Costello (online game)

Costello
Developer(s)	Adrian Cohen, James Hobbs, Jason Hitt, Christopher Sprague, Ford Nickel
Engine	MudOS
Platform(s)	Platform independent
Release	1995
Genre(s)	Educational MUD
Mode(s)	Multiplayer, Single-player (CD version)

Costello is an educational MUD — a text-based online role-playing game — designed for teaching English as a foreign or second language. It is offered online as a free service. Created in 1995, it was innovative in its use of the MUD medium for EFL/ESL instruction,and has received positive critical response.

Costello is intended to function both as an engaging game and a teaching environment, following the reasoning that players will be more motivated to learn if their skill acquisition aids them in their game-play. To avoid degrading the value of language skills acquired, the game's command parser avoids support for ungrammatical shorthand forms; where a typical MUD might allow a player to examine a hat with the syntax l hat, Costello requires look at the hat. An integrated dictionary provides explication of unfamiliar terms.

The game may be played through a Web browser using a Java applet or using a Java client distributed on a CD-ROM with the course textbook. A non-networked standalone application version of Costello is also included on the CD-ROM.

Costello's tagline is "Quest-Based Learning", reflecting its structuring of learning experiences through quests. An earlier tagline was "English Through Imagination".

Costello runs on the MudOS game driver and a version of the Ain Soph Mudlib from Lost Souls, with customizations engineered by former Lost Souls developer Jason "Rand" Hitt and others.

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