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Gaming Roots: MUD and the Birth of MMOs
angry tapir writes "I recently had a chance to interview Richard Bartle — the creator of MUD, considered the grandfather of modern massively multiplayer online games. MUD had a text-based interface, but despite that, its design was hugely influential on modern MMOs."
The thing about MUDs were, it was very up front about your options: Go North, Go West, or Get Eaten By Grue. Modern MMOs try to sell themselves as "fully immersive", but just try running out of the battlefield area once... flashing red lights and your character either explodes, or magically teleports. Very realistic... I know that when I make a wrong turn in my car, if I don't make a u-turn in the next 60 seconds, my car explodes and the police are sent out to pick up little bits of me splattered all over the roadway and other drivers.
I guess my point is... MUDs didn't hide the fact that there were limitations, and in fact turned it into clever logic puzzles and such to solve. They were about having fun and thinking your way out, rather than focusing on beautiful walls of text and then having your only option being pressing ENTER repeatedly, which is what today's MMOs feel like.
The older games were more creative, and they made do with a lot less. Today it's all about achieving technical perfection but without any real substance.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I had the misfortune of doing my degree at Essex from 1982 to 1985. I sacrificed all my mainframe time to play this instead of doing my coursework. :-)
Wonder why my degree isn't a 1st?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
That summary was both informative and well crafted... Almost a bit too long but I think you stopped yourself before it became "wordy"
I remember wasting months of my time there until one day I realized "this is a giant waste of my time!", wished them good luck, and left.
I don't do MMORPGs for exactly this reason. Part of it is it's a waste of time, the other part of it is I don't have the necessary self-discipline to "limit myself" in a game venue that essentially punishes you for not playing.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
His famous paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit muds"
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
incorrectly assumes that the taxonomy MUST include kilers. "Old-Skool" MUDs like Eve allow PKing as a fundamental game design. Modern games do not. Modern game design is heavily driven by anti-griefing because most players don't find griefing to be fun _for_ them (those _doing_ the PKing definitely find a sense of adrenaline.) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer
I think you find most players these days are more interested in cooperation then competition hence dynamic spawn rates, heavily instanced world (so miners can't ninja loot your ore), etc.
Does Richard understand modern game design?
I think its just extremely hard to market to the Killers. There are thousands out there who like PKing and "greifing". Which is an art form and there should be design attention payed to it.
A game were you can loose nothing to a human opponent is kind of boring.
But the typical MMO does not cater to this mind set because they don't go hand in hand. You need less item dependency and more rock paper scissors strategy tempered by a bit of luck and the ability to pull tricks out of a hat to make for a good pvp experience. And you need to give people something to fight over. So that the dominance game can be won. But you need to make that thing not so strong that its impossible to unseat the kings.
The typical MMO caters to themed time investment in "rides". Which is counter intuitive to competitive warfare in themed areas. There needs to be plenty of parallelism and things that do not require player interaction shouldn't be time sinks. (like collecting ingredients for a piece of armor) unless the challenge is in keeping the area safe long enough for those items to be collected to outfit your side.
MUD, PLATO and the dawn of MMORPGs: "Richard Bartle has been answering a reader's suggestion that MUD was not, in fact, the first online RPG and that the original multi-user games actually ran on the University of Illinois' PLATO system - generally regarded as the birthplace of the 'online community' concept."
His famous paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit muds"
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm [mud.co.uk]
incorrectly assumes that the taxonomy MUST include kilers.
Those players are still there. Just because (some) modern games have been designed with the intent of excluding them doesn't make them stop existing, and knowing that they exist is important for future game designers.
I think you find most players these days are more interested in cooperation then competition
I'm a long way from convinced. If this were true, why do people complain every time an MMO's cash shop offers an item that gives the players who buy it an "advantage" (scare quotes because it's not entirely clear that items that make a game easier are actually advantageous to the players who purchase them, as doing so actually reduces the amount of fun they get from the game)?
Does Richard understand modern game design?
Yes. And if you want to start understanding it yourself, read that article. Then read it again. This is at least part of the key to why WoW is still the most popular subscription-based game in the world, all these years later.
When compared to the crapfest of MMO's that have been thrown in our faces over the last 15+ years now some of the MUD's, with only their text based representations, are more detailed and well thought out than their multi-million dollar flashy 3d grandchildren. In the world of MMO's (not all, but most), a picture definitely isn't worth a thousand words. More detail can be presented to the player in a well written sentence than 5k polygon. Imagination is great like that.
A game were you can loose nothing to a human opponent is kind of boring.
The problem is that almost all of these games are based on D&D style levels in one form or another. A level 10 character is going to kill a level 2 character every single day of the week and twice on Sunday, so you can't really run PK games like that, the obsessives would rule the roost. If games were less focused on turning individual PCs into demigods and more focused on something else (like actual adventures), you could have PK to a certain extent.
HI I NEW HERE
HOW DO I KILL PPL ON THIS MUD?!!!!!!!!!!!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Aww, c'mon slashdot!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
All your saying is modern game design has left out a group. One of the reasons I never started playing WoW was simply because you couldn't loot corpses after pk... I mean whats the point.
A game were you can loose nothing to a human opponent is kind of boring.
The problem is that almost all of these games are based on D&D style levels in one form or another. A level 10 character is going to kill a level 2 character every single day of the week and twice on Sunday, so you can't really run PK games like that, the obsessives would rule the roost. If games were less focused on turning individual PCs into demigods and more focused on something else (like actual adventures), you could have PK to a certain extent.
And there are games like that. My understanding (although I've never played it myself) is that Meridian 59 would be a good example.
You should try Vendetta Online. It's an indie space MMORPG where PvP and PK is central to gameplay. Death is cheap in most cases but if you're carrying around special equipment or cargo it can be quite a setback.
And yes, it runs linux :-) [and windows, mac, android, and ipad]
(actually, its development pre-dated EVE but it is a very small shop so things move a lot slower. The player base is small but very involved, and you can find the lead dev responding on the forums, making it a nice environment)
I heartily agree with the comment about orcs down the hall not hearing or seeing the attack on their colleagues and either coming to help or running away. it is, of course, a game design thing to make each encounter doable, rather than having to worry about more unpedictable situations where the group size suddenly doubles (the famed "ADD!!!") or quadruples because those who ran away came back with helpers.
Games have done limited variations on this:
- D&D Online, the monsters can hear you, and specifically will hear you smash a barrel on the other side of a closed door and wake up, being ready for your attack. Sound and sight matter, though still not quite as much as desired here.
- EverQuest and other games frequently have a monster run away through other packs, hoping you will stupidly follow and aggro a second group. Most people quickly learn not to do this. Sadly, the other pack doesn't join in in this case. I guess when tearing by, the monster under attack forgot to mention his colleagues were currently under assault.
- World of Warcraft had perhaps the most egregious example, where a group of two wandering (cycling on a large path) centaur "scouts" would attack you. You could kill one then run away. Eventually the other "scout" would give up and go back. Did he do what scouts are supposed to, hightail it back to camp and warn the others? No, he just resumes his path, making a mockery of the concept of being a "scout". Uhh, thanks for scouting for us, Beaky.
It's all this "idiocracy" of design that bothers me. I want to see dynamic, world-upsetting events and invasions. I don't mean one-shot stupidities, I mean real wars. I want to see cities invaded where the vendors and trainers get attacked and slaughtered, and the players don't know where to go anymore, so they'd better fight.
Death to the sentiment, "I don't wanna participate in that, and am irritated that I can't go do something else."
Well, nowadays we have enough games to accommodate you. Let's have a new one that shakes things up. Hell, for that matter, start out with a new principle: Ban all static zones and dungeons from design, and force designers to create a dynamic, ever-changing world. No more theme park zone designs, including safe cities.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://mume.org
Don't mix up competition/ PKing and griefing. Griefers are just anti-social, and only get pleasure from provoking negative reactions.
There's no such thing as a server where only griefers play and have fun attacking each other. If they do that, they aren't griefers.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The thing is that building takes much more time to do than destruction, so if you had marauding armies destroying major cities, the entire MUD would be a wasteland in no time whatsoever.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think it is a necessary element but should be blended with the rest of the game well.
For instance there is a huge difference between Defiance's sanctioned world PvP events and the game's balanced leveling system and games with either world PvE or PvP always on depending on the server and then elitist gear/ability metagaming past that.
Agreed, but greifing can be a competitive sport with the lack of any clear goals in a game. Which can inturn turn into a different form of competative play. It's a staged progression. Unfortunately the only people who are initially attracted to pvp and stick it through are people who either enjoy greifing or aren't bothered by it. That probably will not change. Their like the noob class that exists in regular PvE. They have not figured out how to put their skills to use yet in a social way.
"EverQuest and other games frequently have a monster run away through other packs, hoping you will stupidly follow and aggro a second group. Most people quickly learn not to do this. Sadly, the other pack doesn't join in in this case. I guess when tearing by, the monster under attack forgot to mention his colleagues were currently under assault."
It's been a long time since I've played EQ, but I'm almost certain that EQ mobs, at least back in the day, could transfer their "aggression". I think that it was faction-based... that is, if you were fighting an orc, and it ran away, it wouldn't cause any wandering centaurs to attack you. But if it ran away into another group of orcs, they *would* come after you, immediately. You didn't have to follow the orc you'd been fighting in order to be in trouble -- whole aspects of the game ("trains", the importance of snaring/rooting spells, etc.) depended on this behavior. Granted, it's possible, even likely that in the years since, Sony, Blizzard, and other game-makers have curbed this behavior to prevent malicious behavior (using these mechanisms to dump a huge mob of mobs (pun intended :p) on others, etc). But EQ *did* do this.
EQ also did at least one other thing that's specifically mentioned in the story as MMOs *not* doing. EQ mobs, if they spawned with an item that was better than their default attack, *would* use it, and often you *could* see it visually. Now, it's true that not all equipment items were visible on mobs. But weapons often were, at least on the obviously humanoid mobs (dragons didn't hold weapons they may have spawned, but orcs, frogloks, etc. did). They (as well as player pets, like elementals and skeletons) were also smart enough to use whatever was better (their natural attack, or the weapon). Hence the early tactic of giving necromancer skeleton pets two fine steel daggers to improve their damage output. Again -- this behavior may have been removed to avoid unfriendly behavior (giving low-level mobs high level weapons and laughing as they mowed through new players, etc.). but EQ did include stuff like this.
I'm far past my MMO days -- but I still think back on EQ fondly. It was far from perfect, but the shared experience and the community was top-notch. Everything I've heard/read says that this has largely been lost in more "modern" MMOs.
I still fondly remember a dikumud I played back in the late 90's (Ancalagon). I discovered an item duplication bug due to the server's slow writes of the player save data and the death traps (a special room that caused instant-death, delete all items, and return to menu). If you saved your character just before entering a death trap, and dropped all your items, then walk into the death trap, the server would dutifully delete your items in RAM (nothing), but then the save-write process would finally take place and your character would have all its pre-drop items upon reentering the game. Walk back to your pile of items, repeat. I had a bag of holding with sooo many diamonds. I just role-played from that point on. Didn't see the point in beating up monsters for treasure if I had an infinite supply.
Guildwars 2 had that. Entire towns get wrecked and you have to get a group going to take them back if you ever want to see NPCs in that area again.
That was pretty cool, until the WoW (and similar) game fans came, complained about everything that was different, and convinced the devs to put a bunch of things back for their comfort zone...but not everything. So now no one's happy.
RetroMUD has these! There are events where evil or holy warriors flood through portals and try to conquer the worlds, invading hordes akin to Day of the Triffids, balance swings where the NPC pantheon of RetroMUD takes a hand in the daily goings-on, and so on and so on and so on...
When I discovered RetroMUD I realized that it's the game that every MMO since 1997 has been trying to make with graphics. 100 levels, about 20 main classes and hundreds of smaller guilds, hundreds of skills and spells, exquisitely-balanced combat... a lot of fun. Shame it's text-only, I get tired of reading after a couple of hours at a time.
The thing is that building takes much more time to do than destruction, so if you had marauding armies destroying major cities, the entire MUD would be a wasteland in no time whatsoever.
The game should include natural limiting forces. There's not enough food to raise enough armies to destroy all the towns all the time, etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not much about Roy Trubshaw the original inventor of MUD but then again I used to work with Roy and had no idea he'd done such a thing in his student days. Lovely guy but not exactly a self publicist!
ADVENT was a great game, am pondering porting David Platt's A-Code to our rules engine...
LORD was a BBS game from the early 90s. It was a lot like a MUD (arguably the same concept, using text to select options instead of typing the options.. its been so long that perhaps my memory fails and you could type options). It was really fun. It was my first experience "meeting" people in the digital domain. I was twelve.
There was a very popular MUD called Gemstone III which took off in the days of AOL and the early internet. To this day, I still use the typing system that I acquired "naturally" by having to type 'kil' (the shortest acceptable version of "kill") 'nym' (nymph) 'hob' (hobgoblin), 'say', and, of course, the cardinal direction N E S W. I still type this way, using five or six of my fingers to type. I can type 100 words per minute if I am simply writing my thoughts and not transcribing. Obviously some words are easier to type. I had a girlfriend on Gemstone III. I had a wife on Gemstone III. I had cybersex on Gemstone III. I won poetry competitions on Gemstone III.
I also played a MordorMUD (Isengard and ChaosMUD) and a DikuMUD whose name I have forgotten.
Now.. does the "immersion" in modern graphic MUDs or "MMORPGs" offer these kind of experiences? I say "no, they do not." The reading and writing skills I acquired from that game have proved rewarding.
However... I noticed that I started prefacing my statements with "say" instead of just saying what I wanted to say, i.e., I would say, "Say, Hey guys, how's it going?" and sometime I would say the word "smile" instead of actually smiling. I thought hard about this and decided that I could probably learn a foreign language or develop some other skill instead of playing the game, so I quit when I was 17.
Going on a murderous character killing "rampage" (which was not impossible in the game, but was against the rules, and punishable) was a satisfying way to ensure that I would not play anymore.
FULL DISCLOSURE: These are products I created and operated by my company. But very relevant.
The term MUD tends to harken back to an earlier time before 'puters had graphical horsepower of any note. But the reality is, online text-based games come in all varieties, and the one's we operate are in a league all their own. More significantly, they are still serious ongoing commercial efforts. If you want to see what a MUD can be when it's been in continuous development, expansion for decades, then check out:
http://gemstone.net/
http://dragonrealms.net/
GemStone IV, which began its life as a sequel to GemStone ][ (then called GemStone III just to confuse everyone) first came to existence on the online service GEnie. Eventually it moved to CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy and others. When online services went the way of the doodoo bird, we moved them to the internet machine. DragonRealms is somewhat younger than GemStone, but same sort of history. I began work on it shortly before forming my company Simutronics, something like 27 years ago.
Despite having worked on lots of other types of games, such as mobile titles, and working on other PC/Mac/Linux games of a much more graphical variety now... these text based games remain the corner stone of Simutronics.
David Whatley
bartel's not what made MUDs and MOOs important or useful... and only hipster without any sense of historical context waste time bothering with him as anything of anything. MUDs and MOOs are important tools... not the joker who coded them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
I'm surprised Bartle neglected to mention the most incredible thing about MUDs, which to this day has yet to be surpassed by even the most advanced MMOs. Once you reached the maximum level in MUD, you became a "Wizard". This gave the user access to the filesystem, and code-slinging capabilities. Since MUD runs an interpreted language, edits to the codebase could be seen immediately, in real-time, to the users. Wizards could essentially change the world as it was being played, creating endless opportunity for creativity and spawning some of the coolest MUD "worlds" imagineable. Of course, this presented a whole set of issues with ethics, balance, and cheating, but those got resolved by the best MUDs over time. Imagine if the next generation of MMO, or Diablo 4 or whatever, allowed for the players to graduate to "Wizard" status and create new worlds for people to play. Maybe then, these games could still be played over 20 years later like MUDs.
Ahh, Bartle is so pretentious, always inflating his worth. Starting his article with how hardly anyone will be able to understand him and peppering it with statements of how profound things are. He seems to be injecting his own narrative onto the zone while not acknowledging a core true, that many people approach the zone in different ways. There also seems to be something obnoxious about the way he ascribes the intent of the designers to the zone.
I will acknowledge that he highlights elements of the design, but they are not profound or revelatory. I feel like he is both simultaneously florid and ambiguous. There is a sensation that he knows something and that he's "trying" to communicate it to the reader. But, these ideas have been communicated much more clearly by others with much better formalization.
I also remember how he seemed to hold court on various forums, comporting himself as an elder statesman. I don't mean to diminish his accomplishments, but I find him grating and overly admired. The DIKU people arguably took a larger leap than MUD1 over zork and they make no pretensions to the same majesty. Bartle seems to be better at self promotion than either game design or communication in general.
I've just seen so many games where the pursuit of realism managed to destroy any sense of fun. I love that in WoW a "scout" doesn't call the whole village on you. The point is a pretense for creating a moving system of parts where you apply logic to separate them out into manageable bits to accomplish a goal. Now, maybe a game can do this better, but WoW is not "wrong" or "egregious" for doing it, its intended design and it plays well to a certain gamer. It is extremely hard to create dynamic mellifluous worlds that still build stable, engaging systems. Even harder to do it such that it works within budget (of developer time and of the computing hardware it will run on). Finally, I don't think most gamers want this. Sandbox games do not give the same sense of narrative or accomplishment, shifting the reward to a player's own creativity without making the world too dynamic; there are still rules!
There have been games I've played where griefers worked as a team to grief, were recognized by the general population as villains, and managed to drive a living narrative where they played the role of villains and the general population worked to survive them and build despite them. The closest MMO that comes to this sensation for me is EVE where certain corporations act in a griefing manner and cadres of cooperative people play the "good guys" and try to build systems. EVE certainly seems to encourage this with the nature of null sec and the ability to pirate other ships. I would say that this was sometimes intentional in muds that the various people running these games knew that the griefers were the central villain in the game's narrative and that whatever NPC villains were put in, were effectively just set pieces and not narrative focal points.
I played BatMUD and 3 Kingdoms back in the early-mid 90s. A lot of fun. Heck of a time sink though. On the other hand, "Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted." -- John Lennon / various attributions
Great to see they're still around. Amazing.
You just asked for Eve Online.
Please see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_%28PLATO%29
I realize I am now officially old (45), but we were playing a graphical, multi-user, chat-enabled, dungeon-crawling game before MUD1 was written. This article seems very weak in conveying the actual history. The mid 70s saw a lot of micro and global development of DnD type games, from paper and pencil versions, to versions in BASIC, to text-only Adventure-style MUD1 things, to more "advanced" things written in disturbingly crappy languages like PLATO's TUTOR. There were user forums, there were hacker attacks against servers and login systems, there were chat spaces, dungeon games, space games, tank warfare games. All with glorious 800x800 1 bit per pixel graphics.
Moria was early, but not the first. The Wikipedia article does not have a photo of the machine we played on, the IST. The IST was perhaps twice the total volume of the "IST 2" in the photo. Huge machines, separate modems with two rubber holes to jam the old AT&T phone receiver into. We played crappy dungeon games with people from Europe, Japan, and across the US and chatted constantly. I think the command was something like "SHOUT" to chat with people who were not in the same map XY, but it's been over 30 years, so forgive me if my memory of the commands is vague.
That article deserves to be deleted and the author mocked, not slashdotted.
Shift-stop, shift-stop, shift-stop.
While I agree with the sentiment, part of the problem is that it now takes hundreds of people to create the current semi-static MMO environment and keep it running while occasionally adding new content. To create the kind of constant-flux world environment you are talking about would be at least an order of magnitude harder, what with the need to be constantly adjusting everything for the new realities on the ground. It would be astronomically expensive to build and maintain, and I can't begin to imagine the nightmare that would be QA testing.
I can't imagine what you'd have to charge monthly to maintain such a world, while competing with free-to-plays.
Life needs more saving throws.
I don't know if you are who you say you are, but if so, I want to tell you that Dragonrealms still stands as my all-time favorite game!
I started playing DR in 6th grade when my parents had AOL by the minute. I convinced them to get unlimited so I could play. I played for years. I still remember everything about DR... From char creation, rat killing at the shipyard, learning how to skin, moving to goblin killing... Etc.
I still reference DR to my friends at work when we talk about online RPGs. No other game, especially graphical ones, have had anything close to the mechanics I love in DR like the stealth, stealing, and lock picking. I would lock pick all day long.
The only moral moment I've ever had in a game occurred in DR. I stole coin from someone and was caught, she chased me yelling to 'give me back my money!'. She chased me out of town and my friend killed her. I felt so bad I gave her the money and watched her grave and items. I still feel bad about it. Warcraft never gave me those feelings.
I could go on and on but I will stop. I just wanted to tell you how much I loved DR. I hope you were able to make some money off of it.
For me, it was mostly about having fun coding something cool, and the challenge of getting things to work :)
Also, I played AberMud before we started on DikuMud.
--Hans-Henrik
I still remember drawing maps and whatever it took to complete Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure back in the 1980's. It was Don Woods extended 140 location/350 points version.
Still love it and actually still play it; I've got it on my Android phone and it's the extended 660 points version from 1994 which is still available for download as a source tarball. I also have it on my personal server in case I get into withdrawal... There's still places I haven't been in this extended version.
> adventure4
[A-code kernel version 10.05; MLA, 01 Apr 94]
Welcome to Adventure4+ [660 point MLA version 10.06 - 26 Jul 95]
Would you like instructions? no
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully and a wide path leads northwest.
? enter
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There are some keys on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
? get all
You get the keys.
You get the lamp.
That should stir up a few memories...
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Bartle has made a career out of claiming he created the first MUD. He didn't. His claim is similar to the guy claiming he invented email. Both created programs that happened to have those names, MUD and in the other case, EMAIL. Somehow this makes them the inventors of it simply because of the filenames they chose. The fact is, MUDs were alive and well and thriving already on the PLATO system years before Bartle got involved. I am disappointed that Slashdot doesn't call Bartle on this.
tldr;
He was a prick back then, and he's still a prick.
(yes, I knew him 'back then').