Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  The social interaction and player freedom offered within MUD took video games into uncharted territory. Before it, multiplayer games limited players to following the rules laid down in the computer code. MUD’s virtual world, however, allowed players to define the shape and atmosphere of the world through their actions. In theory Bartle still had ultimate control, but in practice the players also had power. “The people who run the game are effectively gods – they can do anything they want, they can change the physics of the world,” said Bartle. “However, if they do anything they like and the players don’t like it, the players can leave and you end up a god without worshippers. Both players and developers have the ultimate weapon, the developer can do anything they want and the players can walk away.”

  This tug of war between players and developers made MUD a social experiment as well as a video game. And within its digital walls, a new culture would be born. Players and developers debated how and when disruptive players should be punished and coined new words to describe the actions and types of players within MUD. The disruptive or abusive players, who hounded and deliberately annoyed their other visitors to the world of MUD, became known as ‘griefers’. New players unfamiliar with the world and its mores were called ‘newbies’ or ‘noobs’. The exact origins of the term ‘newbies’ is unclear. “It’s one of those words that has probably been invented before – maybe private schoolboys used it or the British Army. But I’m fairly confident that ‘newbie’ is one I made up and since’ve never been to public school and never been in the army, I can’t of imported it from that,” said Bartle. Whatever its origins, the word ‘newbie’ caught on in MUD and then spread on to the bulletin board systems frequented by MUD players. And when the internet arrived, the term spread across cyberspace until it eventually crept into everyday language.

  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 MUDs. By the end of the 1980s there were around 20 or so MUDs, 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 MOOs 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 MUDs 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. “The
y 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 MUDs, 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 MUDs. 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 MUDs 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 and 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.[3] 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 MUDs. 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.[4]

  To ensure players felt connected to the world of Habitat, the game allowed them to customise the looks of their digital self, decorate their virtual homes and adopt computerised pets. Even the customer service aspects of the game became part of the game world. Players could contact the system administrators with their problems via Habitat’s Bureaucrat in a Box, use Pawn Machines to sell the objects their digital selves owned and check the state of their virtual finances using ATMs. And to give players a sense of purpose, Lucasfilm created dozens of fun activities to participate in ranging from road rallies to games of Chess and treasure hunts.

  The idea of these activities, explained Morningstar, was to ensure no matter what a player’s personal interests were there would be something within Habitat that appealed to them. As if this wasn’t ambitious enough, Lucasfilm also intended to allow up to 20,000 people to play in Habitat at once. It was an unheard of figure. MUDs rarely topped the 100-player mark and they didn’t even try to represent their worlds in graphics. Given the volume of traffic and the unpredictability of player behaviour, Lucasfilm and Quantum Link decided to do an initial pre-release ‘beta’ test of the game in 1986 with 500 players. Morningstar and his team started out believing that Habitat should function in a way similar to a theme park, creating new activities designed to keep the visitors to its virtual world entertained.

  The developers spent weeks honing some of Habitat’s more involved quests and introduced them to the game world confident that it would keep players occupied for weeks on end. Players solved them in just a few hours. Deciding that their original centrally planned approach was doomed to failure, Lucasfilm did a u-turn and embraced a more libertarian, free-market attitude where they would be facilitators not directors. They gave players weapons and allowed them to kill each other in the hope of encouraging them to make their own fun.

  That too backfired. Habitat became a lawless world as players gunned each other down in the streets and stole each other’s items. One player, a Greek Orthodox priest in the real world, responded by forming the Order of the Holy Walnut, a popular virtual religion that preached non-violence. In the Habitat town of Populopolis, players fed up with the lawlessness formed a virtual town council and elected a sheriff before launching a campaign to get Lucasfilm to grant their law enforcer of choice special powers. As a result Lucasfilm agreed to hold a referendum among players to decide what powers Habitat’s first police officer should have.

  But before the referendum could be held, Habitat was shut down. Habitat had become a victim of its own success. Despite the challenges, Habitat had largely delivered on its vision but the beta test had revealed a major problem that no one foresaw. While just 500 people had access to the trial version of the game, they were playing it so much that the beta tes
t version of Habitat swallowed up 1 per cent of Quantum Link’s network capacity.

  Quantum Link realised that if Habitat matched the success of RabbitJack’s Casino and people played it as often as the first 500 players, its network would be unable to cope. And since increasing the network’s capacity was seriously exnsive at the time, Quantum Link and Lucasfilm cancelled the game’s full release.[5]

  Habitat wasn’t the only game to appear on Quantum Link that sought to push back the boundaries of video games. In 1988 the network teamed up with a writer called Tracy Reed to create The Quantum Link Serial, an experimental interactive fiction project that foreshadowed the fact-and-fiction-blurring alternate-reality games that would gain prominence thanks to 2001’s The Beast, a promotional game for Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I.[6] Included as part of the subscription to Quantum Link, The Quantum Link Serial combined storytelling with online chat and email. Reed would write the story in weekly instalments after asking readers to suggest how they could be included in the tale. The Quantum Link Serial became one of Quantum Link’s most popular features, not least because the readers themselves had become part of Reed’s fictional world.

  In 1989 Quantum Link also released the first of two games it had commissioned from Don Daglow’s Stormfront Studios. The pioneering game developer, who had created 1971’s Baseball and the Intellivision game Utopia, started working with the network after a visit from its executive vice-president Steve Case. “Steve did a tour of all the game companies looking for ways to hook up with them and get games on Quantum Link,” said Daglow. “I was at Brøderbund and he showed me what they were doing. I privately thought the Apple II was starting to fade and Brøderbund was the leading Apple II game company. I did a two-title deal with Steve for a token payment because they didn’t have any cash at that point – Quantum had 40 employees and was operating on a shoestring – to get us in the door.”