Funny, I wonder if Ultima Online would be considered a child of Diku. It is a multiplayer game, so in that sense they are related, but UO only had speech over one's head and you had no ability to far-reaching-talking. So if you wanted to say hello, you walked to the person you wanted to talk to.

That encouraged lots of natural role play and it also encouraged strangers to interact. In some ways, the MUD chat window we are all now used to distances us from the actual players in our area. So many times I see a huge group of people not even acknowledging one another's existence yet they are all probably chatting away in guild/party/etc... chat.

Makes me wonder. Of course Diku you generally go to a zone to talk and although you can whisper across the zones, the players tend to stick to their role play world and follow a lot of conventions we that are throw away in graphical muds (our current MMOS)