The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [70]
Social worlds, on the other hand, are the opposite of player-killer servers. They exist to promote dialogue and foster social networks between players. The least-rich media forums include chat rooms, and the more advanced networks, such as Second Life, contain fully realized avatars. Most games of this sort do not have a combat system. Socializers are best served by this style of game.
Finally there are the online role-playing games that seek to satisfy both groups. Player-killing or socializing is emphasized or regulated on certain servers. Combat is an integral part of the game, but so is trade and character growth. Low-media-rich games of this sort include MUDs, while the more advanced include MMORPGs. We will discuss massive multiplayers in a later chapter.
History
With Dungeons & Dragons so popular on campus and the rules everevolving from the relatively niche art of miniature wargaming, it was perhaps inevitable that college students would adapt computers to handle the complex rules. For players who were not statistically inclined, these rules were necessary evils. With a computer doing all the work, the players could enjoy the less math-heavy aspects of the game.
In the early days of MUD development, personal computers were not yet ubiquitous. One large group that did have access to computer mainframes was college students. The earliest computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and MUDs emerged from these systems. A cat-and-mouse metagame ensued as students sought to hide their games from faculty who didn’t want to see their considerable resources used for purely recreational purposes. Many of these early games have been lost to history as a result.
The powerful mainframe computers had several built-in advantages that lent themselves to gaming, not the least of which was that a large group of players all had access to the machine. This meant that games could be played cooperatively amongst groups of college students. Collaborative play was not available to personal computer users until the Internet and computing power caught up with mainframe processors. As a result, several advancements in gameplay that debuted on mainframe games were later “dumbed down” for personal computers (Barton 2008:30).
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle first discovered the single-player game known as ADVENT in 1979. His interest piqued, Bartle craved a more participatory experience similar to Dungeons &Dragons. After college, he created the first MUD (Barton 2008:38).
Jim Schwaiger produced an extremely difficult variant known as Oubliette on the PLATO system. Oubliette featured 15 races and 15 classes, each with various stat bonuses and penalties, and armor and weapon proficiencies. To survive, players had to work in groups. It also featured taverns, guilds, and “charmees”—animal companions that would find their analogue in the pet code of massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Oubliette had one unusual feature: the ability for female characters to seduce the opposition, either converting them to henchmen or dying in the effort. This was an important turning point for the fellowship’s debut in the interactive fiction environment. It transformed MUDs from solitary play to adventuring parties that relied on each other for survival. However, even though Oubliette was a multiplayer game, it was not a persistent game world (Barton 2008:34).
MUD, or Essex MUD or MUD1, ran on the Essex University network. After Bartle licensed MUD1 to CompuServe, Essex MUD was closed. This left only MIST, a MUD derivative, which would go on to become very popular until 1991 when