Multi-User Dungeon Pioneer Interviewed

Thanks to Stratics for posting an interview with Richard Bartle, the co-creator of the original text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) environment. This chat with Bartle, who is also renowned for writing Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, an early exploration of the effects of PKing (player killing) on virtual worlds, discusses the current crop of MMORPGs and their likely longevity: "Sooner or later a major world WILL be closed down, but I think they are far more stable then many players realise." Bartle's website also contains a treasure trove of early writings on MUDs, both by Bartle himself and other pioneers, and it's interesting to contrast this new interview with a 1995-era interview with Bartle, in which he foreshadows this new era of graphical MMORPGs.

Comments

"HCSD" is good but ...

[UnknownSoldier]

I disagree with his assertion that a world "needs" PKs. I played UO for a number of years, and had a lot of friends leave precisely because of PKs. Guess what, getting killed was NOT fun for a lot people -- if a person is not having fun, the game is not a good one.

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[Kevin Stevens]

I think a necessary component of allowing TK's is making the penalty for being killed not that onerous. It sucks to get killed and then lose a level, your equipment, etc, and then have to work your way back up. In addition, PK'ing needs to be tightly controlled, so some level 500 or so player doesnt prey upon some newbie. Confining it to specific areas and allowing it only within certain skill ranges is necessary. In general, it is best to let the noobs run around fighting NPC's, allowing only the higher level characters to kill each other- especially since they are more involved in the game and therefore better equipped to handle it- A player may have a vendetta against another player and use his social connections to seek revenge, and as long as it is all done 'in character' and somewhat maturely, it could add a great storyline to the game.

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[kulmala]

I disagree with his assertion that a world "needs" PKs.


In the interview, Bartle claims he has made no such assertion:

[People] seem to know me for [...] writing a paper, "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who Suit MUDs," where I advocate PKing. I did write the paper, but I don't advocate PKing in it; rather, I explain what effects of having (or not having) PKers are on virtual worlds, so designers can anticipate the problems associated with their preferred approach.

And, in HCDS itself, Bartle writes:

As mentioned earlier, this paper is not intended to promote any one particular style of MUD.

FWIW, I don't detect any strong pro-PK bias in HCDS. (Back when I used to MUD, I myself disliked PKing.)

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[KDan]

I disagree 100%. What's very important is to make absolutely certain that a player who's careful and quick enough can avoid being pk'ed - that there are no ways that you can be pk'ed without any warning. Ie, give every player a fair chance of getting out of it alive no matter how good the pk'er is.

However, making the pk onerous is a requirement for there to be pk's at all! For instance, in Diablo 2 (not hardcore mode though) there is no pkilling. It's all a joke, because you don't lose anything except a little bit of xp and some gold, so no one really cares about being pk'ed. On this mud I used to play, though, where you lost everything you were carrying, not to mention 1/3 of a level of xp (and there were only 30 levels overall, so that was a lot), and with the possiblity of losing stats points if you lost a level, dying *really* mattered. That gave you a very good motivation to:
1) Form groups of trusted players that you knew weren't going to pk you.
2) Be very aware of what other groups/clans/lone assholes were known to pk randomly so that you could get away quickly if you met them.
3) Never leave your character sitting on his ass in the wilderness - only do that in 'safe rooms' like the inn and the guilds and such, cause otherwise even a clueless newbie could kill you.
4) Always carry the essential stuff to get away from anywhere quick (ie several scrolls of recall, and wear a lucky charm to prevent other people from summoning you).

These all made the game much more fun, because there was an element of risk. I never saw a single person complain that this mud was not balanced pk-wise, though at some points in the faraway past (before I started playing it) it had some unbalances such as a clan taking over the fountain of a major city and charging coins to allow people to fill their waterskins, on penalty of death. Even that was referred to by all with some fondness though.

Even when I got pk'ed, I could always point the finger to one point where I panicked and didn't do the right thing or didn't know the right thing, and fucked up. I had the means to avoid pk. That's how it should be balanced.

Daniel

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[(trb001)]

Most of the time, when people say that PKing is needed, I would agree with this caveat...PKing is one of many different ways to play a game. Exploration, questing, building, these are all important too. PKers are important, IMHO, because they add and indeterminate amount of danger to a world.

Imagine a world with no PKing...what mortal dangers does your character really face. It's not a real world simulation if you can't kill each other. Now, as many have pointed out, your typical PKer would walk into a room with you, slay you, and be headed off to the next room to kill your buddy before you could type 'Ho there!'. Most players could probably be described as 'jackasses'. That doesn't mean, however they aren't necessary. What is necessary is a way to curtail the behavior so that, just as in the real world, there are consequences for your actions. If you kill another player that happens to be good alignment, I would imagine the local authorities aren't going to like you. As with the real world, you best make sure you can handle the authorities and the gangs of do-gooders that will come around looking to snag the price on your head.

I do think PKing is essential...I don't a game should promote ONLY PKing (a lot of MUDs advertised for that, and I failed to see how they kept a user base).

--trb

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[Doctor Cat]

I'd say with some six billion people on this planet, there are bound to be some who: A) only will play a game with PKing in it, B) will play games that have it, but would prefer to be able to avoid it, and C) will only play games with no PKing (or a switch where they can "opt out" of it). My assertion would be that category A contains the fewest humans (most of them "hard core gamers"), B has more, and the majority of the human race falls into category C. The most popular multiplayer games online by sheer numbers are still simple card games like Spades and Hearts, mostly.

Of course this opinion applies mainly to the MUD style games, where being killed usually involves losing resources and/or progress you put noticable amounts of time and effort into acquiring. Part of the brilliance of Doom/Quake/Half-Life and the many others in that genre is that when you die, all you lose is the weapons you spent the last 30 seconds running around and gathering up. The victor gets the satisfaction of "I killed you", the loser doesn't feel as upset as when killed in a MUD. Also the fast pace and simpler gameplay makes it likely that most or all of the players will get at least *some* kills. Contrast this to MUDs/MMORPGs where often only the killer(s) will have a "win" to be satisfied about in a given play session, and the victims have nothing to be happy about. In "low impact death" games like Quake, a higher percentage of the population will be in categories A and B than in games like Everquest.

Odd

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

That was kind of an odd interview. He kept giving weird answers. I also would've expected him to really be playing more games, since he's famous for making the first MUD. I thought he would've been one of the huge MMORPG people.

Best Bartle Quotes

[Demona]

From "Interactive Multi-User Computer Games", Dec. 1990:

Running a MUA is not simply a case of mounting a game on a computer and inviting all-comers to play. MUAs arouse such emotions in their players that they will often resort to lying, cheating and vitriolic abuse to achieve whatever goals they have set themselves.

MUAs which are played mainly by teenagers are more likely to be violent and acrimonious than those played mainly by adults in their thirties.

Top-heavy games are hard to deal with, because once players have reached wiz level it is often impossible to remove them without causing even worse problems.

...almost every MUA has its prophets of doom who will tell anyone willing to listen that the game has gone downhill since the "fun" days of yesteryear, and it's only a matter of time before it keels over. Reviewers who are talking to players should be ready to hear this kind of morose rambling, and only give it credit if it is substantiated in talks with others.

Confessions of an Arch-Wizard

[Hobart]

2 things:

1. If you haven't read it before, check out Confessions of an Arch-Wizard . Imagine "BOFH" meets online RPG's. It'll bring a smile to your face.

2. One of the more popular MUDs, AberMUD, was written by Linux's own Alan Cox!

   One player of the Essex MUD was Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy. He wrote (with a bit of help) AberMUD, named after the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, which he attended at the time. It was originally implemented on a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS but was soon ported to UNIX.

Re:forever

[Doctor Cat]

and a little support from the developer

That's really the key phrase for me in the above comments. I think in general, when the control of the game is in the hands of a small company or group of people that did the project not only as a business venture, but as a labor of love, there's some chance of them trying to keep it going for more than a decade. (Though they may lose interest, focus, financial resources to do so, or get sucked into newer projects that pay the bills). I know Gemstone III is still running after a really long time, and still making money. (I think it was the first online game to make over a million dollars in gross revenues in one year). Achaea is another for-pay game I'd expect to see stick around for a long time.

When there's a big corporate daddy that has final say, games are more likely to die off when their usage (and thus revenues) fall below a certain point. And since graphic games are a lot more expensive to create, you'll usually (though not always) see them under the control of a big corporation. I have occasionally seen small groups of people acquire rights to their dearly beloved game after it's been shut down, but usually they come back a lot smaller, and gradually fade from sight. Castle Infinity from Starwave was one of those. More recently, two of the original programmers of Meridian 59 got the rights back from 3DO, and seem to be doing ok so far, even fixing some old bugs and adding new features. And the latest incarnation of Habitat in the US, Dreamscape, is still limping along the last I heard. Something like server emulators as an option to keep a game alive is a newer phenomenon, but I think those would have trouble living much past the five year mark, because the community will fragment to multiple emulators right from the start, the emulators won't have 100% of the features people liked in the original game, and the game probably won't progress technologically or artistically on the client end.

I've always deliberately kept my team and my overhead small on my game. For the first few years, we worked other full-time jobs and maintained and expanded it in our spare time - and operational and support costs are still so low we could switch back to doing that in a heartbeat, if we really had to. In addition, I owned over 50% of the company when two of us founded it, I own over 50% of it now, and I will always own over 50% of it. I won't sign any contracts that'd give any outside party the authority to shut our game down for good, so nobody can get rid of it till they pry my source code from my cold, dead fingers. I think I ought to easily be able to live another 50 years or more, so maybe I can set some kind of new duration record eventually!

Though I do think in 50 years most kids would rather play the new 4D holo-stim games than my old technologically backwards crude looking "retro" game. Also I think MUD 2 is still running somewhere, which started a long time before Furcadia did. I don't know if there's any copies of MUD 1 running anywhere - probably so. I think a few of the old mid-70s Plato multiuser graphic dungeon games that preceeded MUD can still be found on things like NovaNet, though I haven't checked in the last couple of years.

Bartle Column at Skotos

[herderofcats]

In addition to his excellent website, Bartle has also been doing a column at Skotos Articles called Notes from the Dawn of Time.

The column tends to be more technically focused then the other columns at Skotos, with topics including issues of mud text parsing, code inheritance and heirarchies in muds, methods of generating quests, etc.

-- Herder of Cats

Re:forever

[Psychochild]

More recently, two of the original programmers of Meridian 59 got the rights back from 3DO, and seem to be doing ok so far, even fixing some old bugs and adding new features.

Yep. We're located at http://www.meridian59.com/. We're even working on a new rendering engine for the game.

The trick is to stay small enough to be self-supporting until you can grow normally. I love Meridian, so we've taken steps to make sure it'll be around for a long time. :)

My thoughts,

Brian "Psychochild" Green