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> ID

DOOM 3 was a bust. iD sells games today based solely on pre-built brands, and even then can't meet expectations. iD has lost the power to create new series and make them popular - they peaked years ago. The downhill coast will be made on Quake IV, Doom IV, Quake V, Wolfenstein 6, etc. To paraphrase President George W. Bush, iD earned "gamer capital" and is now spending it. But they aren't generating more.

> and Valve

Valve is another company whose current heights are derived solely from past successes. In Valve's case, it isn't even their success they've built on - it's the Counter-Strike team's. Half-Life was an above-average game that nevertheless would not merit a mention in gaming history without Counter-Strike.

> And Blizzard

The first Blizzard game I bought was Warcraft II in 1995. I bought Diablo the next year. Blizzard haven't really come up with new game material since then. There was Starcraft, which was fun but not much more than Warcraft in space. The newest Blizzard project is Warcraft as MMORPG. It is safe to conclude that Blizzard are also coasting (but at least it's iD-like and not Valve-like).

> And SOE

Has Everquest to coast on, a game from 1999 which was nearly unique on release (and which may even have been based on OSS) and which still holds the largest share of the market it created.

It also has Star Wars Galaxies, which inserts the pop culture phenomenon "Star Wars" into the framework of Everquest. Roundly dissed by critics, it would be hard to argue that this game has succeeded on the merits of its gameplay.

Your examples highlight the current successes in the PC game market, but also the problem - there hasn't been any innovation there since the 90s (in some cases, the mid-90s). The studios that do innovate are inevitably doomed to failure (or worse, moderate success - and subsequent consumption by Microsoft or EA). And the ones that ride their successes hard don't always make it past the 4th or 5th sequel. Witness the downward spiral of Eidos for evidence of this.

for a long long time on the Mud-Dev mailing list. In fact a point of discussion many times, and not just the faucet drain economy model either.

Mud Dev Faq
Full archive here

for a long long time on the Mud-Dev mailing list. In fact a point of discussion many times, and not just the faucet drain economy model either.

Mud Dev Faq
Full archive here

Imdb? May I suggest this or this to fully appreciate Ms Andress' .. um... acting ability.

I'm pretty sure the term avatar (for VR) predates 1990.

My first memory of the term "Avatar" being used to represent an online persona was on the online service Q-Link aka Quantum Link, a nationwide BBS system for the popular Commodore 64. (The parent company later became AOL.) They had a 2D graphics chat world called "Club Caribe" which I remember using the term "Avatar". (At the time, I thought it was a bit odd, since I was used to the term Avatar being used for the main character of Ultima IV (1985).) This would have been around 1988-1989 or so, which is earlier than the OED citation, although I do not have a printed source backup for this. (Check a C-64 magazine of that time period? Old copies of Compute Gazette, anyone?)

I've found a post from a MUD-Dev mailing list discussion thread held in 2001 on the same topic (what's the earliest use of the term avatar) that supports this recollection, and adds to it that the term might have been used by the predecessor of Club Caribe, Lucasfilm's Habitat (1984-1988), or possibly even earlier by Jaron Lanier. Again, no paper-based backup on this.

Regarding the term "morph", 1993 doesn't sound too far off; it might be a year or two earlier though. I ran across the term in late 1993 when trying to replicate the morphing process used by Michael Jackson's "Black or White" music video for a computer graphics class (based on a white paper by Pacific Data Images). Both that video and Terminator 2: Judgement Day which used morphing came out in 1992. The CG morphing technique was known as morphing when I took the class in 1993. I'm not sure the PDI white paper used the term morphing though, so maybe the term's name caught on some time after the video came out. So it might be 1993, but I wouldn't be surprised if the term was used in 1992.

--LP

They were going to put it in a winged toaster case, but the lawyers from Berkeley/After Dark warned them that they'd slap them with a trademark suit, and changing it to a toaster with a propeller just wasn't going to work. (Just kidding.)

I wonder when the U.S. Internal Revenue Service will require online gaming companies to report the earnings of players? At least some MMORG players are starting to worry about this issue.

The extent that virtual economies let "players" perform virtual jobs and earn virtual money that can be used to buy valuable products and services is the extent such virtual income is taxable. If enough players earn more money online than they pay in monthly fees, then said players are effectively gainfully employeed and profitable. If the virtual money is exchangable for real money, then it becomes much more likely that the IRS could get interested.

Hmmm... do virtual earnings count as earnings in foreign country?

Well, it's beyond hope now... but it was good to begin with. It had the potential to be a new genre, but it really just extended the current Fantasy-RPG style of gameplay to space (rpg-in-space) sure, there's a bit of trade element and experience based upon your exploration of the known universe (very cool, not too difficult to imagine but the first time I've seen it in a graphical mud.)

Really I'm tired (as well as many others I suppose) of the hack+slash forever pointlessness. Not to mention the horribly pathetic issue with EQ of waiting for many RL days for virtual items (gah someone castrate the person who came up with that revenue-model.) Hopefully there will be some changes drastically in the "treadmill" model of character development. Lemme tell ya, if I have to kill 12,000 mobs to get to a theoretically more enjoyable endgame one more time I'm gonna smack all of mud-dev.

What kind of statistic is that? Honestly, it sounds like they haven't done enough research. Online games with a gender have been around a lot longer than everquest. Surely they could have had some more data had they asked muddev listers.

This topic has come up several times. Not only that, but kanga.nu polls would be the perfect place to ask this question. Or heck even a slashdot poll.

The commenters AFTER the article explain the prevalence of gender bending in moos etc. But the author really didn't have a whole lot. WAKE UP EQ isn't the ONLY online game!

Is this /. or MUD-Dev? From the responses to all the MUD/MMORPG related topics I'd say we have more players here than anything else.

As for games as art, I'd also cite Rez, Ico, Frequency, GTA3... but why not go back to some oldies like guns n butter or hidden agenda as well.

Part of the problem is that art is going to look very different in this medium, IMHO.

Just about every MUD resource online can be found via the library at kanga.nu, as can some extensive archives of the online game development list (MUD-Dev), which you can find if you nose around the site. Several of Jessica's articles can be found there, as well as Dr Bartle's Suits article referenced above. The mail list itself can get fairly heady, but might as well be required reading if you're serious about being part of the industry. There's more social engineering and business plan traffic on the list now, compared to the extremely technical bent of five, six, seven years past, when it was by invite only, but it's still the most serious discussion venue online. Take a look... -- To email me, drop the second through seventh character and the repeated symbols.

Just about every MUD resource online can be found via the library at kanga.nu, as can some extensive archives of the online game development list (MUD-Dev), which you can find if you nose around the site. Several of Jessica's articles can be found there, as well as Dr Bartle's Suits article referenced above. The mail list itself can get fairly heady, but might as well be required reading if you're serious about being part of the industry. There's more social engineering and business plan traffic on the list now, compared to the extremely technical bent of five, six, seven years past, when it was by invite only, but it's still the most serious discussion venue online. Take a look... -- To email me, drop the second through seventh character and the repeated symbols.

Please feel free to mail me corrections and additions to the timeline. The vast majority of it was not written by me, it was written by others who submitted material.

Some blanket replies to clarify the intent of the timeline:

Tolkien is listed because he was very influential on the people making those early games (annd still is to this day). To take another example, Lord Dunsany is comparably important in the development of fantasy as a genre, but has not had very discernable influence on online worlds specifically.

The Sega channel probably does deserve to be listed. Please feel free to send details. Note, however, that this timeline is specifically about online worlds (aka muds, MMORPGs, virtual realities, what have you), not about peer to peer gaming except insofar as instances of peer to peer gaming serve as bridges towards online worlds. Hence the absence of things like Case's Ladder or Kali. Heck, Quake is only in there because it brought greater awareness to online worlds in the process of being a big hit.

Lastly, concerning the title... AFAIK, there are only four significant timelines on the history of online worlds on the Net. There's George Reese's, there's The MUDDex's, there's Jessica Mulligan's on Biting the Hand, and there's mine. Of these, George's is centered on LPMuds, The MUDDex centered on MOOs and MUSHes, Jessica's on commercial games, and then there's mine which tries to cover all the above. Plus, George and Jess both contributed to mine. As of right now, there is no more comprehensive source on the Internet--at least, not that's indexed by any search engines. Believe me, I've looked. For a preliminary links list of resources for online world design, I refer you to my list.

The genesis of the timeline was actually as some research to help out Dr Amy Bruckman (MediaMOO, MOOse Crossing) for a Game Developer's Conference panel we were both on. It has been posted regularly to rec.games.mud.* newsgroups and the MUD-Dev mailing list as well. It's very much a community effort, and not based on my personal preferences save for the criteria by which I determine whether or not something is an actually an online world.

I see a lot of posts here in the replies which I intend to scarf up and add to the timeline, though. So thanks to those posters. :) Certainly one area where the timeline is deficient is the entire area of BBS games, so submissions are definitely welcome there.

-Raph Koster

As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.

(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)

This is a subject on which I am as close to a world expert as it's possible to get. If you are familiar with MMOG development, you may have heard of MUD-Dev. If you do a search for my name and "physmud" you'll turn up hundreds of articles on the simulation of physics in a game engine. I used to simulate multi-day trajectories of orbital and ballistic bodies for SDI purposes for a living. I know just about all there is to know about this kind of modeling, and where you can take a shortcut, how to do a numerical approximation in n or nlogn steps when possible, what the inaccuracies introduced by each approximation would be... sometimes, I know how to do an exact solution to a transformation in a far smaller amount of time, using a jacobian transformation on complex geometries with an angular integration... but the reason I know this is, I learned on the job, and I took a degree (plus a bit) in physics, and I read all the books I could find. So, it is with regret that I say this book was not terribly good. I've seen better in a text entitled "An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods, Applications to Physical Systems", a not too well written textbook with source in BASIC, but at least featuring a fair breakdown in the nature of algorithms, numerical integration, efficiency and accuracy, etc. A much better choice, IMO, would be "Numerical Recipies in C", though it's a little more advanced... "Numerical Methods for Physics" is hard to find, but very good. "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" is not the same book, and while very good for numerical analysis, it isn't an ideal book for learning simulation techniques. If you're interested in related fields, try looking on Amazon under Books/Subjects/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Compute r Mathematics. There's stuff on 3D graphics algorithms, signal processing, crypto, genetic algorithms, organic and physical chemistry sims, and more... just be aware that there are a lot of books on using Matlab/Mathematica/Maple/etc.

This is a subject on which I am as close to a world expert as it's possible to get. If you are familiar with MMOG development, you may have heard of MUD-Dev. If you do a search for my name and "physmud" you'll turn up hundreds of articles on the simulation of physics in a game engine. I used to simulate multi-day trajectories of orbital and ballistic bodies for SDI purposes for a living. I know just about all there is to know about this kind of modeling, and where you can take a shortcut, how to do a numerical approximation in n or nlogn steps when possible, what the inaccuracies introduced by each approximation would be... sometimes, I know how to do an exact solution to a transformation in a far smaller amount of time, using a jacobian transformation on complex geometries with an angular integration... but the reason I know this is, I learned on the job, and I took a degree (plus a bit) in physics, and I read all the books I could find. So, it is with regret that I say this book was not terribly good. I've seen better in a text entitled "An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods, Applications to Physical Systems", a not too well written textbook with source in BASIC, but at least featuring a fair breakdown in the nature of algorithms, numerical integration, efficiency and accuracy, etc. A much better choice, IMO, would be "Numerical Recipies in C", though it's a little more advanced... "Numerical Methods for Physics" is hard to find, but very good. "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" is not the same book, and while very good for numerical analysis, it isn't an ideal book for learning simulation techniques. If you're interested in related fields, try looking on Amazon under Books/Subjects/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Compute r Mathematics. There's stuff on 3D graphics algorithms, signal processing, crypto, genetic algorithms, organic and physical chemistry sims, and more... just be aware that there are a lot of books on using Matlab/Mathematica/Maple/etc.

This is a subject on which I am as close to a world expert as it's possible to get. If you are familiar with MMOG development, you may have heard of MUD-Dev. If you do a search for my name and "physmud" you'll turn up hundreds of articles on the simulation of physics in a game engine. I used to simulate multi-day trajectories of orbital and ballistic bodies for SDI purposes for a living. I know just about all there is to know about this kind of modeling, and where you can take a shortcut, how to do a numerical approximation in n or nlogn steps when possible, what the inaccuracies introduced by each approximation would be... sometimes, I know how to do an exact solution to a transformation in a far smaller amount of time, using a jacobian transformation on complex geometries with an angular integration... but the reason I know this is, I learned on the job, and I took a degree (plus a bit) in physics, and I read all the books I could find. So, it is with regret that I say this book was not terribly good. I've seen better in a text entitled "An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods, Applications to Physical Systems", a not too well written textbook with source in BASIC, but at least featuring a fair breakdown in the nature of algorithms, numerical integration, efficiency and accuracy, etc. A much better choice, IMO, would be "Numerical Recipies in C", though it's a little more advanced... "Numerical Methods for Physics" is hard to find, but very good. "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" is not the same book, and while very good for numerical analysis, it isn't an ideal book for learning simulation techniques. If you're interested in related fields, try looking on Amazon under Books/Subjects/Science/Mathematics/Applied/Compute r Mathematics. There's stuff on 3D graphics algorithms, signal processing, crypto, genetic algorithms, organic and physical chemistry sims, and more... just be aware that there are a lot of books on using Matlab/Mathematica/Maple/etc.

EverQuest is a MUD (Multi User Dungeon/dimension); its a game.

Furcadia is really not a MUD; it's a MUSH (Multi User Shared/simulated Hallucination); it's a chat room.

Obviously MUD and MUSH online environments evoke aspects of both game and chat room, but to different degrees.

I still think the "points" orientation is more compelling than the "relationships." Examining the number of commercial companies targetting MUD-like environments vs MUSH-like ones, plus a some pseudo-statistical data would support this view.

Why does the population prefer this? I'll leave that question to your imagination or more followups.

--LP

If you're interested in the design, development, and implementation of MUDs, and that enclude Everquest, WorldForge, UltimaOnline, TheRealm, Skotos, BatMUD, LambdaMOO, etc, have a look into the MUD-Dev mailing list. It is a high signal list (typically 10 posts a day) which features many of the architects, designers, implementors, and inspirations of the above games and many others

• https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev/

MUD-Dev has been active since the late 1980s, but unfortunately the archives only extend back to 1996 due to the earlier traffic being lost:

• http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/

If you're interested in the design, development, and implementation of MUDs, and that enclude Everquest, WorldForge, UltimaOnline, TheRealm, Skotos, BatMUD, LambdaMOO, etc, have a look into the MUD-Dev mailing list. It is a high signal list (typically 10 posts a day) which features many of the architects, designers, implementors, and inspirations of the above games and many others

• https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev/

MUD-Dev has been active since the late 1980s, but unfortunately the archives only extend back to 1996 due to the earlier traffic being lost:

• http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/

Link one: http://www.kanga.nu/arch ives/MUD-Dev-L/1998Q4/msg00164.php

Link two: http://www.samurai.com/list s/bryans-list-1998/0398.html

I haven't tried it because I'm stuck on a windows box without a decent nslookup but it looks simple enough.

Ah, the irony:

The rights to Paranoia were recently licenced by one of the more innovative (text based) commercial mud companies around...

Skotos has the info in this press release.

Also of interest is the text mud The Eternal City www.eternal-city.com, as well as others listed in the MUD-Dev FAQ

Text muds may not be the same, but they're hardly dead... and the best ones are emerging as hybrid graphical/text muds.

Out there on the web, we've got this site...

MUD-Dev is a professional and advanced amatuer discussion and design sharing forum, based around a mailing list and the kanga.nu domain. These topics are a regular subject of discussion there.

Follow this for a philosophical/technical discussion about trusting the client; includes significant amounts of contribution by Raph Koster (OU's Designer Dragon)
This is a currently running discussion about controlling "grief players"...

Take a look... there's some good stuff in here.

Out there on the web, we've got this site...

MUD-Dev is a professional and advanced amatuer discussion and design sharing forum, based around a mailing list and the kanga.nu domain. These topics are a regular subject of discussion there.

Follow this for a philosophical/technical discussion about trusting the client; includes significant amounts of contribution by Raph Koster (OU's Designer Dragon)
This is a currently running discussion about controlling "grief players"...

Take a look... there's some good stuff in here.

Out there on the web, we've got this site...

MUD-Dev is a professional and advanced amatuer discussion and design sharing forum, based around a mailing list and the kanga.nu domain. These topics are a regular subject of discussion there.

Follow this for a philosophical/technical discussion about trusting the client; includes significant amounts of contribution by Raph Koster (OU's Designer Dragon)
This is a currently running discussion about controlling "grief players"...

Take a look... there's some good stuff in here.

I actually wrote an (albeit crappy) essay on the topic of wether Bazaars obeyed Brooks' Law or not. Or, more accurately, wether they obeyed the Law of Diminishing Returns.

I submitted it to Slashdot ... but I'm not ESR, now am I :)

Check it out at:

http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/docs/extess/