Putting a Face on Things - Putting a Face on Things - page 5

In their early text-based period, virtual worlds had to be found, usually by word of
mouth through a friend. You had to get on the network. And, you had to deal with often
glitchy code and imperfect design (not everything has changed since 1979). A self-se-
lecting group, often composed of the same young computer scientists who worked on
the university network during the day found their way into electric dungeons at night. 5
MUD1 (multiuser dungeon) written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle of Essex
University on a DECsystem-10 mainframe, trail blazed the genre and remains to this
day one of the most famous applications of text-based adventure games. The popularity
of Colossal Cave followed by Zork , single-player computerized adventures, inspired
Trubshaw and Bartle to create the code for MUD. Their innovation of the multiuser
format changed online game history.
To begin with, only Essex students on the university intranet could access MUD1. A
year after its debut, word had spread and outside players began accessing the game by
calling into networked modems from their homes. MIT computer scientist Hal Abel-
son describes coming home one evening to find his eleven-year-old daughter calling
into the network modem of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
(where he worked) to access the MUD. (In the early 1980s, the password RMS, the
initials of Richard Stallman, the initiating author of GNU code and the Free Software
movement, got you onto the system. The password for the network paid homage to
Abelson's student Stallman, just as Abelson's work in object-oriented programming
languages became part of the inspiration for two game designers who would make the
first graphical multiuser game, Habitat.) After a few weeks of obsessive play, Abelson's
daughter was running her own dungeon. 6
The talents needed to run a multiuser dungeon reside with two kinds of writing. On
the design end, one needs the ability to work within the “framework of discrete [code]
objects,” as Bartle describes it, that create the technical workings of the game. 7 On
the user end, the part that the players see, one needs to be able to vividly describe a
world. Literally, players would navigate through mazes of text that described environ-
ment, objects, and other players. Bartle underscores the importance of good writing for
MUD game design: “For text-based [Multi-User Adventures]…the impact of well-writ-
ten room and object descriptions on new players cannot be underestimated.” 8 In the two
layers of “code” that create MUD1, I draw attention to a pattern that will come fully
into use in the development of networked media from those early days to the present:
the technical platform remains essentially open and the participants design the partic-