Chapter: What They Are and Whence They Came
Although more abstract versions can, and do, exist, most virtual worlds adhere to certain conventions that distinguish them from related non-real spaces. The most important of these are
The world has underlying, automated rules that enable players to effect changes to it (although not to the rules that grant them this ability). This is the world's physics.
Players represent individuals "in" the world. They may wield partial or total influence over an army, crew or party, but there is only one game entity that represents them in the world and with which they strongly identify. This is their character. All interaction with the world and other players is channeled through characters.
Interaction with the world takes place in real time. When you do something in the world, you can expect feedback almost immediately.
The world is shared.
The world is (at least to some degree) persistent.
A chat room would not be a virtual world because it has no physics; a strategic wargame doesn't map the player onto a single character through which that player acts; a play-by-email game doesn't run in real time; a single-player game is not shared; a first-person shooter isn't persistent.
For some examples, the case is not so clear-cut. Are tabletop role-playing games virtual worlds, for example? No, because they're not automated, but it's a close call. Would a two-player educational MUD be a virtual world? Probably. Would a 500-player game with a world so vast that the players could never find each other? Yes, but under protest.
In practice, it's fairly easy to determine what is or isn't a virtual world simply by looking at its heritage. If its design draws heavily from the design of an existing virtual world, it almost certainly is one; if it doesn't, it almost certainly isn't.
The First Age: 1978?1985
Virtual worlds are often called MUDs because MUD was the name of the first one to prosper. Although earlier games had been written that might today be described as virtual worlds, they were seeds that fell on stony ground. MUD, by contrast, grew to produce seeds of its own.
MUD was programmed in MACRO-10 assembler on a DecSystem-10 mainframe at Essex University, England, in the fall of 1978. Its author was a talented Computer Science undergraduate, Roy Trubshaw. Version I was a simple test program to establish the basic principles by which a shared world could be maintained. When it worked, Roy immediately started on version II, a text-based virtual world that would be instantly recognizable as such even today. It was also written in MACRO-10, a decision that led to its becoming increasingly unwieldy as more and more features were added. Because of this, in the fall of 1979 Roy made the decision to begin work on version III of the game. He split it in two: The game engine was written in BCPL (the fore-runner of C); the game world was written in a language of his own devising, MUDDL (Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language). The idea was that multiple worlds could be constructed in MUDDL but would run on the same, unmodified engine (which was effectively an interpreter).
Roy had a basic working program by Easter 1980, but it only amounted to a fraction of what he envisaged. This being the final year of his degree, he realized that he did not have time to complete the project. Someone else would have to do it.
From the beginning, Roy had been open to suggestions from his friends as to how MUD could be extended and improved. Most of these ideas came from fellow undergraduates Richard Bartle (that's me) and Nigel Roberts. Unlike Nigel, I was younger than Roy and did not have to leave the university for another year (in fact, I was to stay until 1989; first as a postgraduate and then as a lecturer). Luckily, I was also a first-class programmer and had a strong background in gaming. Roy therefore passed MUD on to me, and I subsequently wrote the remainder of the engine and nearly all the world to produce what became the paradigm for the entire genre. That's enough blowing my own trumpet, you'll be relieved to know.
Roy had two motivations to write MUD. First, he had enjoyed single-player adventure games (Crowther and Woods' ADVENT; Anderson, Blank, Daniels, and Lebling's ZORK; Laird's HAUNT) and liked the idea of creating a multiplayer game along those lines. Secondly, he had a strong academic interest in writing programming language parsers and interpreters. The two came together when he discovered a means of sharing write-enabled areas of memory on the DEC-10 mainframe and mused on its potential uses.
The "D" in MUD stands for "Dungeon." Contrary to what many people assume, this has nothing to do with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and does not mean that the game world had a dungeon setting[2]. Instead, it is due to the fact that the version of ZORK Roy played was a Fortran port called DUNGEN[3]. Roy wanted something that was like a multi-user DUNGE(o)N, and the acronym MUD immediately presented itself.
[2] This is just as well, as it didn't.
[3] The DEC-10 used six-character, all uppercase filenames. This is why "Dungeon" is referred to as DUNGEN and "Adventure" as ADVENT by old-time hackers like me.
Essex University is a mere 45 minutes by road from the main (what was then the Post Office, but is now) British Telecom research facility, located at Martlesham Heath near Ipswich. This caused the university to be selected to pilot a new, experimental packet-switching service called EPSS. Among other things, EPSS allowed contact to and from the ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) net in the United States. Roy could therefore tell people in the U.S. about MUD, and some of them came to try it out[4]. The ARPA net eventually evolved to become what is known today as the Internet.
[4] A fact that has busted more than one twisted patent claim.
Nevertheless, MUD remained a mainly Essex University phenomenon in its formative years, existing primarily because of the largesse of the Computer Services team and their manager, Charles Bowman. In the teeth of complaints about wasted resources, members of the university's Computer Society were allowed to spend off-peak time doing anything non-academic they liked. Many of them chose to play MUD.
Some, however, were inspired to write their own games in MUDDL for use with the MUD engine. There were a number of these, of which the pre-eminent were ROCK (based on TV's Fraggle Rock Muppet show), MIST (original and anarchic), BLUD (original and bloody), and UNI (the Computer Science Department as a sword-and-sorcery virtual world).
Besides its EPSS connections, Essex University also had a number of modems for dial-up use. News of MUD reached the U.K.'s small community of BBS (bulletin board system) users, and they obtained permission to play the game by direct dial?just as long as they did so at times when any sane person would have been in bed for two hours. This they did, and demand grew so much that that they clubbed together and bought the university some extra modems so it could cope…!
Network uptake increased, and eventually all U.K. universities were connected to a system called JANet (Joint Academic Network). EPSS ceased to be experimental and became PSS, which enabled people with access to either company PSS accounts or substantial amounts of money to connect to the university's computer systems in yet greater numbers. In 1984?85, there were articles on MUD in practically all the specialist computer games magazines in the U.K. The floodgates opened.
The MUD engine had its limits. It could hold a maximum of 36 players at once[5], and if more wanted to play then a second game would have to be cranked up to supersede the first. Furthermore, it only ran on a DEC-10, and although copies were sent to other institutions in the U.K., Sweden, and Norway, only two of these allowed outsiders access (Dundee Technical College and Oslo University).
[5] The DEC-10 used a 36-bit world, and Roy assigned 1 bit per player for internal reference.
While Roy was still working on version II of MUD, another student at Essex University, Stephen Murrell, had written from scratch his own virtual world using a different means of handling inter-player communication (that of assigning devices). His game, PIGG, was also written in MACRO-10 and eventually ran into the same maintainability problems as MUD. Nevertheless, the precedent was set. A number of external players of MUD became inspired, or frustrated enough by it, to set about writing their own games.
The Second Age: 1985?1989
The first such virtual worlds to appear were Neil Newell's Shades, Ben Laurie's Gods, and AMP[6]. They were followed shortly by Pip Cordrey, et al's very active MirrorWorld. As these games were all derived from MUD, they became collectively referred to as "MUDs" or, occasionally, "MUGs" (Multi-User Games). The original MUD was dubbed MUD1 (even though it was in its third version) to disambiguate it from the class of MUDs. This marked the beginning of the second age of virtual worlds.
[6] Unfortunately, I only ever met the husband-and-wife team behind AMP once, and have been unable to recall their names. I don't think I ever did know for what AMP is an acronym.
The possibility of making money from these games arose, so MUD1 went live both on the dominant U.S. online service of the time, CompuServe, and a U.K. look-alike, CompuNet. A programmer at CompuNet, Alan Lenton, was moved to write his own virtual world, Federation II, which has the distinction of being the first MUD to have a non-Fantasy setting (it was Science Fiction).
MUD1, Federation II, Shades (on the Prestel Micronet teletext system), and Gods (in a German translation) went on to achieve commercial success. Scores of other MUDs were created in the U.K., written mainly by players of the Big Four. It was a time of great experimentation in both game world and game engine design, with much original work coming from the MirrorWorld group on their IOWA (Input/Output World of Adventure) system[7].
[7] This period of experimentation parallels that which took place in early conventional computer game design, although the two occurred quite separately.
Around this time, the decision was made to rewrite MUD1 from scratch as MUD2 (although it was actually version IV). The original architecture and its DEC-10 platform had proved too limiting, and MUDDL (which owed much to the database definition scheme employed by ADVENT) was not sufficiently powerful to handle advanced concepts. A new language, MUDDLE (Multi-User Dungeon Definition LanguagE), was developed from first principles specifically for writing MUDs. It turned out to be expressive enough to stand the test of time, and this was therefore the last occasion on which the game MUD was to be rewritten in its entirety.
Virtually all the key issues of virtual world design were identified in the first and second ages. By 1987, for example, all the protocols and in-game tools for dealing with player problems were in place and reasonably well codified, thanks to the pioneering efforts of people like Mark Longley (MUD1), Michael Lawrie (MIST), and Pip Cordrey (MirrorWorld). Sadly, however, this kind of knowledge was not passed on in its entirety.
Developers of descendent games usually knew what they ought to have, but not necessarily why they ought to have it, with the result that after several generations a number of important concepts had been forgotten.
Games that were launched 10 years later, therefore, had to rediscover some of the fundamentals the hard way.
Most of the MUDs that were written in the second age were programmed by enthusiasts at home[8]. At this time (but not for much longer), single-player text adventures were a very important part of the computer game market, so there were plenty of people who understood the principles. Because few academic institutions in the U.K. were as liberal with their computer resources as Essex University, those MUDs that were written at such places tended to achieve only local success.
[8] For a reasonably comprehensive survey of these, see http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/imucg.htm.
The exception was AberMUD, so called because it was written at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Its programmer, Alan Cox, wrote it in B (another fore-runner of C) for a Honeywell L66 mainframe under GCOS3/TSS in 1987. A year later, it was ported to C. This was a turning point in virtual world history. The game wasn't particularly advanced either technologically or in terms of content (it was very combat-oriented), but it was great fun. More importantly, in C it was positioned to make a huge advance: It could run under Unix.
The Third Age: 1989?1995
AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.
TinyMUD, by Jim Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon University, arrived in 1989. It had two main ancestors: AberMUD, and a VAX VMS game called Monster that had been released a year earlier. Monster (by Rich Skrenta at Northwestern University) was unusual in that it was written independently of the general MUD1 hierarchy. Its main innovation was the facility to create elements of the virtual world from within the world itself. This was something that had been removed from MUD1 in the switch from version II to version III.
TinyMUD was basically a stripped-down version of Monster. Although still a virtual world, it had practically no "game" aspect to it at all. Players could create new locations and objects (but not much functionality) almost with impunity. Whereas MUD1 and AberMUD had boasted around 400?500 discrete locations, a popular 1990 incarnation of TinyMUD called Islandia racked up over 14,000 of them in the few months of its existence.
The lack of game in TinyMUD meant that players spent most of their time creating things and talking about their creations. Although not the first primarily "social" virtual world (Clive Lindus' cleverly conceived Void[9] beat it by a few months), it was the one from which virtually all subsequent such worlds sprang. TinyMUD was deliberately intended to be distanced from the prevailing hack-and-slay AberMUD style, and the "D" in its name was said to stand for "Dimension" (or, occasionally, "Domain") rather than "Dungeon;" this is the ultimate cause of the MUD/MU* distinction that was to arise some years later.
[9] Its name over the years has been variously Void, The Void, and Vortex, but they're all the same place. Void is adult in nature, and was directly inspired by the first such virtual world, The Zone.
LPMUD was named after its author, Lars Pensjö of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Having played both AberMUD and TinyMUD, he decided he wanted to write his own game with the adventure of the former and the user-extensibility of the latter. Whereas most early MUD designers were of the haughty opinion that players weren't as good at world creation as they, Lars believed the opposite: that players could build a better world than he could himself. To this end, he developed an in-game programming language called LPC that allowed players of sufficient experience to add not only objects, but also powerful functionality to the game as it ran.
This was a major advance, and introduced many people to the wonders of programming without frying their brains in the manner that conventional academic learn-to-program courses tend to do. LPC was sufficiently well designed that it is still very much in use today.
DikuMUD was created at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (Datalogisk Institutved Københavns Universitet), Denmark. Released in 1990, its authors were a group of student friends: Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. It was designed purely as a better AberMUD, and made no reference to either TinyMUD or LPMUD. Whereas these other two games had moved toward allowing on-the-fly changes to be made to the virtual world, DikuMUD's designers went in the opposite direction and hard-coded everything they could.
However, they hard-coded it very well: DikuMUD ran "out of the box" and was organized very well internally. A reasonable C programmer could easily modify the original DikuMUD code and produce a new world of their own, or change the data files to create a differently-appearing one. Many did.
As a result, several major codebases (standalone MUD program suites) were created from the basic DikuMUD original, the main ones being Circle, Silly, and Merc. Merc spawned ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy, among others, and these in turn had their own spin-offs. All appeared?and continue to appear?in a dizzying number of sub-versions.
LPMUD did not inspire quite so many offshoots, because LPC was flexible enough to allow people to write their own games without writing their own game engines. Although most LPMUDs are combat-oriented, critically (and unlike DikuMUDs) they don't have to be[10].
[10] For a comparison between LPMUDs and DikuMUDs, see Rawn Shah's and James Romine's, Playing MUDs on the Internet. New York, John Wiley, 1995.
The TinyMUD family tree is perhaps the most interesting of the three main AberMUD-inspired branches. TinyMUD itself was little more than a mere proof of concept. Incarnations of the game would appear on some long-forgotten university Unix machine, enjoy a few short months of brilliant existence, and then collapse under the weight of acrimony, apathy, and full disk packs that they caused. Those players who weren't put off virtual worlds for life would then migrate[11] to another nascent TinyMUD and the cycle would repeat, slash-and-burn style.
[11] Those that had Internet access would. It was by no means universal at the time, and not every player could find another home when his or her local TinyMUD was shut down.
The problem was that players couldn't actually do much in TinyMUDs except invite one another to admire their latest piece of what might as well have been wallpaper. One player, Stephen White, decided in 1990 to extend the functionality of TinyMUD and wrote TinyMUCK (muck being a kind of mud). Using this as his template, he then produced MOO (MUD, Object Oriented). MOO introduced a fully functional scripting language (as such in-world programming languages[12] are called) and thus brought the LPC-like capabilities to social-oriented virtual worlds. MOO had two important offspring: Pavel Curtis' LambdaMOO (which was to become a favorite of journalists, academics, and social misfits) and, via CoolMUD, ColdMUD (an attempt to create a software-engineering quality virtual world authoring system).
[12] So are some out-of-world programming languages, as we'll see later in this chapter.
MOO's descendents have found a niche in the educational world, as they are easy to use and (like LPMUDs) can demonstrate the principles of programming to youngsters without scaring the wits out of them. They were not, however, the only important codebase family to come out of TinyMUCK.
Larry Foard released TinyMUSH later in 1990. The "MUSH" part originally didn't mean anything special, but was later retrofitted as "Multi-User Shared Hallucination." The TinyMUSH codebase introduced several advanced features, such as event triggering and software automatons (known as puppets), which together facilitated role-playing. Consequently, most of the derivatives of TinyMUSH (known as MUSHes) are role-playing in nature: What you do defines what you are, rather than the reverse.
From a non-historical perspective, the significant property of MOOs, MUSHes, and other descendents of TinyMUCK (known as MUCKs) is that they don't have computer-controlled monsters for players to seek out and, within the context of the virtual world, kill. Players of these classes of virtual worlds are the ones most likely to use the term MU*, reserving MUD to mean those games that do have computer-controlled monsters for players to seek out and kill[13].
[13] In this context, MUDs are frequently dismissed somewhat haughtily as inferior game forms. Players of MUDs reciprocate by calling the MU* brigade carebears.
The third age of virtual worlds was thus a period of huge expansion. More people sampled virtual worlds than ever before. Indeed, a study of traffic on the NSFnet backbone in 1993 showed that just over 10% of the bits belonged to MUDs; in other words, before the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) MUDs constituted some 10% of the Internet!
There were less positive consequences, however. Whereas in earlier times anyone who wanted to run a virtual world would have to write one from first principles, the sudden preponderance of codebases meant that this was no longer the case. If you wanted to run a virtual world, you simply downloaded an off-the-shelf one and voila!?one virtual world! Although in theory developers could change any aspect of what they had downloaded (particularly for LPMUDs and TinyMUD derivatives), in practice most people simply built on what they already had. This meant that two worlds using the same codebase would probably have the same basic geography and physics, with multiple extensions. Although some old-timers have complained that this leads to homogeneity and thereby stifles creativity, that's not the main bugbear. Rather, it's that if designers don't understand why the partial design they begin with does what it does (and doesn't do what it doesn't do), how can they be sure their changes are for the best? Come to that, how can they be sure the template they begin with isn't itself flawed in some way?
Were only undergraduates and amateur enthusiasts considered, the third age of virtual worlds is still very much upon us. Several thousand LPMUDs, DikuMUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and MUCKs exist, some of them with impressive numbers of players. How-ever, the torch of innovation was soon to be picked up by a different bearer?business.
The Fourth Age: 1995?1997
MUDs might very well have been called SOGs had things turned out differently.
Around the same time that Roy Trubshaw began work on what was to become MUD1, Alan Klietz wrote Sceptre of Goth on the CDC Cyber run by MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium). The game (also known as Empire and The Phoenix) was based on an earlier MECC game called Milieu. It was developed completely independently; its mechanics owed more to Dungeons & Dragons than did MUD1's, particularly in its use of character classes.
Sensing the commercial possibilities, Klietz ported it to run on a PC and ran it as a dial-up game. It met with local success, so incarnations were set up in several major U.S. cities. Klietz's company (GamBits) then sold the software to another company. Unfortunately, this second company ran into severe legal problems and ran out of money. Sceptre of Goth passed to a creditor, and was never released again. Thus, through bad luck, the first commercial virtual world did not have the impact that it might have had, although it did make enough of a mark to influence the design of some later codebases, in particular Mordor.
In the U.K., offshoots of the MUD1 family tree had done well, but were stymied by the system of high telephone charges that was then in place in that part of the world.
When it costs more to connect to a game than it does to play it, there will inevitably be problems. People were running up phone bills of £2,000 to £3,000 a quarter?this at a time when the average salary was under £9,000 for an entire year.
The situation was little better in the rest of Europe; Gods did well in Germany, but couldn't really be said to have cracked the market. Shades, released in a French translation for the Minitel teletext system, made nowhere near the £70,000 or more a year it had been clearing in the U.K.
The picture was different in the U.S., where local phone calls were basically free. CompuServe recruited over a million subscribers to its system, charging them at premium rates to access data. Games formed a big part of its profit: Whereas it takes only two minutes to check how your stocks are performing, you might spend two hours playing a game. However, CompuServe did not promote its games, fearing that to do so would discourage parents from signing up to the service lest it corrupt their children.
Rivals to CompuServe were not so coy. GEnie was launched in 1985 by the former head of games at CompuServe, Bill Louden. Naturally, it put games to the fore, as did another 1985 start-up called QuantumLink. Although QuantumLink carried a very influential precursor to graphical virtual worlds (Lucasfilm's Habitat, designed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar) and was destined to become the mighty America Online (AOL), at the time it was GEnie that drew all the attention. Genie's games-first strategy worked well, in that by the early 1990s hard-core gamers accounted for nearly 70% of GEnie's revenue. However, GEnie suffered from lack of investment (most of its profits went back to parent company General Electric) and the fact that CompuServe's concerns about the side effects of promoting games were not entirely unfounded. At this time, people still needed "noble content" such as news or educational products as an excuse to sign up for a service, even if they were only intending to play games when they got there.
Much of GEnie's flowering at this time was due to the efforts of its Games Product Manager, Jessica Mulligan. Jessica had worked for QuantumLink, where she had recommended acquiring the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license for an online game (which was eventually to become NeverWinter Nights).
When QuantumLink began to de-emphasize games, she moved to GEnie. There, she assembled an impressive stable of some of the finest games of the day. Because of her, GEnie was the launch point for many classic online games, including two very important virtual worlds: Gemstone II in 1988 and Dragon's Gate in 1990 (a year in which earlier U.K. favorite Federation II made it to GEnie).
Gemstone had been created by David Whatley and his company, Simutronics, in 1987; the II was added when it went live on GEnie. Simutronics' expertise grew from BBS technology, and Gemstone II was a descendent of neither MUD1 nor Sceptre of Goth.
In 1989, Darrin Hyrup, the lead programmer on another Simutronics game (Orb Wars), left to join a company called Adventures Unlimited Software, Inc. (AUSI). AUSI was started in 1984 by entrepreneurial programmer Mark Jacobs to run a text-based virtual world named Aradath he had also written independently. Like Sceptre of Goth, Aradath ran on a home computer dial-up system, but unlike all other virtual worlds for the next decade it charged its users a flat fee to play. Although it was turned down by QuantumLink, its promise was enough to tempt Darrin to join Mark to write Dragon's Gate. This was a smart move.
At the end of the pre-WWW era in 1993, five U.S. services dominated the online market: CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, Delphi, and GEnie. Smaller, games-specific services, such as MPG-Net and the ImagiNation Network, were also players in the games market (or tried to be). These services had a stranglehold on virtual world development: If you couldn't get your game on one of them, you were in for a hard time. At this point, third-age virtual worlds were still the biggest and most important.
The WWW changed it all. People were suddenly excited by the concept of "online." They flocked in droves to those services that offered Internet connection (which had previously been mainly the preserve of colleges). Some, such as AOL, embraced it. Others, particularly the ever-conservative CompuServe, tried to weather the storm and failed. A price war in 1993 among the major services had made Internet access affordable for all. Come 1995, hordes of inexpert computer users were knocking on the door, looking for interesting things. Some of them?rather a lot of them, in fact?wanted to play games.
Thus, the short but extraordinary fourth age of virtual worlds began. AOL went for the throat and signed up Gemstone III, Dragon's Gate, and Federation II (it already had NeverWinter Nights). In common with other services, its business model was based on time spent connected to its system, a legacy of how computer bureaux used to charge for mainframe timeslices in the days when not every company had its own hardware. Also like everyone else, if its customers were accessing content provided externally, AOL paid a royalty. Unlike most of its competitors, however, it paid a fair royalty[14]. Unlike all its competitors, it picked up a vast user base[15].
[14] CompuServe in particular was resented among developers for its arrogant "tell me why we only deserve 92% of the income that our customers generate" approach.
[15] This was basically because they gave away the client software, I should add. I don't mean to imply that it was due to their paying a fair royalty to game designers!
The consequence of this was that games like Gemstone III and Dragon's Gate were making their authors over a million dollars a month. Even the "failing" NeverWinter Nights (NWN) took around $5,000,000 in 1996, despite being limited to 500 simultaneous players. It was an amazing time to be in the industry?if your game was on AOL. If not, it was hugely frustrating.
Disaster struck when the business model suddenly changed.
Small companies that used to run local BBSs began setting themselves up as Internet Service Providers. Initially, they used the same, pay-per-hour tariffs as the big boys. Then, in response to customer pressure, they broke ranks and switched to flat rate charging. AOL followed suit in December 1996, so as not to lose customers to these upstarts.
Unfortunately, AOL's contracts with external information providers assumed a per-hour charge, which AOL had to honor. They tried to persuade game developers to accept a flat fee or a much reduced per-hour royalty, and some indeed went along with it. Others, however, held their ground. It was their opinion that the reason their games were successful was because they were good games; it had nothing to do with standing directly in the flow of AOL's newbie hose.
A compromise dual-pricing scheme was implemented similar to one introduced by GEnie some years earlier, whereby "premium" content (that is, games) was charged by the hour and everything else was flat rate. This was not a great success, though, and by mid-1997 the gravy train had stopped running.
Most of the virtual worlds that had been on the big services set themselves up as independent games on the (now easy-access) Internet. After all, if they were able to keep all the money that players paid, they could afford to shed 80% of their player base and still make a huge profit. Unfortunately, they had not anticipated three major obstacles that would humble them greatly:
Most of their players objected to paying for a game they had previously considered to be free. Only the hard core?around 5% to 10% of the total?ever made the move.
Attracting newbies is very, very difficult. As existing players gradually drift away, from where do their replacements come?
Over a thousand virtual worlds were already accessible via the Internet for free?the LPMUDs, DikuMUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and MUCKs. Sure, they were "free, and worth every penny," but hey, free is free!
These for-pay virtual worlds (and others) do still exist, and do still make money, but it's nowhere near the amount they did in the halcyon days of 1995?1997. It would be nice to think that developers have learned from this the dangers of over-estimating the intrinsic value of their products; nice, but unlikely.
Off-the-shelf codebases are free to use and free to play, but they are not freeware. They come with strict licensing conditions that preclude their being used commercially. This means that there is still some innovation, as people who want to make money from virtual worlds must perforce write their own from scratch. The days when people would willingly pay more per hour to access a commercial virtual world than they would later pay per month[16] are long gone, however.
[16] In 1990, GEnie was charging nearly $20 an hour for daytime access?more than double what the major games were charging for an entire month a decade later.
Yet all was not entirely lost. At its peak, Gemstone III on AOL was attracting 2,000?2,500 players simultaneously. In theory, if a product could attract players in sufficiently large numbers?say, 10 times this number in total?then it might be possible to levy an inexpensive monthly fee and still make a respectable profit.
In 1997, Origin Systems Inc. (OSI) launched Ultima Online.
The Fifth Age: 1997?Present
There had been graphical virtual worlds before.
The seminal PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system went live at the University of Illinois way back in 1961, and many games were written to take advantage of both its network connectivity and graphics-capable plasma display units. Some of these laid down principles that would greatly influence the development of later computer games; some came close to being virtual worlds; some actually were virtual worlds.
Orthanc, by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom, was an overhead view graphical game that, although not implementing a shared world, nevertheless allowed communication between individual players. It was written as early as 1973. Jim Schwaiger's 1977 game Oubliette (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Chuck Miller's earlier multiplayer game, Mines of Moria) had a first-person point of view and used line graphics to render the scene ahead. It had persistent characters, but was not a persis tent world. Also, the interaction it allowed between characters was very limited; it was almost there, but not quite.
In late 1979, the first ever fully functional graphical virtual world was released: Avatar. Written by a group of students to out-do Oubliette, it was to become the most successful PLATO game ever?it accounted for 6% of all the hours spent on the system between September 1978 and May 1985[17]. Again using a Fantasy setting, it introduced the concept of spawning to repopulate areas automatically after players killed all the monsters.
[17] Source: http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm.
Despite the fact that PLATO was very important in the development of computer games in general, its virtual worlds had little external impact. This was almost certainly because the twin strengths of the PLATO system?its fast network and superior graphics?would not generally become available to home users for another 15 years. If your screen can only display text and your modem only runs at 300 baud, online pictures aren't exactly a major priority. Insofar as the history of graphical virtual worlds is concerned, the second to fourth ages are pretty much dark ages.
Some of the second age virtual worlds almost went graphical. There were plans to produce Atari ST and Commodore Amiga clients for Bloodstone, a virtual world by Robert Muir that ran on Microlink, but they amounted to nothing. The coordinate-based Mosaic system (nothing to do with the browser of that name) pioneered by the MirrorWorld team was ideal material for conversion to graphics, but Pip Cordrey was vehemently anti-graphics and blocked the move. Others toyed with the idea, only to be put off by the expense involved.
A graphical virtual world that did influence others was Island of Kesmai, (IOK) written by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor in 1981. It grew from a six-player game called Dungeons of Kesmai that the pair had completed a year earlier, and was independent of the other work on virtual worlds going on at the time (the pair hadn't even heard of ADVENT, let alone MUD1!). IOK debuted on CompuServe in December, 1985.
The game did not have graphics as such. What it did have was a display that used individual letters and other ASCII characters to represent a bird's-eye view of the immediate vicinity. Because of the ersatz graphics, the degree of interaction allowed between players wasn't as high as in a purely text-oriented game (a state of affairs that continues to this day), but it was good enough to qualify IOK as a virtual world.
The graphics capabilities of home computers gradually improved, and it was therefore only a matter of time before someone wrote a game that coupled an IOK-style tessel lated world with a hardware-specific means of displaying it. Indeed, by the early 1990s the Kesmai Corporation had already done it for their multiplayer flight simulator game, Air Warrior, which had clients for the PC, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Apple Macintosh. The basic principle was for the virtual world software itself (the server) to send data to software running on the home user's computer (the client), which it could use as the basis to construct an image[18].
[18] Many players seem naïvely to imagine that an entire image is transmitted each time one needs to be displayed, as with TV pictures. This is not, however, yet the case.
Although Kesmai eventually produced a (disappointing) graphical version of IOK called Legends of Kesmai, they were well beaten to the punch by NeverWinter Nights (1991 on AOL), Kingdom of Drakkar (1992 on MPG-net), and Shadows of Yserbius (1992 on ImagiNation Network). These games basically took the same approach: a bird's-eye view of a 2D world built from squares, with flat sprites to represent players, objects, walls, and things to be fought. They maintained separate text areas for information, descriptions, and communications.
This is a very effective way to do it. The bandwidth and server load requirements are comparatively light, the design tools are cheap to develop, and you can create large, interesting worlds with a fair degree of interaction among the players. Such worlds can lack flexibility?you won't see many circular buildings in them?but they pay for it by their ease of creation. The scale is usually an issue, in that there's a conflict between the amount of space in the virtual world that characters appear to occupy (because of the fidelity of the graphics) and the amount they seemingly ought to occupy (because they represent people), but it's nothing too serious.
Note that although all tessellated worlds are essentially 2D, they don't have to be shown in the same, boring, map-like way that a newspaper typically displays a chessboard. Instead, they can be shown isometrically. By fixing the camera (that is, the player's viewpoint) at an angle other than directly overhead (say, at 60°), the impression of a 3D world can be given.
This is sometimes referred to as a 2½D world. It was inevitable that as soon as computer video cards were up to the job, new games would appear in the more realistic-looking 2½D rather than plain old 2D[19].
[19] Strictly speaking, any implementation of a 3D space that fakes height is 2½D. This means that games like Doom, which have a first-person perspective but can't implement bridges, can also be described as 2½D.
At this point, the story changes continents.
In Europe and North America, individuals wanting to use the Internet for fun would generally do so from home. This was not necessarily the case in other countries. In particular, the trend in South Korea was to use Internet cafés, where people could share their online experiences in a friendly, social atmosphere (with broadband connections). Large chains of such establishments soon spread across the country. This presented Korean game developers with a business model not available in the West: licensing game access to the Internet cafés, rather than to the players.
Two companies took advantage of this: Nexon launched The Kingdom of the Winds in 1996, with NCSoft's Lineage following in 1997. Lineage was designed by Jake Song, who had previously worked on The Kingdom of the Winds (TKOW) and was later voted South Korea's best game designer. Both TKOW and Lineage used a 2½D perspective, but the latter had vastly superior graphics and almost immediately became the virtual world with the most real-world players anywhere. It opened in Taiwan and was a huge hit there, too. Attempts to repeat this success in the U.S. market failed, however; for some reason, the game did not appeal to American tastes. It was therefore almost completely ignored in the West, until something happened that forced developers to pay attention: Revenue figures for Lineage in the first quarter of 2000 were posted at 6,500 million Won, that is over five million dollars. Virtual worlds were becoming a global phenomenon, and Korea was a leading marketplace.
In terms of advances in game design, though, the plot returns to the U.S. in 1997.
Although The Kingdom of The Winds predated it, the product that truly proved virtual worlds had come of age was OSI's Ultima Online (UO).
It is hard to understate the impact that this work had on the consciousness of developers and publishers. Prior to Ultima Online, virtual worlds had been regarded as all potential: It was clear from the devotion they inspired that they could probably make pots of money, but as no one had managed to do so outside of peculiar market conditions few companies were willing to invest in producing one. This was soon to change.
When Ultima Online garnered 50,000 subscribers within 3 months, people took notice. When it broke 100,000 within a year, jaws dropped. Never mind the substantial income from retail sales: 100,000 people were each paying $9.95 per month having already bought the game?and none of that money was going to retailers!
OSI was directly taking 12 million dollars a year from that one virtual world!
Ultima Online set the standard: 100,000 subscribers by the end of year one is the benchmark?anything less than that, and a graphical game-oriented virtual world can't honestly call itself a success.
So how did Ultima Online manage to pick up so many subscribers so quickly? Part of it was being the right product at the right time, of course, but the Ultima name?one of the best loved and respected by role-playing gamers?was probably the main reason people were so keen to try it. The virtual world it promised really caught the game-playing public's imagination.
Trying a game doesn't mean that people will continue to play it, though. With ordinary boxed games, the publishers don't particularly care whether anyone actually plays their products, so long as they buy them. Ultima Online had to be good enough that people would want to play?and would shell out nearly 10 bucks a month to do so.
That people did play is a tribute to the game's design team, led by Raph Koster. Raph had a background in virtual world design, having worked on 1992's Worlds of Carnage (the first DikuMUD to have an embedded scripting language) before moving on to found LegendMUD in 1994 with Kristen Koster (his wife), Rick Delashmit, and others. In 1995, Delashmit signed up as lead programmer for Ultima Online and recommended the Kosters to OSI.
LegendMUD was itself an innovative game, boasting a number of features to promote role-playing that had never been implemented before. For example, unlike other DikuMUD derivatives, LegendMUD was classless (players don't elect to be fighters, magic-users, healers, thieves, or whatever); this concept was to shape the design of Ultima Online powerfully. The wide-ranging playing experience of the designers meant that they could draw on ideas from many other codebases, too.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Ultima Online was conceived from the start to be a richer and deeper virtual world than a typical MUD, with an emphasis on community building, player-driven action, and the ability to accommodate different playing styles. These were tremendously important insights; they had a powerful impact on the graphical virtual worlds that appeared in the two to three years following UO's release, and are now regarded as absolute prerequisites in the designs for new virtual worlds. Although later games could take aspects of UO on board, their designers were not always aware of the reasoning that had led the UO team to include or exclude some concept or other[20].
[20] This is a theme I will return to again and again in this book. You already noticed, huh?
This led to balance issues (among others), and is one of the reasons why, in design terms, UO remained pre-eminent until the arrival of Star Wars Galaxies in 2003. It is no coincidence that the lead designer of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) was also Raph Koster.
UO nevertheless did have its problems, the two principal ones being
It was at times too innovative. Some of the ideas it field-tested did not work as planned and had to be altered. Examples: The means by which players were punished for attacking each other's characters wasn't effective; the detailed ecological model employed broke down when players rapidly killed everything that moved; the economy collapsed after a bug led to hyper-inflation.
It was a victim of its own success. Although OSI was expecting tens of thousands of players, they weren't expecting hundreds of thousands of them. The sheer number of people involved meant that the pressure was on to correct any problems as soon after discovery as possible. This caused several management decisions to be made that, in retrospect, set precedents which perhaps ought not to have been set. Customer service doesn't scale well or rapidly.
All in all, UO was a game ahead of its time, but not so far ahead as to be regarded as a failure.
The same could not be said of Archetype Interactive's Meridian 59.
Launched a year ahead of UO (after the company had been bought by 3DO), it was the first graphical virtual world since the days of Avatar to employ a first-person point of view (that is, where the screen shows what the player's virtual character sees, rather than what someone sitting on a low cloud would see?if they could remove rooftops).
Because players could move around and view their surroundings from almost any angle, Meridian 59 gave a far greater sense of being a 3D virtual world than did UO or Lineage. Indeed, this is the kind of viewpoint people typically mean when they're talking about a 3D world or viewpoint in respect of any computer game[21].
[21] Actually, it used a DOOM-like engine and was, technically speaking, therefore only 2½D.
Meridian 59 (M59) was designed by Mike Sellers and Damion Schubert, the latter having been recommended by Raph Koster (who had accepted a job at OSI by then so was unavailable). It was intended to become the first "3D MUD," and in this it succeeded.
However, it was not the huge success that it might have been (and that the designers of other in-development graphical virtual worlds feared it would become) mainly due to a lack of experience. The designers, the developers, and especially the publishers (3DO) made several mistakes that are classic to virtual worlds and therefore should have been easily avoided. To be fair, the designers did know their stuff, but they were working to a small budget and a short deadline.
Among the mistakes made were
Allowing access permissions for certain features (for example, in-game shops) to be determined by the (soon-to-be-hacked) client software.
Not fully testing the software. It was very stable, but one particular show-stopping bug rendered the in-game currency completely worthless overnight.
Community-alienating changes of business plan. Originally costing each player $10 per month, they switched to $2.49 per day ("but never more than $30 a month") and lost a third of their players in the process[22].
[22] Their player base had stopped growing by then, but this hastily shrank it.
Self-defeating customer service work (due to a "no comment" policy).
Of course, these errors were also made by many of the virtual worlds that followed Meridian 59 (indeed, they're still being made today). These other virtual worlds didn't all fail, however, so why did M59?
M59's problem was that it didn't garner enough players early on to weather its storms. There are several reasons for this, but they all come down to the fact that it was launched too soon. M59 is remembered for being the first 3D virtual world; if it hadn't gone to market prematurely, then it wouldn't have been able to claim this title, but instead of being the pioneer it could well have become the paradigm.
What M59 did wrong that actually hurt it was
It had poor marketing. Few people outside the online gaming community knew it existed. The computer games press didn't care about it.
Its graphics didn't compare well to those of other 3D games around at the time (particularly Quake's). This is probably why the computer press didn't care about it.
It had insufficient content. The world felt very small, and it lacked many features traditional to the Fantasy genre that potential players were surprised to find missing.
There weren't enough people with Internet connections when it launched. Ironically, if they hadn't launched early to get the drop on Ultima Online then there almost certainly would have been.
In other words, it wasn't the design that killed it but the business decisions made. Design is hugely important, but it can't do everything.
Even so, Meridian 59 did a lot of things right. In particular, it released expansion sets to keep players interested and (until it changed its pricing scheme) it made the total number of players important, rather than the total number of hard-core players. It also ran multiple incarnations of its virtual world on different servers, some of which it licensed to other countries (which although it had been done commercially back in the days of Shades had by then gone out of fashion).
Although the M59 team was inexperienced to begin with, they soon learned. M59 graduates are now among the most sought-after personnel in the industry. Mike Sellers (who left before M59 shipped) went on to become lead designer of The Sims Online; Damion Schubert accepted the same position for Ultima Online 2 before setting up as an independent creative consultant and eventually winding up working on the much-anticipated Shadowbane[23]; producer Rich Vogel took over from Starr Long at Ultima Online
