vw history

  • Three pioneers: a historic picture

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments
    Richard Bartle, Randy Farmer, and Pavel Curtis
    Richard Bartle, Randy Farmer, and Pavel Curtis

    Far as we can determine, these three gentlemen have never been in the same real world place at the same time before.

    Dr. Richard Bartle: co-creator of MUD, designer and theorist.
    Randy Farmer: co-creator of Habitat, the first graphical world (as well as much more).
    Pavel Curtis: the moving force behind LambdaMOO.

    That is the three biggest inflection points in the history of virtual worlds, right there. 1978/9, 1985, 1990. If only we had John Taylor and Kelton Flinn here too.

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  • Avatar-the-word

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    I turned to F. Randall Farmer, a creator of the online multiplayer game Lucasfilm’s Habitat, for the origins of the term’s current incarnation. He and Chip Morningstar invented the game in 1986, when they also coined avatar in the “online persona” sense (though gamers had already been exposed to the word’s Sanskrit meaning with the 1985 computer role-playing game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.) “Chip came up with the word ‘avatar,’ ” he recounts, “because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number with your telephone and then set it back into the cradle. You were reaching out into this game quite literally through a silver strand. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.”

    –On Language – Avatar – NYTimes.com.

    Very nice, but — “toon” does not come from Toontown, Randy! I first heard it in connection with Sierra’s The Realm; I remember being slightly confused when some Realm players logged into UO and started talking about how small their toons were.

    Most mudders, of course, referred to this as a “character,” taken from D&D, and that carried through into UO, since we were mostly mudder types. But to my mind, both the avatar and the character are the same sort of thing — a graphical version of what we tend to call a profile in a broader web sense. Be it icon, textual description, or a/s/l, it’s just identifying information.

    It may be that Second Life is indeed why “avatar” is so widespread today, though I would be just as likely to give the credit to Snow Crash — a major inspiration to many of the virtual worlds of the 90s. There were bokos and conferences called “avatar” during this time period. Snow Crash frequently got mistaken credit for the coinage.

    Another minor sidelight: a few years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary was running a project on finding the earliest citations of science-fictional words, and I did manage to get Chip & Randy proper credit. 🙂

  • Happy Birthday, MUD

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 26 Comments

    Today is the official 30th birthday of MUD. And MUDs are, for better or worse, the crucible in which today’s virtual worlds were born. There were people who played MUDs working on The Realm, on Meridian 59, on Kingdom of the Winds, on Ultima Online, on EverQuest. To this day, more virtual worlds have been made, run, and played as text muds than any other sort.

    These days, the influences have gotten a bit broader — Second Life is not the product of mudders, for example. All these kids’ worlds are not made by mudders. And the cultural touchstone is World of Warcraft, a game which is also not made by mudders, but which has the conventions of the text games thoroughly ingrained.

    Richard says the anniversary doesn’t matter:

    So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t actually important. The mainstream isn’t interested because virtual worlds haven’t had much impact; developers aren’t interested because the paradigm is obvious; players aren’t interested because knowing doesn’t add anything to their play experience; academics might be interested in the historical facts, but anniversaries don’t figure in their analyses.

    I disagree, if only because otherwise we wouldn’t get to geek out on printouts of the original source code and photos of the original maps.

    In the end, it may be that this is only a historical curiosity. But the stories we tell about our origins make a difference to how we evolve. I think it matters desperately to the future of this medium that we know how it was born, and the spirit in which it was created: whimsical, wry, imaginative, and immersed in the hacker ethic; pushing at preconceptions and fundamentally intelligent.

    We all have our favorite stories from muds. Today is the right day to share them.

  • Red 5’s chasing the persistence dream

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 89 Comments

    Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”

    Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).

    It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed. 🙂

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