Documents of Interest

This page has two sorts of links: links useful to those interested in mud and online world design specifically, and links that are about game design in general.

Studies and histories of specific online worlds

Life at the Palace: a Cyberpsychology Case Study is an extensive and detailed study of the graphical chat space The Palace.
Killers Have More Fun is an article by Dr. Amy Jo Kim about Ultima Online, originally published in WIRED.
On his site, Richard Bartle has page of links to material about specific muds.

Papers, essays, references, and other research materials

Richard Bartle's homepage has a multitude of good material on it. Some of the more notable material includes:
The Arch-Wizard Archives contains Michael Lawrie's "Confessions of an Arch-wizard" which is a seminal document on how to administrate muds.
Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms has a few items of interest to mud designers:
A chapter from Virtual Communities that deals with muds
An essay entitled "Virtual Communities, Phony Civil Society?" which has interesting implications for those interested in virtual societies.
Another essay, by Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson, entitled "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" that covers similar territory.
The fantastic Papers - [ Synchronous Communications | VR | 3D ] page indexes and lists abstracts for a virtual mountain of important papers on muds, including work by Elizabeth Reid, Julian Dibbell, Richard MacKinnon, Richard Bartle, Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, and others.

Mud design links

Marian Griffith's Roleplaying page includes her !Overlord Project, which is a collaborative design for a roleplaying-focused mud.

General game design sites and documents

Items by Chris Crawford:
His seminal book The Art of Computer Game Design
Various writings of his on game design
GameDev's library of game design links.
Gamasutra is a game development industry hangout that often features game design articles.