15 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology



Executive Summary

A Commercialization Opportunity

Many commercial products take their ideas from hobbyist predecessors. This was my experience starting an Internet computer games company, Turbine Entertainment Software. Hobbyists had created Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) long before we adapted them for commerce. Although the main ideas already existed, there were other challenges for idea generation. Commercialization goes beyond merely copying ideas: it is a process of adaptation that may require new ideas from other fields. A description of the history of MUDs, and the adaptation of ideas at Turbine, will illustrate this thesis.

The Industry

Massively multiplayer (MMP) games are virtual reality worlds, where hundreds or thousands of customers can simultaneously connect over the Internet. Players guide a character like a puppet, moving the character through the game world and going on adventures. The gameplay content, the level of interactivity, and the social community are the main features attracting customers. There are now enough Internet users to justify the production expense for a commercial MMP game; however, non-commercial predecessors, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), had been invented 18 years before the first MMP game.

Precursors

MUDs stem from fantasy literature, which gave birth to Dungeons & Dragons, the first commercial roleplaying game. Soon computer games, such as Adventure and Zork, tried to capture the flavor of Dungeons & Dragons on a computer. Called standalone roleplaying games, these quickly went commercial and were a great success. However, the first MUD, which was a multiplayer version of a Zork-like game, was not commercialized and stayed among hobbyists. Until recently, MUDs had evolved little from their conception, except that it had become much easier to maintain them and to add game content (the trolls, wizards, and magic scrolls that form the adventure). Today, hobbyist MUDs with computer graphics have been created – an effort that is now worth it as the popularity of the Internet has created more hobbyists. The commercializations of MUDs are called massively multiplayer (MMP) games.

Technology Commercialization

Because MUDs are virtual worlds, they contain extensive databases that describe the world locations of people, objects, and buildings. These databases come with tools to make content creation simple, even for non-programmers. MMPs have taken these ideas from MUDs, although commercialization has posed other challenges. MUDs for hobbyists needed to handle 200 simultaneous players, or fewer. Scaling MUDs commercially to thousands of players required new server technology. Also, users expected fancy computer graphics to replace the traditional text-only MUD format. Fast-action delivered over the often slow Internet also posed real challenge.

Gameplay Commercialization

Commercializing MUDs has required new gameplay solutions as well as new technology solutions, again to deal with the much larger community. For example, say that a small family of six dragons is causing trouble in the fairyland town of the MMP. If six players battle and kill one dragon apiece, then the dragon menace is gone, leaving no monster for other players to battle.

Although simple MUDs simply resurrect the same dragons in the same location, MMP games require a more complex restocking of the monsters in the world – one which will be less predictable. Several other new gameplay issues arise from commercialization. For example, special rules prevent players from escaping a bad fight by deliberately breaking their network connection. Other MUD game problems have no clear solution in the commercial world and need one. When generating new ideas for these commercialization challenges, Turbine applied ideas and experience from live roleplaying, a form of improvisational theater, which has a community that interacts like an MMP community interacts, and therefore has similar game balance challenges.

The Competitive Field: How Old Ideas are Adapted

Turbine created a commercial version of MUDs that could compete with mainstream commercial standalone games. However, our work went beyond a direct adoption of core MUD ideas. We adapted the old ideas, and then added new ones. For example:

• Even if no solution could be found, it was useful that MUDs, with a long tradition, demonstrated where problems lay.

• Turbine extended the evolution of MUDs one step, instead of just taking it as-is. Effectively, Turbine commercialized the next generation of hobbyist MUDs.

• Turbine had to fill commercial needs neither posed nor solved by non-commercial MUDs, such as large traffic and a requirement of glitz and glitter.

• Problems unsolved by MUDs were fixed with ideas from other fields. Turbine's strength in live roleplaying games (LARPs) thus became a competitive advantage

A Commercialization Opportunity

I asked, "Can anyone suggest what prerequisites an entrepreneur should have before starting a company?" It was January 1999 and I was giving a lecture series at MIT about startups. The audience made several suggestions, including "money", "intelligence", and "having a good idea". My experiences starting an Internet computer games company suggest otherwise, I told them. Money will come automatically to a good company. Persistence is more important than intelligence. Even having a good product idea is not a prerequisite. If you start with a passion for some field, your research and enthusiasm will discover ideas: from pundits, from visionaries, and from existing products. Even in an emerging industry, which lacks commercial products, non-commercial products made by hobbyists will provide ideas.

Modifying ideas from hobbyists had been my experience starting an Internet computer games company, Turbine Entertainment Software, whose first game, Asheron's Call, was set to launch in late 1999. The new field of massively multiplayer (MMP) computer games is primarily a commercialization of existing products, called multi-user dungeons (MUDs), created by hobbyists. However, this commercialization posed several challenges that required the integration of ideas in technology and game design. Commercialization goes beyond merely copying ideas: it is a process of adaptation that may require new ideas from other fields.

A review of the development of MMP games will shed light on this thesis. A description of MMP and MUD games will be followed by an examination of technology adaptation, and gameplay adaptation. Both provide opportunities for competitors, by adapting ideas differently from the same hobbyist precursors, to differentiate themselves.

The Industry: Massively Multiplayer (MMP) Games

Electronic entertainment is a broad market encompassing customers having fun with software. This software might run on a personal computer, an arcade machine, or a specialized game computer like the Nintendo or Playstation. Recently, a new segment of electronic entertainment has appeared: Internet computer games, currently limited to PCs. Game players can shoot weapons or fly airplanes with up to a dozen friends. Characterized by rapid growth, Internet computer games had revenues of $81m in 1998 and are forecast by Jupiter Communications to grow to $1.1b by 2002. Today, customers expect games from major publishers to include networked play over the Internet.

Massively multiplayer (MMP) games are themselves a segment within the Internet gaming market. MMP games are roleplaying games that provide virtual communities. Hundreds or thousands of players can simultaneously connect over the Internet to interact. Each player chooses and names a character, who enters a virtual reality fantasy world. Every game is a new episode in that character's life. Players can chat with each other or explore the game world. They can fight each other, or join forces to fight game monsters. It's a rags-to-riches story as each character strives for fame and fortune, over the course of many game sessions. Players enjoy the experience, similar to acting, of inventing and portraying a fantasy personality.

Massively multiplayer games have many appeals for customers:

• Content. Customers play games for the experience. The game must be fun.

• Production value. As well as quality, players expect thorough testing and a large quantity of artwork and game design.

• Interactivity. Customers enjoy playing against real people, not computer adversaries.

• Community building. Like nightclubs, MMP games offer a social meeting place. Each game session is a social investment, where the player builds a group of friends.

MMP games are unusually expensive to create, because the virtual world must be rich and large enough to hold thousands of customers -- very much like building an amusement park. However, unlike normal games, which have only retail sales, MMP games bring in more revenue: they are sold retail and then customers are additionally charged a monthly service fee to play.

Massively multiplayer games became financially practical in 1997 when, due to the World Wide Web, an adequately large customer base with Internet access existed. For the first time, potential profits were large enough to justify a major investment in Internet games. However, even before commercial viability, massively multiplayer games existed through half-hearted commercial efforts and hobbyist efforts, collectively called MUDs.

Precursors: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)

Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) are text-based games for many simultaneous players. Users connect form their client computer to a MUD server computer, where they can manipulate a fantasy character in an extensive game world. Although it has no computer graphics, a MUD uses text to describe the room that the player's character is currently in. All objects and creatures in the room are also described in text. One player, Harry, inputs commands such as "walk east", or "attack troll with sword". Another player whose character is nearby would get a description of these actions. For example, "Harry walks east, leaving the room.", or "Harry attacks the troll with the sword, killing it." Players get to live a fantasy adventure through their characters, although gameplay consists mostly of killing monsters and chatting with other players.

A MUD is a simulation of a world, a low-tech version of the simulation in the movie The Matrix. A MUD is "persistent", because the game continues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When an individual player logs off, the other players continue gameplay and the world keeps changing. This is very unlike chess where each game starts by resetting the pieces to their original position. In MUDs there is no resetting. MUDs must incorporate a database that stores the location of all the characters, monsters, buildings, and objects in the game. This database must be robust, because if it becomes corrupt, the entire world may cease to exist.

To understand the genesis of ideas behind MUDs (see appendix), it helps to begin with J.R.R. Tolkien, who founded the fantasy literary genre in the 1950s by authoring a trilogy of fantasy fiction collectively called the Lord of the Rings. The fictional world depicted in the books was so vivid and powerful that many readers spent time daydreaming about escaping their everyday lives and living in a forest with elves.

This kind of hobbyist escapism led to Dungeons and Dragons, the first commercial roleplaying game, which was invented in 1976 for acting out those fantasies. Roleplaying was a game of interactive storytelling based in a fantasy setting similar to Lord of the Rings. A storyteller, called the Dungeon Master, would prepare an adventure story, leaving many of the details unwritten. Then, while telling the story to the group of players, the Dungeon Master would stop to ask each player what he or she would like his or her character to do next, in the story. Roleplaying became immediately popular, but because the rules for D&D were too complex, players often sat bored, idly waiting for dice to be rolled and combat mechanics added up.

Fortunately, computers were available to automate these complex calculations. The first roleplaying computer games to appear in the late 1970s were created by hobbyists: Adventure and Zork. These games were similar to Dungeons & Dragons, but the computer played the part of Dungeon Master. After the computer set the opening scene, the player would command his character (as in Dungeons & Dragons) by typing a command on the keyboard. The game software would compute what happened, and continue telling the story as a textual description of the world. The popularity of Apple and PC computers provided a large enough customer base for roleplaying games to go commercial in the 1980s, with products such as Sierra's King's Quest and Origin's Ultima eventually incorporating computer graphics. These single-player games lacked the social component of many-player roleplaying games, but made up for the lack with entertaining riddles and logic puzzles.

Meanwhile, the first multiplayer roleplaying game, Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), was finished in 1980 by hobbyists Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University in Britain. For the first time, roleplay gamers had it all: social interactivity and also a computer to compute the combat mathematics. The original MUD was commercialized, unchanged, onto CompuServe as British Legends. It met with only modest success.

During the 1980s, when commercial single-player roleplaying games boomed, there were few hobbyist and no commercial MUD sequels. Perhaps this was due to the small size of communities that could access MUD through a single mainframe. However, beginning in 1989, networking between computers became more common, as the precursor to the Internet, ARPAnet, became popular among colleges. The larger networked audience inspired an explosion of alternative MUDs: TinyMUD, LambdaMUD, and MUD Object Oriented (MOO). The most important new features were the ability to add new objects and monsters to the game world quickly. This allowed creative, but non-technical people to develop game content (new monsters, rooms, and puzzles) without having to write software.

As America Online and chat made online services more popular, some commercial Internet games were created, such as Kesmai's Air Warrior in 1987, a combat flight simulator. These games included a few half-hearted commercial MUDs. On America Online, Neverwinter Nights was adapted cheaply from an online standalone roleplaying game. The first hobbyist MUDs with graphics came in 1994: DragonSpires, and The Kingdom of Drakkar, which quickly went commercial. Sierra created a gaming service, the Imagination Network, including MUDs Fates of Twinion and Dragons of Yserbius, which were the first MUDs to include pseudo-3D graphics. Due to low budgets, these games fell well short of mainstream standalone games, and were not popular. The Imagination Network, lacking quality and coming too soon for the Internet revolution, failed and was sold to AT&T in 1994 and phased out in late 1996.

After a few near misses (3DO's Meridian 59 and SSI's Dark Sun Online), finally, the first commercial MUD appeared of sufficient quality to compete with mainstream standalone games. This was the first true massively multiplayer game (MMP), Ultima Online in mid-1997. Like normal standalone games, it was sold retail, not downloaded for free. Ultima Online and Dark Sun Online closely resembled the hobbyist DragonSpires (see appendix).

By early 1999, no additional MMP games had appeared, as the industry came around slowly to the MMP concept. However, two visionary organizations had started MMP work early, for the first time designing a commercial MUD from scratch, instead of retrofitting a standalone game: Turbine's Asheron's Call and Sony's Everquest. Both 1999 games employ cutting-edge computer graphics, making their MUD-like games for the first time competitive in “look and feel” with mainstream standalone commercial games. Additionally, Asheron's Call has an added advantage: stronger gameplay, fixing many of the traditional gameplay problems with MUDs. For Asheron's Call, this marks the end of a commercialization project that began in 1994, based on MUDs, but requiring adaptation as well.

Technology Commercialization

Design work on Asheron's Call began in 1994, before Ultima Online and the popularity of the World Wide Web. The commercial game was modeled heavily on hobbyist MUDs. This included basic ideas, such as using a database to store the virtual world, but it also included some interesting technology ideas taken from MUDs.

Non-Commercial Foundation

Standalone computer games are a little like movie studios. You only need the stagehands to construct the side of the building facing the camera. Once you're done with the set, you can take it down. Standalone computer games show a similar false world, taking advantage of the single player to show the game through a single "camera". However, in MUDs, thousands of players are exploring inside and outside buildings, and even under the ground. A MUD needs a more robust, "persistent" world, with the tools to maintain that world. Game administrators, who play the role of camp counselors, use world-modifying tools to:

• Handle complaints from players

• Add new areas to explore, and new monsters to fight

• Monitor the game: are the rules working? Some MUDs keep statistics.

At Turbine, the world-modifying tools, similar to the best MUDs, allow artists and game writers to add content quickly and without programmer intervention. This has become a great advantage for the company, reducing greatly the cost of content creation.

Another idea that Turbine based on MUDs (specifically MOOs) was to create a special language just for programming objects in the game. For example, if a player touches a match to a torch, the torch should burn. Thus a program is required that instructs a torch to respond to a match. These kind of object-object interactions are described differently than each object’s location is described. Typically, in MUDs, the game designer used a “world building tool” to place each torch, monster, and building in a physical location. A separate application in the best MUDs implemented torches and other game objects with "object-oriented" programming concepts. Each function involving a torch (how to pick it up, how to light it, what happens when it touches fire or water) is packaged in the same location as the data for the torch (how big, is it lit, who owns it). This greatly simplifies both creating game objects, and debugging the software.

Ideas for handling security also come from MUDs. For example, imagine a game world with two large locations: a town and a forest. Typically, a MUD would assign a separate server for each location, similar to how separate web servers host different major web sites. The two servers can be deliberately confused by a crafty player seeking to cheat. For example:

1. The devious player, Harry, discovers a magic gem in the forest

2. Harry waits for the forest server to perform an automatic backup. All of the information about the forest (including the existence and location of the gem) are stored in the backup.

3. Harry (still in the forest) then picks up the gem, carries it into the town (run by a separate server), and leaves the gem in the town in some hidden location.

4. Harry returns to the forest. Exploiting a bug in the program, he causes the forest server to crash. All the information about the forest is lost when the server goes down, including the fact that the gem has been removed.

5. In fact, when the forest server retrieves its data from the backup, it restores the forest to its earlier state: the gem is now in its previous location on the ground.

6. The player picks up the gem, and travels back into town (on the server which did not crash), where a copy of same gem remains hidden safely. Now the cheating player has turned one gems into two gems. Continuing to double, he may earn four, eight, sixteen, or thirty-two gems.

Players may tolerate loopholes like this on a free hobbyist MUD. But to commercialize a MUD for paying customers, many security holes like this must be plugged. In this case, the solution is to coordinate the server backups, a much-studied academic issue within parallel computing.

Adaptation for Commerce

In the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons, combat in MUDs is mathematical and doesn't involve the hand-eye coordination of fast action video games. But to compete commercially with mainstream games, Asheron's Call would incorporate some fast action combat. To handle this, Turbine had to defeat the slow speed of the Internet. Imagine two players trying to fight each other online: one (Bill) in California, and one (Hillary) in Washington, DC. They are trying to interact but are separated by small communication delays in the Internet. Bill dodges to the left, but this information is only transmitted to Washington, DC after a delay of 0.5 to 2.0 seconds. So the player in Washington, Hillary, is aiming a crossbow without accurate information about Bill's location. The solution comes from Internet action games instead of Internet roleplaying games: the computer assists Hillary to track the real location of Bill.

Another challenge of commercializing MUDs was handling a much larger customer base. Traditional MUDs ran on a single server computer, handling 100-500 players. For an MMP, which is more computationally intensive, to handle 2000-5000 players, several servers must be used. Normally, a MUD with several servers would assign part of the world to each server. Server A handles the forest, Server B handles the town, and Server C handles the dungeons. Unfortunately, if all the players flock to the town for a party, Server B is bogged down and Servers A and C are underutilized. To make more efficient use of the computational power of the server, Turbine incorporated load-balancing from academia. As player leave the forest to join the town’s party, and Server B becomes too slow, part of the town (part of the “load” on Server B) is broken off and responsibility for that piece is transferred to the underutilized Server A.

Bringing MUDs into the mainstream also involved incorporating computer graphics, a thriving field where many good ideas exist in industry and academia. Most traditional action games with 3D graphics consist of empty hallways: players and monsters just shoot each other without any clutter. Thus walking around is fairly simple. However, a roleplaying game requires a number of objects to exist: swords, tables, chairs, lanterns, and others. So instead of ignoring the clutter, Turbine had to create a system where, if a player bumped into a table, she wouldn’t just walk right through it. The solution was 3D “physics system” that calculated when objects collided. This prevented players from walking through complex objects, as well as walls. This system would also calculate the angles of rebound when objects collide. With no precedent in computer games for this system, ideas for a physics system were modified and extended from academic work.

Gameplay Commercialization

Creating MMP games required both adapting, and going beyond the technology of MUDs. The same requirement was found in gameplay issues. For an MMP to be fun, it must be a good game. But because an MMP involves the long-term interactions of thousands of customers, it is impossible to know in advance whether the game is fun. Many factors are involved. Is there a level playing field? Are there holes in the rules to be exploited? Will players run out of things to do?

Non-Commercial Foundation

Besides chatting, players in MUDs like to explore the world and slay evil monsters. The shining knight kills the dragon and rescues the princess. Unfortunately, with so many players attacking monsters, quickly all the dragons are dead and no fair maidens need assistance. An important idea taken from MUDs was to automatically replenish the "stock" of monsters, maidens, and other adventures in the world. Most MUDs replenish a killed dragon by creating a new dragon in the same location, 5 minutes later. Unfortunately, players become bored with knowing exactly where all the monsters are. For Asheron's Call, we wanted to do better. Monsters are instead created randomly inside a large "home area". The monsters can roam around freely in this home area, adding an element of surprise to encounters with players.

Surprisingly, many gameplay problems come from the underlying technology. For example, due to network or phone problems, a player can become disconnected from the game. Without any player to guide the game character, most MUDs put the character safely in storage until the player logs in again. Unfortunately, this kind of "safe landing" encourages players to deliberately break their network connection when they are about to be killed by a monster. Asheron's Call uses a sophisticated technique that prevents such "safe landings" to occur, without penalizing players whose network connections really do break.

Because MMP games, like all roleplaying games, involve fighting, sometimes the character in the game will be killed. Paying customers find this frustrating, because it's a rags-to-riches story where each player trains a character, who gains more wealth, weaponry, and skills. If, after several months, this character dies, then all the effort the player has invested has been wasted. Understandably, players become overly cautious, trying to avoid character death at all costs. But in a cautious environment, no one goes exploring or dares to attack monsters, even when a fair maiden cries out for help. That’s boring.

Some MUDs try to solve this problem by allowing dead characters to become instantly reincarnated, with no penalty. This has the opposite effect: death suddenly becomes unimportant. The game becomes less visceral and less exciting to risk your character's life, because it doesn't really matter whether the character dies. Players start taking foolish risks and not really caring whether they win or lose. To solve this dilemma, Asheron's Call borrows an idea adapted from the most sophisticated MUDs. If a character dies, it is reincarnated, but it loses a magical object of power, some money, and some strength. Thus there is a real penalty to death, but not one that brings too much risk-aversion.

Adaptation for Commerce

As well as adapting gameplay ideas from existing MUDs, Turbine adapted ideas from standalone mainstream roleplaying games: combat, computer graphics, and a graphical user interface. One idea became an attractive feature of Asheron’s Call: allowing players to customize the appearance of their characters. Players like to identify with their characters. The character becomes a statement of personality, like a stylish car. A concept pioneered in standalone games, Turbine expanded it for Asheron's Call, where the high level of interaction makes "dressing cool" and "looking cool" more important.

The evolution of MUDs had wrestled with and resolved many gameplay issues, such as monster regeneration and deliberate disconnect. However, other gameplay issues seemed inherent to the genre, and no practical solution was found. For example, more experienced players often beat up the newer players, because they are easy targets. This is not a fun experience for the new players. This problem was limited, but not resolved, in both hobbyist MUDs and the commercial Ultima Online. At Turbine Entertainment, we had an extra source of ideas: my experience in live roleplaying.

Live roleplaying is a form of improvisational theater invented at MIT and Harvard in 1984. Like Dungeons & Dragons, players portray a fantasy character, acting out their roles on stage. However, there is no "off-stage" area. Everyone is acting all the time. Writers, called Game Masters (GMs), write the first act of the play: everyone's character, with motivations, backgrounds, and histories. The remaining acts are ad-libbed. Characters come into conflict, and may exchange items, spread rumors, and even use plastic toy guns to shoot each other down. Live-action roleplaying (LARP) games resemble MUDs because there is little control over what characters will do. The writers of LARP games quickly learn to balance game components, to create a level playing field -- or else one team may win too easily. Writers must also think about incentives -- if Act I doesn't give concrete reasons for the KGB and CIA to be enemies, the players may just decide to team up in the game, spoiling the game balance!

Having played in and written LARPs since 1985 at MIT, I had seen many ideas that could be assets to the company I founded. These kinds of issues gave Turbine an edge both in spotting MUD game imbalances, and in correcting those imbalances. For example, the problem of new players getting beaten up was clearly an incentive problem. The older players had no possible use for the inexperienced newer players. So why not abuse the newer players? Thinking about incentives, we invented a game system where large teams were important: thus older players had an incentive to recruit (not abuse) newer players. Discovering secrets, spreading rumors, and infiltrating enemy groups became important: all requiring many bodies.

Also, the situation reminded me of a part-time job I'd had working for Herbalife, a health products company similar to Amway, which used a pyramid scheme to draw in more workers. I adapted the concept as an "allegiance system" for Asheron's Call. Older players could get newer players to "pledge allegiance" to them. The older player would automatically collect a percentage of the newer player's income. In exchange, the older player would offer to train and assist the newer player. This incentive system has become the most lauded attribute of Asheron's Call in the press.

The Competitive Field: How Old Ideas are Adapted

As in many fields, massively multiplayer (MMP) games emerged from the ideas of hobbyists and tinkerers. MUDs had been popular more than a decade earlier. The ideas taken from MUDs went beyond technnology to include gameplay. Earlier notions of gameplay were vital to the success of MMP games, because of the highly unpredictable nature of long-term human communities. It would be impossible to create a virtual world with no prior knowledge and have the game balance work well. Combined with substantial money and production value, these modified MUD concepts would make money by themselves, as Ultima Online and its commercial predecessors showed.

However, to reach a broad market and to compete with mainstream games, Turbine Entertainment went further than just borrowing the MUD ideas, in four ways:

• Hobbyist work demonstrated needs as well as ideas. Some issues, such as gameplay imbalance and security loopholes, could only have emerged from an existing game.

• The evolution of MUDs has been a slow and incremental process. Instead of merely adapting an existing MUD, Turbine combined the qualities of the best MUDs and continued the evolution one more incremental step while commercializing it.

• Commercialization introduced new challenges that MUDs had never had to face. Therefore, the MUD community was not a source of solutions to these challenges.

• The ideas to solve these problems came from other areas, such as LARPs, parallel computing research, and mainstream computer games. For this reason, experience in these areas became a competitive advantage at Turbine.

The future of MUDs and MMPs will continue to draw upon work by hobbyists. LARPs hold much untapped promise for interesting community gameplay. MMP players have created self-descriptive web sites that commercial MMPs are trying to incorporate. In another example, the June 1999 Computer Gaming World describes how customers of Ultima Online are trading their magical spells, swords, and even entire characters -- for real money! Using EBay, the online trading service at , players offer their items and characters for sale. Other players eager to gain these items pay real money and then receive the item in the game. There is a commercial precedent for a non-computer game, Magic the Gathering, where you can spend real money to gain an unfair advantage in a game. Perhaps it is time for MMPs to follow, as they have in the past.

Resources

1. Early MUD History, Usenet post by Richard Bartle, November 1990

2. Multi-User Virtual Environments, by Jerry Michalski, "Release 1.0", June 1994 (Esther Dyson's monthly newsletter about the future of computing and communications technology)

3. The MUDline, 1995 by Lauren Burka,

4. Market Overview, May 1995, Jonathan Monsarrat, internal document, Turbine Entertainment

5. Competitive Advantage Report, November 1996, Jonathan Monsarrat, internal document, Turbine Entertainment

6. MUDs and MOOs, an Overview, Leslie Harris, Susquehanna University

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Massively multiplayer games are a segment of the Internet games market.

Massively Multiplayer Games

Internet Games

Electronic Entertainment

Invention of the modem by BBN employees

The first specialized gaming computers in arcade halls and purchased for home

Infocom founded to commercialize Zork.

The Apple and Radio Shack computers gain widespread acceptance, establishing a market for home gaming

Adventure and Zork are the first roleplaying computer games.

Live roleplaying invented at Harvard & MIT

Adventure games (left, 1980) brought roleplaying to the computer, and were commercialized (right).

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Dungeons & Dragons (1976) was the first commercial roleplaying game. Players used data sheets (left) to follow the complex numerical rulebook (right).

Fantasy literature becomes mainstream

The RAND Corporation uses roleplaying to train businesspeople

Gary Gygax of TSR introduces Dungeons & Dragons, the first roleplaying game

Activision's Pitfall is the first computer game to immerse the player in a virtual world

The Artificial Intelligence program Eliza can understand a small amount of typed English

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Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1950s) series founded fantasy literature.

Tolkien publishes the Lord of the Rings, launching the fantasy literary genre

Timeline of Ideas leading to Massively Multiplayer Gaming

1960

1960

1970

1999

1980

Monster's Lair

The Snow Monster, bellowing loudly, blocks the eastern exit.

>SHOOT THE MONSTER WITH DART GUN

The Snow Monster clutches at the dart and then keels over. His body vanishes in a cloud of acrid black smoke.

>EAST

Orange Grove

A path leads northeast through this small grove of orange trees. A dark cave lies to the west. A sign is posted near the grove.

>READ THE SIGN

"Warning! These are poisonous oranges, not meant for human consumption.

>EAT AN ORANGE

Aaarrrr! It burns your tongue and your throat!

Jonathan Monsarrat

jon@



September, 1999

@create $note named "MessageInABottle"

@describe "MessageInABottle" as "You see a rolled up, weather-worn piece of paper which says, 'Help me! I'm lost on a desert island.'"

Creating a MOO object, and specifying an important characteristic: the description.

First graphical MUDs: Kingdom of Drakkar and DragonSpires

Turbine's Asheron's Call is the first MMP game of comparable quality to mainstream games.

Sony's Everquest and Origin's Ultima Online are first low-quality MMP games

America Online drags online services into the mainstream

Pre-WWW commercial MUDs games for the tiny online community lack adequate investment

Single player roleplaying computer games (Ultima, Bard's Tale)

non-commercial

commercial

The first MOO is a MUD that makes adding game content simple.

Id Software's Quake starts the era of 3D computer games

First local network computer games, including the hit DOOM by id Software

The World Wide Web makes the Internet popular, establishing a foundation for home computer gaming

Compuserve makes MUD available to its users under the title "British Legends".

Chat drives online growth

First Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) is a "Zork" for multiple players

First online services, Genie, Compuserve, and Prodigy, offer private online networks for dialup usage.

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The Kingdom of Drakkar (1994) was one of the first hobbyist MUDs with modest computer graphics. Without animation, characters move icons on a checkboard grid. It was quickly commercialized.

[pic]

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Asheron’s Call (1999) also included flashy graphics, but extended the MUD gameplay using knowledge of live-roleplaying.

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MUDs (1980s) are multiplayer versions of those text-based adventure computer games. They are still popular today.

[pic]

Live roleplaying games (1980s), based on fantasy literature, became available commercially (1990).Similar to Dungeons & Dragons, they use rulebooks.

[pic]

But the half-hearted commercial MUDs in no way competed with flashy action games like Quake (1996)

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DragonSpires (1994) was another hobbyist MUD to have early computer graphics. It was also commercialized.

[pic]

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Ultima Online (1997) was the first MUD to take on mainstream games. Notice how similar the appearance is to the hobbyist games Kingdom of Drakkar and DragonSpires.

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EverQuest (1999) combined the flashy computer graphics of Quake with a traditional MUD background.

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For example, the Asheron’s Call system allows players to extensively design their own appearance in the game.

1990

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