A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ?

u

verb⁰ The abbreviation for the 'up' directional command; often capitalised. Although 'up' is short enough for 'u' to be assigned to for some other command, 'up' wins it by default as there are no other common commands that begin with the letter 'u'...

uh?

interjection A popular expression denoting perplexity. "Sorry, I don't understand". "Does not compute!". "I think I've missed something here." "Why are you asking me?!"

undercover

adjective Said of a wiz who is masquerading as a mortal with a view to gleaning information which couldn't be obtained by simple snooping. Usually, an undercover wiz will not mind if other wizzes know who they really are, but they will still probably refer to their persona as secret. A wiz acting undercover normally does so only temporarily, using a scratch persona they discard afterwards, but an extended period of playing undercover may be referred to theatrically as deep undercover. "The only way I'll find out what they actually think of my Elven Forest addition is if I go deep undercover". See masquerade, incognito, secret.

undersea city

noun A suggestion that the size of The Land should be increased by the addition of more rooms, commonly in the form of an undersea city or a castle in the air. This assumes that The Land would be better if it was larger, which of course is only valid if there are enough people playing at any one time to justify it - rarely the case, but that doesn't hold any water with someone who has sat up all night feverishly writing down their designs... Some such proposals for new areas are so breathtaking in scope that they can also be described as tidal. "And the king of the mermen has this trident that if you use it to get the pearl turns into a weapon only slightly better than the LS...". See size.

unfair

1. interjection Against the run of natural justice. P1: "So I stole your cape - that makes it mine now." P2: "Unfair!"

2. adjective Mistreated by the game. "You changed the way the LS worked and never told anybody! That's unfair!".

3. adjective Subject to (suspiciously) bad luck. "Every time the Z6 moves, I walk right into its room. That's unfair!".

4. adjective illegal, but performed by an individual who seriously outranks you. "Don't you think that FODding someone for having the same name as your cousin's dog is a little unfair?"

5. adjective Exceeding reasonable bounds of generosity or meanness from a position of power. "You can't give her back her T, that'd be unfair!".

6. adjective Contrary to what the speaker wants. Continued use of (1) to (5) will generally lead to them all being interpreted as (6). "I can't open the portcullis on my own. That's unfair!". Yeah, sure...

universal preposition

noun In most MUA input (1) sentences, prepositions are only present to separate the object (5) and the instrument; they don't have any other function apart from this syntactic one. Therefore, players always tend to use the same preposition whatever the circumstances - normally they choose the one that is easiest to type. This is known as the universal preposition. In MUD2, the parser does differentiate between prepositions, so eg. 'get sand with coracle' and 'get sand from coracle' are two different commands (2). There is also an 'excluding preposition' in MUD2, which indicates that the instrument is to be excluded from the set of objects (5) under consideration; this gives rise to the unwieldy term universal excluding preposition. See f, wi, x, b.

unplayable

adjective the game is unplayable for you when circumstances mean you are constantly unable to issue commands that further your main goals. This might be for hardware reasons (slow comms, bad line-noise), general game-related reasons (too many players, slow response time) or reasons specific to you (killers attack you all the time, wizzes hassle you with questions). This normally warrants a moan to the powers that be.

unrealistic

adjective Not the way things work in the real world. "If I throw this mobile from the top of the cliff it should die, but it doesn't. That's unrealistic.". As most of the game is predicated on the assumption that magic works, and most of the real world is predicated on the assumption that it doesn't, one would expect that the term unrealistic could not be applied in such cases. This does not, however, deter people from doing so, eg. "The invis spell only works on players and mobiles, not objects: isn't that unrealistic?". In this case, unrealistic can be read as meaning "not how the real world would behave if it had been programmed properly". See depth, inconsistent (2).

unsuitable

adjective Said of a mortal player who would not make a good wiz. Usually, the individual concerned will be a plodder and easily dealt with, but sometimes they may have that spark yet be possessed of a ranklingly abrasive personality or thoroughly obnoxious manner. wizzes determine unsuitability by testing the mortal concerned, however even they will be unable to stop someone unsuitable from making wiz if they're a true addict. legally, anyway...

Naturally, this form af natural selection is not necessarily guaranteed to be for the good, and wizzes really ought to bear in mind the following extract from "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" (Clute & Nicholls, Orbit, 1993, page 275): "... one of the most annoying of SF cliches: the idea that selfish deviants might be harrassed as a kind of test to prove their suitability for recruitment into the social elite of a stable society.".

ur-wiz

noun A BL term to refer to people perceived to hold a rank higher than arch-wiz. The 'ur' prefix means 'original', and therefore an ur-wiz is an original wiz - one who existed at the time the very concept of wizdom arose. The term is not officially sanctioned, however: the two holders of this supposed rank, MUD's authors, appear as arch-wizzes in the game, and have never applied the ur-wiz description to themselves or anyone else. Needless to say, BL's folklore pays no heed to officialdom in any form... It is generally believed that the 'ur' prefix came to BL from other games on CompuServe, although no-one appears to know which, specifically, these are.