What is a MUSH?

A MUSH is a text-based interactive roleplaying game in a persistent world, a member of the MUD genre, but focused more on immersive roleplay than gameplay (or, as tabletop gamers would put it, roll play).

WAIT! I don't care about any of that. I meant, why should I try it? (Click to skip to the next section.)

MUDs were originally conceived as a multi-player version of interactive fiction games like Colossal Cave Adventure, and the most famous example, Zork. These are parser-based games where you enter commands as though you were typing instructions to your character, and the game's logic interpreted those commands and carried them out.

One such text adventure game was called Dungeon, a modded version of Zork, which was akin to a game of Dungeons & Dragons with a computer-controlled dungeon master. This in turn inspired a multiplayer version of such a game, creatively called Multi-User Dungeon. Much like Rogue inspired a genre of games called roguelikes, MUD inspired a genre of games called MUDs, many of which featured cooperative dice-rolling dungeon crawling akin to a game of D&D with friends, as well as competitive PvP, offering some of the earliest MMO-esque experiences.

One such notable game, which itself went on to spawn dozens of imitators, was called TinyMUCK. TinyMUCK was intended as a purely social, roleplay-driven experience and stripped the limitations of gameplay from the game, instead offering a space to create characters and hang out with friends in a text-based, user-created world not dissimilar to Second Life. The term MUCK is merely a play on "mud," and does not have a meaning. However, MUCK is commonly used to refer to social-oriented MUDs with little to no gameplay.

As technology advanced, MUDs were created which used object-oriented programming techniques that created more robust and flexible parsers than were traditionally available. These object-oriented MUDs were called MOOs, which stands for "MUD, Object-Oriented." Most of these MOOs descend from LambdaMOO in one form or another.

MUSHes are variants of MUCKs which, while maintaining the social-oriented aspect, are more specifically oriented towards roleplaying in an immersive environment. Unlike MUCKs, MUSHes typically have stronger hierarchical administration structures which impose limitations on what characters are permitted to do, providing for a more immersive experience than MUCKs, which are carried more by the writing of the userbase than by the game's systems.

Collectively, all of these genres are referred to either as MUDs, or as MU*s, with the asterisk intended as a wildcard character, or more rarely as MUXes, which stands for Multi-User eXperience.

The most famous furry examples of the genre are FurryMUCK, Tapestries MUCK, Shangrila MUX, and Flexible Survival, which does not advertise itself as a MUD because it also provides a single-player alternative. If you have played any of these games, you are probably prepared to play the Furhaus MUSH. If you haven't, you should try it anyway; MUDs are for everyone, and while they may seem intimidating at first, they aren't all that difficult to get into.

Why should I play?

A reasonable question you may be asking is as follows: What's the difference between a MUSH and the Furhaus room on F-Chat? Or, you may be asking: Why should I spend the time learning this instead of just hanging out on F-Chat? I will outline my answers in the short summaries below, and you may click on any of them to expand a more thorough explanation of my reasoning.

Despite being a haven for text-based roleplaying, F-List is by nature a strongly visually-oriented community. Potential roleplay partners are often judged not by their writing prowess, but moreso by their aesthetic taste; i.e., how attractive their profile is, how expensive and beautiful the art in your gallery is, maybe a quick skim of your kinks if you're lucky. Partners often go into scenes knowing little about your character besides how physically attractive they are, and attachments to characters are in general ephemeral and shallow.

By contrast, the MUSH provides no barrier to roleplay whatsoever; every character inhabits the same world and you will inevitably interact with everyone in it unless you give them the cold shoulder. This means that the normal way to start a scene with them is to meet them in the world and introduce yourself, letting the dice fall where they may, rather than discussing a scene ahead of time with the intention of a sex scene. Since the game is entirely text-based (a link to the associated F-List profile is still available), you're left to judge characters by their players' writing prowess and their descriptions, which at least in my experience leads to a less judgmental environment where you roleplay more, with more people.
"Always IC" characters are a controversial subject on F-Chat, and are often difficult to play. The MUSH neatly skirts this problem by clearly delineating OOC chatter from the in-character gameworld, which means that everyone is always in character by default, but can still chat globally on the public OOC channel, or speak in good ol' parentheses to discuss things OOCly with people in the same room. In essence, as long as you're logged in you're playing your character, and that can range from idle chit-chat with people hanging out nearby to dragging someone off somewhere private for something more involved.
All interaction in the MUSH takes place in a multi-room environment built specifically for the purpose of casual roleplay. It is a recreation of the Furhaus as illustrated and described in the F-Chat room's description, with plenty of common areas for you to hang out in and many different nooks and crannies you can abscond with partners to for some privacy. Most people who have played the MUSH can attest to the fact that, for the reasons outlined in the other points, there is far less friction involved in starting a scene in the MUSH than with starting one on F-Chat. It's completely seamless; you just start talking to someone, and if both of you are interested in taking it further, it naturally leads to a full scene.

Because you exist in a persistent, shared environment, neither of you needs to come up with any context for a scene. It already exists. Your surroundings are already described by the game appropriate to the area you're in, and they change as you move from room to room. The clothing you're wearing consists of physical items which can be adjusted or removed, and referenced at a glance. All of the legwork in setting a scene is done for you at all times; all you need to do is interact with each other in that framework and let the roleplay flow naturally.
Pretty self-explanatory: many people have characters which are popular enough that logging into them means an almost certain barrage of harassment by well-meaning suitors. Avoid that by playing them on the MUSH instead, where no one outside Furhaus will know that you're on them, and you can once again play popular characters in peace without fending off approaches from strangers with a stick.
This one is rather subjective, but I personally think that MUDs provide an experience that is without equal. The feeling of existing in a persistent world, which will be there whenever you return and carry on without you in the meantime, is unparalleled. Characters' personal stories unfold over weeks and months, the game world changes and expands, narrative arcs even spin up and wind down if people are willing to run them. F-Chat has none of this; it's just a chatroom for people who like roleplay to meet and fuck. The MUSH attempts to take the place you like and the people you enjoy the company of, and put them in a world you can inhabit. Using the parser to interact with that world gives you a sense of physicality, and also allows you to be immersed in your character by, for example, placing realistic limitations on what they can do based on their current status.
It might not be commonly acknowledged, but it's difficult to argue with the fact that you have essentially no reason to interact with anyone on F-Chat that you don't look at and immediately want to fuck. You might chat with them, but you're probably not going to pay much attention to their character, and you certainly aren't going to interact with them in character. This makes it really difficult to play all but the most fuckable characters on F-Chat! After all, if you don't immediately give someone a reason to want to fuck you, they're probably not going to pay all that much attention to you.

But on the MUSH, everyone exists in the same space as you. If you walk into a bar, all you see is a list of names of the people crowded there. To actually get a sense of whether you'd want to fuck them, you practically have to interact with them first and get to know them. This means that you can play much less gregarious characters and still get roleplay with people simply because you're there, and in the process you might pull them into your character as they endeavor to learn more.
Do you go by Example Lastname on F-List because the name Example is taken, or some other arbitrary non-name you have to use because your preferred name is unavailable? No longer! With the moniker command, after you've validated your profile, you can change your name to whatever your character's name actually is, regardless of what the F-List Name Police have to say about it!

If you're sufficiently convinced by these reasons, give the game a try! There's no commitment, no downloads necessary. Simply register an account on the website and follow the Webclient Tutorial written by Emille to get started using the built-in webclient. Providing an email is completely optional; all you need is a name, a password, and an F-List profile that's at least level 2 in the Furhaus room.