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A L S O __T O D A Y Starship trouper By Janelle Brown Douglas Adams' new "Titanic" game is just the tip of a multimedia iceberg (04/30/98) T A B L E__T A L K Is the Mac OS8 all that and a bag of chips? Or is it a gigantic waste of time? Weigh in on Apple's latest OS in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Revenge of the early adopters By Andrew Leonard Angry DVD owners didn't like a new video-rental technology -- so they fought back on the Net (04/29/98) Betrayed! By Evan Marx A writer's engagement unravels -- thanks to a telltale e-mail message (04/28/98) Epistolary romance, digital style By Jenn Shreve E-mail has changed how we start relationships, how we keep them going -- and how we wreck them (04/27/98) Love is blind By Lisa Palac She met her sexual soul mate online -- but he wouldn't let her see what he looks like. Excerpt from "The Edge of the Bed" (04/27/98) Do computers boost productivity? By Andrew Leonard According to one student of the numbers, the answer is: No way (04/24/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST REVIEWS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

A NEW ONLINE GAME LETS FANS OF THE TV SHOW EXPLORE THEIR TEXTUAL FANTASIES. - - - - - - - - - [ 2 1 S T_R E V I E W S ] BY MOIRA MULDOON | If stunning graphics drive the computer gaming market, why are MUDs -- text-based online gaming environments -- still around? And why would the producers of a new online game built for a hot TV series adopt this old-fashioned model? Players explain the MUD advantage succinctly: It's like the difference between reading the book and seeing the movie. "Almost invariably," MUD fan Sylverdust says, "the response is, 'Well, the movie was all right, but the book was better.'" Text-based games are an unusual breed of cat because, essentially, they have no graphics and no linear path to follow. While many gamers eagerly debate the merits of various 3-D graphics cards and the "Riven" story line, others continue to migrate toward "old-school" games that forego graphics for interactive fiction, where gamers create a character and role-play for the duration of the game -- where they can go anywhere in the universe they can think of because there are no rails, no linear paths, no real-time physics to worry about. In other words, MUDs (the acronym stands for "multi-user dimension" or "multi-user dungeon") are the online equivalent of old paper-and-pen role-playing games, where the only limit to where you can go or what you'll encounter is what's in your head. They're like a version of Dungeons and Dragons, all grown up. Fans attribute their preference to the complete freedom available in MUDs -- you can go absolutely anywhere in the game world, do anything you want, say anything to any character you come across -- and to the pleasure of using their imaginations to picture places, other characters and even hunting weapons. "Nobody pictures a 'sooty yew longbow' in quite the same way," says MUD fan Medan (who, like all the fans interviewed for this piece, asked to be referred to by his nom-de-game). "But if you see it there on the screen, there's no question. Your imagination can picture what you see much better than the computer monitor." It's this sentiment exactly that Simutronics and Universal -- creators of the month-old MUD "Hercules and Xena: Alliance of Heroes" -- are hoping will capture the fancy of the legion of Xena and Herc fans populating the Web. N E X T__P A G E .|. Don't dream it -- be it