‘You haven’t lived until you’ve died in MUD’

IDEA N^o 33

MASSIVELY MULTI-PLAYER ONLINE GAMING

When student friends Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created Multi-User Dungeon at Essex University in the late ’70s, they created not only a multi-player game, but also a parallel universe, a virtual world with all the emotions and complexities of planet Earth but without the physical limitations. And with added wizards and dragons to keep it interesting.

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is the world’s most subscribed MMORPG.

Roy Trubshaw was a keen player of adventure games, the genre of computer games named after Colossal Cave Adventure, created by Will Crowther in 1975. The game describes the area you are standing in, and lists nearby objects, characters and exits. The player has to figure out what to do next – ‘take armour’, ‘attack wizard’, ‘go North’, etc. Trubshaw loved the games’ intellectual challenge but missed the player versus player element of the offline equivalent, Dungeons & Dragons. His response was to create Multi-User Dungeon. Also known as Essex MUD (and later, MUD1), it was an adventure game with real-time, multiplayer interaction.

When Trubshaw left Essex University in 1980, his friend Richard Bartle took over development of the game, greatly expanding and improving it. In 1983, Essex University allowed remote access to its network and Essex MUD soon had a global player base. Just as Colossal Cave Adventure had done before it, MUD1, spawned a new genre of computer game – also called the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Graphical versions like Island of Kesmai on CompuServe and Habitat on AOL (then known as Q-Link) soon followed.

With the faster connection speeds of the 90s, MUD became MMORPG, or ‘massively multiplayer online roleplaying game’. Rather then tens or perhaps hundreds of concurrent players, thousands of players could inhabit the virtual worlds of Neverwinter Nights or Ultima Online at any one time. The genre was even more popular in Asia. The South Korean game Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, released in 1996, had more than a million subscribers. EverQuest, launched in 1999, brought MMORPGs into the Western mainstream, while Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW), launched in 2004, is the most played game in the world, with over 10 million subscribers.

These massive virtual worlds provide unexpected insights. In WoW, when a player attacks Hakkar the Soulflayer, they catch an energysapping disease known as Corrupted Blood. The disease is caught simply by being near an infected player, and it kills low-level players in seconds. When it was first introduced, entire servers were infected within hours and huge numbers of players were wiped out. Eventually, the game’s creators had to step in to contain the disease. The spread of the virus and players’ reactions provided a model of how mass populations might react when faced with a real-world epidemic. MMORPGs are now watched with interest by the scientific community.

Online and offline behaviour do not always coincide, though. In the virtual space, gender, age, ethnicity and physical ability recede. Players are judged on their behaviour rather than their appearance. Many exhibit very different personalities online compared to AFK (away from keyboard). The story of a LegendMUD player called Karyn is revealing. After a two-month absence from the game, a letter from her parents claimed she had died in a car crash. Many of her online friends were upset and created a virtual garden of remembrance. They were no longer playing a game. Their grief was real. Later it became apparent that Karyn was probably a man and still alive, but many of the players still felt the same sense of loss.

As we spend more time online, the line between the real and the virtual will fade. Online communities may fill the void left by the demise of the local community. We will perhaps be less inhibited and more likely to find like-minded souls. Whatever the subtle shifts in our identity may be, we would do well to remember the old bulletinboard expression, ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve died in MUD’.■

A visualization of Essex MUD in poster form.