Multiplayer Game Design Class - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 71

n Caverns of Koster. Raph Koster, one of the creators of the text MUD,
Legend MUD , became lead designer on Ultima Online and then creative
director on Star Wars: Galaxies , released in 2003.

Cellars. Mike Sellers was one of the founders of Archetype
Interactive, developers of the first 3D MMO, Meridian 59 , released by
3DO in 1996.
n Wright City. Will Wright is best known for the Sims franchise of stand-
alone games. He is one of the most visionary game designers working
today. His contribution to virtual worlds was Sims Online , released in 2002.
n Pardo

Sellers '

n

s Peak. Rob Pardo, currently vice president of game design at
Blizzard Entertainment, was the lead designer of World of Warcraft ,
released in 2004, the most successful MMO to date.

'

Mud

Mud was originally an acronym for multi-user dungeon, later also used for multi-user dimension
and multi-userdomain.Muds are text-based virtual worlds, the precursors of MMOs, and they can
still be found on the Internet today.

Again I moved guilds from zone to zone throughout the semester. Not only did
it mean one group could not sit at the back of the room to text and avoid
discussion all semester long, but it also figured more prominently in the
gameplay. Now they were required to answer questions concerning each of
the people the zones were named after for extra credit.

Roles
After everyone chose avatar names and pitched their game ideas to the class,
they voted to determine the top six they would be crafting concept documents
for. I again asked for them to give me a list of what roles they each wanted to
play. I still drew the names of the roles from regular game development. Because
the class was larger than the previous one, I added one position for all guilds,
and a second for the larger guilds. Four guilds were made up of seven members.
Two contained six.

I then spent several hours sifting through their choices of games they wanted to
work on and the roles they wanted to play. As before, I started with Designer,