Replay: The History of Video Games (49 page)

Another cultural legacy of
MUD
was an acceptance that male players could become female characters inside virtual worlds. “When we first had
MUD
running, all our players were men because it was a computer science department in 1978,” said Bartle. “But they weren’t really role-playing because they hadn’t got the idea that they were playing as someone else, not themselves, so they didn’t create female characters and all that.”

Bartle solved the problem by creating Polly, the first female character in a virtual world, and venturing into the world of
MUD
. “So here’s me, who everyone knew was male, playing this character who is female,” said Bartle. The stunned players who witnessed Polly’s arrival were unsure how to react – are you gay, some asked, or are you a transvestite? Bartle’s response was straightforward: “I don’t care what you think. This is Polly and this is me. Of course I’m not the same as Polly – Polly’s part of a computer program.”

And once the gender divide had been crossed, attitudes changed. “I’d kind of given them permission to play as female characters and they did,” said Bartle. “Most would try it, some didn’t because they felt it was a slur on their sexuality, but most did have a female character. It became accepted fact that you could have a female character. If
MUD
had been invented somewhere other than the UK people would still play characters of the opposite gender, but it might not have taken root because there might have been social reasons that prevented the original players from doing it.”

Gender swapping would become widespread in the virtual worlds that followed. A 2008 study by the UK’s Nottingham Trent University found that 54 per cent of men and 68 per cent of women who played multiplayer online games such as
Ultima Online
had characters of the opposite sex.

But
MUD
could have easily slid into obscurity if it wasn’t for two crucial decisions by the University of Essex around the time of the game’s creation. The first was its decision to test a new computer communications system developed by British Telecom. “There wasn’t an internet back then, but there was a system called EPSS – the Experimental Packet Switching System – that British Telecom had implemented,” said Bartle. “Only a very few universities in Britain had it – maybe two or three. We were one of the universities being used to trial this. You could use EPSS to connect to what would now be called the internet, which was back then ARPAnet.”

Using EPSS, the pair connected to places such as Xerox PARC, Stanford University and MIT and opened accounts so computr users in these institutions could access
MUD
. “To get an account you had to say something that described what you were doing,” said Bartle. “I had to think of some words to put and came up with ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve died in
MUD
’. That was our calling card.”

The University of Essex’s second crucial decision was to let computer users from outside its campus log onto and use its computer systems. “That was an important decision,” said Bartle. “They allowed people to access the computers during off-peak times when they would otherwise be idle. That meant other people could play the game – we called them externals, the people who weren’t in the university. They could play it and because they could play it they saw the proof of concept and some thought ‘I’ll write my own’.”

Those inspired to create their own virtual worlds were also aided by Bartle and Trubshaw’s belief that
MUD
should not be a for-profit project but a gift to other computer users. “Back then the mentality of programmers was that software was meant to be free and available to everybody,” said Bartle. “So if people asked me for a copy then as long as they weren’t going to charge money for it then I would give them a copy.”

Programmers inspired by
MUD
soon began to hack the code of Bartle and Trubshaw’s game to make
MUD
-style worlds of their own. Soon
MUD
became a byword for text-based multiplayer virtual worlds ranging from
Shades
, a for-profit fantasy-themed
MUD
developed by British Telecom, to
Rock
, a free-to-play MUD inspired by Jim Henderson’s children’s TV series
Fraggle Rock
. The most popular by some way was
AberMUD
, the 1987 creation of four students at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. “
AberMUD
wasn’t a great
MUD
– there were better ones around,
MUD
itself was better – but it ran under the Unix operating system,” said Bartle. “Most of the American universities were running Unix and we didn’t run Unix at the University of Essex, we had a DECSystem-10 back then. So once people got hold of
AberMUD
it just spread across US universities like wildfire. A thousand copies of the game were running in America within six months to a year of its creation.”

AberMUD
initiated an explosion in the number of
MUD
s. By the end of the 1980s there were around 20 or so
MUD
s, but by 1992 an estimated 20,000 people were living second lives in around 170
MU/font>
s. However, while
MUD
had sought to strike an even balance between game and social network,
AberMUD
emphasised the game aspect, much to the disappointment of those who preferred the more social side of the experience. “The social players who’d been playing these games before because they liked socialising with people began to feel left out, so in 1989/1990 there was this schism where the social players broke off,” said Bartle.

The social players found a new home in 1989’s
TinyMUD
, which deliberately snubbed the game elements in favour of a purist social experience that echoed Trubshaw’s original non-game vision for
MUD
. Its creator James Aspnes, a student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University at the time, rejected the scoring and levelling up of
MUD
and sought to build a world where simply being part of it and interacting with other people was what mattered.
TinyMUD
and its followers eventually evolved into a new genre of multiplayer game – the
MOO
or
MUD Object Orientated
. And as socially orientated
MUD
fans gravitated towards
TinyMUD
and
MOO
s such as
LambdaMOO
, a pioneering text world where players could use computer code to create interactive objects within the game world, those who lusted for the traditional gaming thrills of competition and adventure started to weed out the social elements that they no longer felt obliged to maintain.

The most influential of these new game-focused
MUD
s was 1991’s
DikuMUD
– the creation of a group of Danish students from the Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet (DIKU), the computer science department of the University of Copenhagen. “They took the basic
MUD
concept from
AberMUD
and super-gamified it,” said Bartle. “They deliberately added some concepts from
Dungeons & Dragons
– things like classes and races – and honed the game play.
DikuMUD
swept the whole
MUD
thing to one side – if you were encountering a
MUD
for the first time you’re going to go for the one with the game play that is most compelling rather than the most cerebral.”

In parallel to the spread and evolution of
MUD
s, a number of similar virtual worlds also emerged independently during the 1980s. The first was
Scepter ofh
, a 1983 game created by Minnesota programmer Alan Klietz.
Scepter of Goth
had a lot in common with
MUD
, but its author knew nothing of Bartle and Trubshaw’s game at the time and, rather than giving away his game, Klietz charged players to play. Other American game designers followed in its footsteps hoping to profit from home computer owners who owned modems.

But while a few companies and individuals made money from these games, none achieved the level of influence of
MUD
, largely because of Bartle and Trubshaw’s decision to give away their game. “Because they were trying to be commercial all the expertise was kept in-house,” said Bartle. “And because we let people have the code of
MUD
and we didn’t object to people writing their own games – we encouraged them, in fact – we got this large number of people who were skilled in creating
MUD
s. So when virtual worlds finally did take off and people needed to recruit large numbers of experienced online multiplayer game designers, there were a thousand
MUD
makers for every one that came from these commercial games. That’s why today’s massively multiplayer online games are descended from
MUD
s rather than
Scepter of Goth
.”

Trying to make a profitable online game during the 1980s was, however, an uphill struggle. Relatively few people owned a home computer and even fewer had one with the dial-up modem needed to connect to pre-internet computer networks. And even for those with modems, the cost of playing games online was prohibitive. First players had to buy access to an online network such as The Source, which demanded a $100 set-up fee a
nd charged users $10 for every hour they were connected to it. These networks were separate from each other and users could only access the games, software and information that their network operator provided, making them more like a single website than the internet.
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Once connected, early online gamers then faced additional charges for playing commercial online games such as
Heroic Fantasy
, a 1982 turn-based role-playing game played through email that charged $2.50 per move.

Given such high charges and the considerable expensive of providing such services, networks such as The Source, CompuServe and Quantum Link went to great lengths to keep players online for as long as possible. And multiplayer video games with their social interaction and compelling game experience were seen as especially good at keeping people online. Quantum Link, a network for Commodore 64 owners, was particularly successful at using games to keep computer owners racking up the bills. Its most popular effort was
RabbitJack’s Casino
, an online gambling game created by former Imagic game designer Rob Fulop in 1987. “I remember meeting the president of Quantum Link at a trade show and saying they should do a casino,” said Fulop. “They were new then and they were charging $4 an hour and wanted things to entertain people. Itwasn’t mass market then, it was a pretty niche business.”

RabbitJack’s Casino
was designed with one commercial goal in mind: keeping people online. “We built the slot machines to be very generous. Unlike a casino slot machine,
RabbitJack’s
was designed to give you chips. You win a lot and so you’re like ‘Wow, this is the greatest casino in the world!’,” said Fulop.

While
RabbitJack’s Casino
allowed up to five people to play Poker together, most of its gambling games were single-player experiences, such as the slot machines and Bingo, that pushed the socialising element of online gaming to the fore. “In the single-player games you could chat, so in Bingo you could all chat and play Bingo together,” said Fulop. “Bingo’s a very easy game, you don’t have to do anything – it’s a brain-dead simple game to play. Also the big advantage of Bingo is scalability – you can have 10, 100, 100,000 people playing together, all excited, waiting for P4. There’s not many games like that. Good luck trying to figure out a game where you can entertain a million people in five minutes. You can’t beat Bingo.”

RabbitJack’s Casino
became the single most popular game on Quantum Link with around 15,000 regular players who ate up 3 per cent of the network’s capacity to handle traffic. But the most ambitious and innovative title to appear on Quantum Link in the 1980s was a graphical virtual world called
Habitat
that was created by Chip Morningstar, a game designer at Lucasfilm Games.

Habitat
evolved out of Lucasfilm’s belief that by creating a visual virtual world it could extend the appeal of online gaming far beyond those who enjoyed text-based
MUD
s. While a few online games had used basic graphics before,
Habitat
sought to create a fully-fledged visual world with animated characters that brought the players’ digital alter ego to life.
Habitat
’s goal was to create a place where players really could experience an alternative reality. Set in a vaguely modern day world, Morningstar designed a persistent virtual world built out of 20,000 single-screen locations and filled it with numerous interactive objects for players’ avatars to use.
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