characters also have an intrinsic aptitude toward a certain job, like Peasant, Soldier, Artisan, Scholar, etc.
• Stats are randomized whenever you create a character.
• Your enlightenment is a hidden statistic that, as my defiance against a strange and unknowable universe, is expressed as a single integer. However, there is no way to determine how enlightened you are unless you actually achieve Enlightenment. Unlike all other statistics, enlightenment is tied to the account, not the character.
• If your enlightenment gets high enough, your current character achieves Enlightenment. When this happens you have a choice:
• You can retire the account, contented in the knowledge that you have transcended my little MUD.
• Are your attachments a little too strong? Or do you want to help others on their way to Enlightenment? Your character can play on with a host of new powers: you can determine how enlightened other characters are and even add to their enlightenment, and you gain superior physical and mental abilities in-game. However, once your character dies, if you do not retire the account, your next character loses a fair amount of enlightenment, enough that you won’t have one again for a while…
• Enlightenment will be scaled so that there is about one Enlightened character per 200 active accounts at any one time. Assuming a reasonable active MUD of about 50 players, this means there will only be an Enlightened character active about 25% of the time at all.

Notice something missing? Yeah, it’s a big one: How do you increase Enlightenment? And I have no idea, but here are some ideas:

• It’s random, just totally random.
• It’s manipulated by administrators.
• You get it for taking certain actions in accord with your character’s job.
• You get it for taking certain actions in-game, as if solving “quests.”
• You get it for meditating, joining a monastery, or other similar actions in-game.
• It depends per character.
• It depends per account, but you don’t know what kind of account you have.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to get created. I had this exchange with reader Fu Leng:

Me:

F: “I’ve already beaten it.”

Me: “What? How?”

F: “By not playing.”

Touché, sir, touché.