The Proteus Paradox Read Free Page B

Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, began developing a multiuser version of DUNGEN , a text-based adventure game inspired by ADVENT . The very first version of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), still text-based, was released in the fall of 1978. Richard Bartle, a fellow student, soon joined Trubshaw in developing MUD: “The game was originally little more than a seriesof inter-connected locations where you could move and chat. . . . Roy was mainly interested in the programming side of things, rather than the design of rooms, puzzles and so on. When he left Essex, I took over full control. At that point, there was no objective for the players, and only primitive communication.” Drawing from his interest in board games, Bartle added many game elements to MUD, such as a combat system, an experience system that permitted characters to level up, and puzzles. In 1980, Essex University’s computer network was connected to ARPANet, the network that became the Internet, and this meant that MUD became a full-fledged Internet-based game. 6
    The separate historical threads we’ve been following so far—miniature wargaming, epic fantasy literature, role-playing games, and multiplayer video games—finally intersected with the creation of MUD. As with ADVENT , other developers began creating variants of the original MUD, changing the game design and adapting the code to different computer systems. These variants in turn started their own lineages of MUD code bases; among them were TinyMUDs, AberMUDs, and DikuMUDs. In the 1980s, MUDs began to appear on commercial online services such as America Online (AOL) and CompuServe. One notable MUD was
Island of Kesmai,
the first online role-playing game to display rudimentary graphics using ASCII symbols—mazes and rooms, for example, were created using dash, pipe, and asterisk characters on the screen. MUDs were cash cows for these early Internet service providers because users paid for each hour spent online.
Island of Kesmai
cost six dollars per hour on 300-baud modems and twelve dollars per hour on 1200-baud modems. This meant that early online games could be very profitable even with relatively small player bases, as long as there were enough dedicated players. The first multiplayer online role-playing game to display true graphics—that is, using colored pixels to represent charactersand the virtual world—was
NeverWinter Nights,
launched on AOL in 1991. The game used graphics to render the world and the characters in a top-down 2D representation. The game server’s initial capacity of two hundred concurrent players was eventually upgraded to five hundred concurrent players. 7
    Early online games required much of both developers and consumers. Good graphical capabilities were not standard on personal computers in the early 1990s, and Internet connection fees via the early service providers were pricy. On the development side, the creation of online games required teams with incredibly broad skill sets; these teams needed to pioneer methods for rendering 3D graphics, create server technology that could handle thousands of concurrent users, and figure out how to manage online communities in which players could stalk, harass, and kill each other. It was 1996 when
Meridian 59,
the first 3D massively multiplayer online game, launched. Players could now see the game world rendered in three-dimensional graphics from a first-person perspective. Instead of having to play the game through AOL or CompuServe, anyone with an Internet connection could join.
Meridian 59
also has the distinction of being the first online game to employ a monthly subscription model. The game charged players ten dollars per month, regardless of how many hours they played. 8
    Although many recognize
Meridian 59
as the first 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing game, this unwieldy label actually wasn’t coined until a year later, in 1997, by Richard Garriott, the producer of
Ultima