Before Online Games: How “MUD” Gave Birth to a Whole New Generation of Gaming

SPEAKER_00 0:00 We've become incredibly used to virtual worlds. Online games where we can create characters, play as though we're them, forge friendships, and spend large chunks of our lives inside them. Massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and RuneScape made this kind of gaming incredibly popular. But did you know that the entire virtual world revolution can be traced back to one game from 1978?

SPEAKER_01 0:25 I can draw a straight line from Mud One to any modern MMO.

SPEAKER_00 0:30 Wow.

SPEAKER_01 0:31 They are all direct descendants of Mud One.

SPEAKER_00 0:33 Before the graphics, before the internet was in our homes, before most people even owned a computer, before gaming as we know it, one game came along and changed everything. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before, where we explore the history of everyday life. Richard Bartle is the co-creator of MUD, Multi-User Dungeon, one of the first games ever to let you truly inhabit another world and live in it with other people. As a longtime World of Warcraft player myself, I was really excited to speak to Richard. He's here to take us on a trip through history to the early days of gaming and discuss what modern gaming may have lost along the way. Richard Bartle, you are one of the most important figures in the rise of virtual worlds. So can you tell me what is MUD? For anyone who doesn't know and how did you become a part of it?

SPEAKER_01 1:31 Written in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw. And I joined him shortly after he started work on it. So it's second person, so it says, You are doing this, you are doing that, you you can see. And it describes the world in real time in the present tense. So it's uh you are stood at uh on a narrow row between the land and whence you came to the north and south or a pair of majestic mountains, blah blah. And then it would say so-and-so is here, or there is something on the ground, uh, and then you can just type in your actions. That's essentially what it is, except it was a shared world, so it wasn't just you and um NPCs, it was you, NPCs, and other players, and that's what made it uh different. Um modern MMOs are basically just MUDs with a graphical interface.

SPEAKER_00 2:20 Could you sort of just explain then, when you're dropped into the world of mud, like who are you and and what is it exactly that you're you're doing for anyone who doesn't know?

SPEAKER_01 2:31 Well, there's no formal story to it. Uh when you um appear in MUD, the the only questions it wants to know is by what name shall I call you? And what sex do you wish to be? So those are the only two things you needed. And once you were dropped in, well, if you wanted to be a thief, then you would steal things from people. If you wanted to be a magic user, you would cast spells. If you wanted to uh be a fighter, then you would grab swords and weapons and and attack people. So you were what you did. It didn't really even occur to us to um give people character classes, partly because we were against classes when you reached the level cap. That was it. You'd won the game, congratulations, pat on the back. You can stay around and um help other players, or you can play through it again, or you can just stop playing, which is what most people did, because once you've reached the end game, there's no reason to carry on. We weren't in the business of trying to raise money by um forcing players to sit through meaningless groups raiding and daily quests until we produced the next level of content to uh squeeze money out of them. When you got to the end, it was just a case of that's it, well done. Congratulations, you've won.

SPEAKER_00 3:50 Where were you finding inspiration and what did you think the point of a virtual world was? Had you even considered that when you were in the process of creating it?

SPEAKER_01 3:59 Well, yeah, I had. Roy had as well, although Roy was more general, generalist. Um for me, I wanted a world that was not the real world, because the real world sucked. Roy wanted a world where people could go and do cool things, but ultimately for the same reasons, because you can't do cool things in reality. My background, you will have noticed, be it because you're English, um, is from the north of England, and back in 1978, um I sounded much the same as I do now, basically a peasant. Roy's accent was um from he's from Wolverhampton, so he's he speaks like this, and he said he sounded like a factory workout. We we were condemned by how we looked, how we sounded, our background, everything of the whole society put you in a box and forced you there. Um it was it was a class thing, really. Um, and we we were working class. So we I mean we railed against this, and angry young men, we were young men and we were angry. So um I wanted to make a world that was an alternative to the real world, cut out the middleman, don't bother trying to change the real world because you didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge and your your parents don't run an engineering company. So you you got no chance. Create another world, a world that sidesteps all this, where people can can be judged by the strength of their own character rather than what the rest of the world thinks of them.

SPEAKER_00 5:38 Do you think that's the same reason people escape to MMOs today?

SPEAKER_01 5:43 Well, the the reasons that people play MMOs are is is essentially um to do with identity. By playing as somebody else, you get the freedom to find out who you yourself are. When you play an MMO, you create a character. Um the character isn't you, but over time the character becomes you, you become your character, you become immersed in the virtual world, and you get to learn more about who you are. Um you get to change who you are if you don't like who you are. You get you get to do all this away from the pressures of society. You can say, what if I was less um outgoing? What if I was more outgoing? What if I was sneakier? What if I was more honest? Do I like helping people? Do I like protecting people? What do I like? And why do I like it? And is that me? And so you can in a virtual world you can explore your identity and find out who you are, because you can't explore it in the real world because there's no no backspace. If you if you screw up in the real world, then you're screwed up. That was the the ultimate thing that was driving me. Yeah, it was the freedom for people to become themselves and and then be themselves. It didn't change who you were, it more crystallized who you were. You were always the person that you found. It was just that you never got the opportunity to be that person except through playing. And through playing, you could explore and find the the person you you really were, or at least some step on the way to it. To begin with, it didn't really work because everybody knew everybody was in reality, because we were all playing on the same mainframe and we're all computer science students. But over time, yes, it um that did happen, and people did get to to explore um their sense of self.

SPEAKER_00 7:41 Yeah, because we must remember this isn't a time where we had uh online gaming spaces. You were playing on a connected computer network. That's how you played, correct?

SPEAKER_01 7:51 We were, yes, but that um it was connected to what would later be called the internet. We did have people playing from the US in 1979 and Japan in 1979. Those people could connect to us if they knew we existed, and we did tell people we existed. So it wasn't just on campus, there was internals who were the people who were uh students, and externals who were the people who were offline. And um the university had some modems, and people could dial in on the modems, and um and a a group of them chipped in together to buy the university more modems so that they could play at night, uh, which was kind of nice. So we did have people playing on dial-up, people playing locally, and people playing um over networks of various sorts from other institutions.

SPEAKER_00 8:45 Did you start to see already you some of the recognizably modern internet behaviour that we see now emerging in MUD? You know, like people developing romance, friendships, or things like trolling, even. Did you see any of that happening?

SPEAKER_01 8:58 Oh yeah, yeah. On the CompuServe version, British Legends, it was called, uh, which was just Mud Mud One, um, but but the same code but running on CompuServe, a large information uh provider, as they were called, um, yeah, there was people who would play that and they would be having affairs the whole time. I charted a 12-long circular path of relationships between them at one point. We did get people attempting to be to be jerks, um, and if it was within the what the game um rules allowed, then we let them. The problem is you can't code in all the things you want to stop. So um should a high level character be able to attack a lower level character? Well, it would be easy to stop that so that they can't attack them, but if the lower level character's been bothering them, following them, um, picking up all their stuff, trying to steal their kills and so on, then the high-level player might feel justified in attacking the lower-level player and getting them to go away, in which case it would be okay. But having code that somehow makes the judgment isn't really possible. And even if it were possible, then players would push at the edge cases, and they always did push at edge cases. Why have you banned me for stealing that person's uh sword? Well, I've banned you because I told you not to steal that person's sword after you'd been following them for the past week stealing their sword. Um so it wasn't that I did it for one, I did it because you disobeyed the order of a an administrator who was telling you not to do it because it was pissing people off um just for the sake of it. And what would happen is people would say, Well, the game lets me do it, to which our um reply was I have a finger of death spell. Bang. The game let me do it. Uh so we didn't bother with any of this Nambi pamby, you're on a three-day ban. If somebody misbehaved, off you go.

SPEAKER_00 11:10 Boom.

unknown 11:10 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:10 So you were actively involved in the um goings-on of the the player base as well. That's something that I don't think we can sort of um picture in today's games with millions of players, you know, had that hands-on approach, that sounds um quite amazing to me.

SPEAKER_01 11:26 Well, you had to in those days. I mean, we didn't have customer service reps or anything. Game management was something that we identified early on as being a good reason to be to play a um a game that actually cost money to play as opposed to one of the free ones. And so you knew other players, um, you knew who to be wary of, you knew not to um have any truck with this other guy because he's a bit of a jerk. That's something that larger virtual worlds don't have.

SPEAKER_00 11:56 Mudd actually inspired a lot of people to start creating their own versions, didn't they? Um what what do you think motivated people to build virtual worlds before there was this huge industry around them?

SPEAKER_01 12:08 Well, people have always created the created imaginary worlds, paracosms they're called. Lord of the Rings is a paracosm. I mean that world was created by Tolkien for fun. And lots of people um create paracosms, but in fact most people do, and they stop around age 11 or 12, but some carry on. And there are many examples of famous authors who've um who maintain paracosms into their adult life. I wanted to create a world and I created many worlds. Well, I say many, I mean it's quite a job, but uh at least at least three or four, maybe maybe six. What I got with um with computers is I realized I could make a a paracosm that people could not just visit in their imagination, but actually visit. Now, people who played Mud, many of them had their own ideas of worlds. Maybe they'd written stories of themselves set in worlds, and that made it easier for them to invest time and effort making their own MUDs, as they were generically called. There were other people who would be doing it because they played Mud, liked it, and thought, I can do that but better. So they did it, and some of them were better, most of them were, but some of them were better. This is how the concept evolved, and Roy and I were happy to let them do that because we wanted people to play MUDs. The concept of a a virtual world was invented independently at least six times. Um wow. Mud was probably the first. Um there are other ones, important early ones. Um Sceptre of Goth. Um, there's one called Avatar on the Plato system that had a small graphical aspect to it, basically a raster graphic that you could just, well, no vector graphics, you could just tore tiny little pictures. There was um Island of Kesme, which used ASCII graphics on a tile-based set. What happened was that the other ones, which are in America, immediately people commercialized and well, we can make money from this. So they kept their code bases to themselves, although it was quite hard because there was nothing. If somebody stole your code, it wasn't theft. There were no laws to say that somebody couldn't just take a copy of your code and hand it out because you still got your code. How how could I have stolen it? So um that did happen to Sceptre of Goth. But with MUD, um we actively encouraged other people to take our not to take our code, um, other people who wanted to run MUDs, we would give them our code. We just didn't give it to the players because that would spoil the game, but we were happy to help anybody who um would wanted to know how to implement these things. Um as indeed were the Kesmai people, they were um happy to help others do it. And when it we always knew we were going to get graphical worlds, because it was obvious. I mean, we had graphical regular games, and the only thing that was really stopping us doing it was um we didn't have any artistic abilities. But we could but textual worlds are better in almost every sense, um, except that they don't look good first. So they're much more immersive, you can do more in them, they're more sophisticated than graphical worlds. But if you look at text and you look at graphics, you're gonna go for graphics. So we always knew there was gonna be graphics. But when when the development of graphical worlds really started to take off, um the the big companies needed people who had experience in creating virtual worlds. And for everyone who came from Kesmai or um SeptolGoth background, there were hundreds who had come from a mud background because we just let the concept go out there. That meant that most of the early graphical worlds were based on on MUDs because the developers had all played MUDs, particularly they played one called Diku Mud, uh Datalogic Institute, Copenhagen University. That meant that all the modern MMOs ultimately had their roots in Diku Mud, which got its roots from Abba Mud, which got its roots from Mud.

SPEAKER_00 17:38 So can you draw a straight line then, do you think, um, between Mud 1 to World of Warcraft? Like could be.

SPEAKER_01 17:46 I can draw a straight line from Mud One to any modern MMO.

SPEAKER_00 17:50 Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:51 Even the um Far Eastern ones are direct descendants of Mud One.

SPEAKER_00 17:56 Wow. That's quite an amazing family tree to be at the beginning of. Um I'm also fascinated by this idea that well, what you just said, um that text-based games are more immersive. Why why do you say that?

SPEAKER_01 18:10 Well, first of all, the input and the output are in the same medium. So when you're typing, you're using words, and what you're reading is words, and it's the same medium, you're not having to do a uh a transfer. Secondly, um the images that you see in the text are bespoke to you. So if I say a huge fire-breathing dragon flaps its immense wings before you, or something like that, well, you're going to picture a dragon, but it's not the same dragon that someone else is going to depict. You're depicting the one that you want at that moment that's best for you. Whereas if I if it's in World of Warcraft or something else, it's a big dragon that someone's um carefully crafted. Now, if you haven't got much of an imagination, that's probably great. If you have an imagination, then, or at least um an internal visualization, because not everybody can see pictures in their heads, then you can create your own particular one that's I mean it might be sleek, it might have great things coming off fronds and scales, who knows what it's going to be like. Well, you know what it's like because you've pictured it. Before I um uh retired from university, I'd always used to get my players, my students to play Mud 2, because that way they couldn't say they had never played a virtual world. And towards the end, the players were saying, Whoa, what is this? Because they'd never seen a text game before. Well, I just typed commands in it and it understands me. Yeah, yeah, it does. And they're thinking it's like grade one AI and it's 30, 40-year-old AI. It's nothing special. And they were really impressed by all this um towards the end because they'd never seen it before. So we might see a resurgence in text, but I doubt it because people just graphics look better than text. If you read text, it's dead on the page. You have to play it for it to be meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 20:08 But also, there was something very different um in 1978, really, because games I feel well, at least they seem fundamentally different. There was no battle passes, cash shops, daily login rewards, you know, this enormous commercial machine that drives most of sort of modern MMOs. There was none of this behind mud. When money became a much bigger consideration in the design of online games, do you think that changed things at a fundamental level?

SPEAKER_01 20:38 Originally, it didn't. Originally, it was the games were free, as in absolutely free, not free to play with microtransactions, just they were just free. You know, like if you wanted to play knots and crosses right now, it would be free. It wouldn't cost you anything. When commercial things came along, they were originally um charged per minute or per hour. Um, because that's what computer companies charged. If you ran it on a if you high if you rented space from a deck system 10, then that cost you money per hour. So it was per hour, and that meant the more you played, the more it cost you. Once people were connecting through modems, either to a network or directly to the game, that uh that money that they were paying also shaped how they would play. But some of them, uh Marc Jacobs games, they went with a subscription. You paid for a month, and then you could it was all you could eat for a month. Now that revenue model of um subscriptions stayed around until about 2012, something like then, when Dungeons Dragons Online kind of broke the uh broke ranks and said, right, we're gonna make it free, except you pay little bits for everything. And they didn't know what to make you pay for, so basically it was for everything. Yeah. And they doubled their revenue like overnight. So other people thought, well, that sounds pretty good. So they stopped charging subscriptions and started these you can play for free with microtransactions. And that model then became the dominant one.

SPEAKER_00 22:29 Oh, it's Dungeons and Dragons game that that started it all.

SPEAKER_01 22:32 Yeah, DD Online was pretty well the one.

SPEAKER_00 22:34 I mean not the legacy you want.

SPEAKER_01 22:38 Well, it yes, I mean well, they still it's the game's still around and it still makes money. There are text mods that charge, and there are some that make more money, text games that make more money than graphical worlds. Wow. Yeah. Because they're small, bespoke, they have a high quality of um users, they have a high quality of um customer service reps. I mean the probably the pre-eminent one would be Akea, A-C-H-A-E-A, by Matt Mihay, who pretty well invented the dual currency system that's used, you know, where you buy one currency for real money, and you've got another currency that you get from the game, and then there's an exchange where people can buy one for the other. And then some things cost basically real the real money equivalent and some things are just the games. So that's that that that came from ACA. And um yeah that's a very successful highly sophisticated game that's more profitable probably well almost certainly more profitable than Dungeons Dragons online. That's how things were now the thing is that when designers were designing games the players would often accuse them of you're making this game deliberately slow so I have to run all this way from A to B because that means that I'm logged in for longer and then I'm going to be paying more money. The players always accuse designers well the designers didn't do that. That wasn't ever in their equations they didn't plan to make a game so that players would conform to the revenue model. When subscriptions came along they didn't try and get players to log in every day and make and then log off straight away so that um they didn't put a strain on the resources. That wasn't in their thinking. But as time wore on the games became more expensive to create and the uh corporates who ran them wanted to uh attract more players pull them away from other games they did start um insisting on changes which were that ran against the artistic message that the developers were or the designers were attempting to say these days um would you be uh um prepared to pay money for a a health potion well in the old days you wouldn't be paying that would be ridiculous these days well maybe some people would pay that and this is the pay to win thing anything that's got a gameplay effect is pay to win even a tiny gameplay effect like extra inventory space in the bank you're still paying to win because if you didn't pay the subscription you wouldn't have it and you want it so you're paying it so now you're paying to win because it's helping the gameplay cosmetic items are okay though because they don't affect gameplay and that's kind of where we are now but um they've gone on to this um the system of battle passes which battle passes are subscriptions that's all they are they're subscriptions and you get a bit of stuff when you do the thing that goes meet the goals that they've set you to do but they're subscriptions um but that being called battle passes and making players feel they have to earn the uh items that they get makes it um sound less like it is a a subscription so do you think modern games are sort of increasingly designed around keeping us playing rather than giving us a world we can yeah we want to inhabit well the whole thing about when you get to the end the L end game you've you've leveled up you've got to the um the end you've reached level whatever the cap is that should be it they should be saying congratulations here's a little 3D printed model of your character either go away and um don't come back or come back and play as uh an alt or hang around and chat with your friends whatever but well that's that but instead they say well now we're going to give you this um this completely different game the elder game which is all about raiding and uh dungeons and you get all this gear and the idea is to collect the gear and collect the sets and once you collected all the sets will bring out an expansion and it'll all be useless. So you're just being kept tread treading water trying to do best for your character when really it there's no point. You know that it's going to be replaced everything that you're doing's pointless. The journey is over and now you're being held here you're not being told you've won you've not you're not being validated in your actions you've been said ah yes you thought you'd won but you hadn't won and you won't win until eventually you decide you've won and leave us in frustration and disgust. We don't want people leaving you in frustration and disgust. If you're going to spend all this extra effort making expansions we'll spend it on making a new game people will be hyped for that new game. They're not hyped for new expansions but they are hyped for new games and if they like the previous one then well yeah they would want to play the the next one because it would sound good and maybe they would find different aspects of themselves that they couldn't have done before. But that's not how it works because the commercial side of companies wants people to keep playing because they're afraid of losing them.

SPEAKER_00 28:23 And also there's something else uh you know when MUD was new you know players were genuinely discovering it right whereas today a game it can be data mined guides can be published before most people have even played it um and also we're as gamers we've changed as well I think it's all about optimizing everything now and making sure that every bit of gear we have is is perfect every decision we make is is perfect and have we have we lost something by knowing too much as well I don't even know if it's possible to go back because of the internet but yeah knowing too much seems to have done a disservice to the games.

SPEAKER_01 28:59 Well there are some games where I mean they've been around for years and they don't have marvelous um wiki pages supporting them. Embers Adrift is like that. It's been around since what 2014 or something and but if you try and look up who is this mob then yeah good luck to you um where can I find it well it doesn't even have a UI here on the minimap. So there is in fact it doesn't even have a mini map it's just got a map. So there are some some virtual worlds where yeah that is like that but they tend to be the smaller ones um the larger ones overrun with bots and um real money trading and everything like that well you can play as much as you like just by following instructions off the screen. You don't have to buy the old prima guide you used to be able to buy you can just look things up and follow the instructions. Watch the video know your class do the dance before the boss download the mod follow the instructions that when it says at this point run behind a tree run behind a tree. So you're just following instructions and what sense of achievement you get from that how you how that validates who you are well it doesn't really does it I mean it's it's as if you're exchanging work for work. In the earlier days yes um when people hadn't played all these games and they and there weren't twitch streamers out there telling them how great it was that they you know this is how you do this this is how you watch this this is now how you should play look at all these pranks I can play on people ha ha ha we don't didn't have the external forces telling you how you should play and that was good because we were trying to get away from the external forces. We didn't want the real world to be telling you what how the virtual world should play and this is why probably in the the successful games of the future um MMOs will be smaller. Instead of having twenty servers with 10,000 players on each one you could have two 200 servers with 10 with a thousand or you could have 400 with 500 players on it. Because the closer it gets to Dunbar's number the more you get a village feel and the village feel is the one that players like because everybody knows everyone else and but it's within the world you don't have to go out of it. And if there's somebody there who's trying to tell everybody something that they don't want to hear they don't have to listen.

SPEAKER_00 31:38 And Dunbar's number being how many people you can realistically form a relationship with right?

SPEAKER_01 31:42 Yeah yeah depending on um how far out you want to go it's about 250. The thing is that most of these games today the designer doesn't actually have anything to say they're craft rather than art and you want them to be artwork. You want the designer to have something to say this is a game about freedom in my case but it might not be it might be a game about building bridges or it might be a game about language or it could be authority. I mean whatever you want to say something about it could be the game about you look at the real world it um you could say okay well let's have a game that's about autocrats or a game that's about um preventing wars or a game that's about escaping from prison camps or something. You can think of what you want the game to say what am I actually why am I making this game it's going to cost me take me five to seven years of my life to design this what am I saying in it and a lot of designers these don't have anything to say many of them are players rather than designers or they're crafts people. They can make you a good table but they can't design a good table this is what's holding a lot of these virtual worlds back is that they've got nothing to say and if they've got nothing to say why should the players listen? What is World of Warcraft trying to say now it's trying to say I was a player and I liked playing this so now I'm a player. But the way it says it is things like well this is a capitalist world you are judged by your possessions not by your own worth so that's how it is if you've got lousy possessions you're you're a lousy person so keep getting your stuff and then you'll be a better person. Except you never will be because we'll always bring out another expansion that tells you you're a lousy person again.

SPEAKER_00 33:35 It um very weird analogy here but it reminds me of when I uh so I was briefly in the heavy metal band as the lead vocalist and I was doing screaming vocals um which maybe you can't imagine um but I was learning how to do these screaming vocals and I was watching a a YouTube video many years ago from somebody who taught um the the vocalist of Lamb of God a really heavy uh band how to do it and and she essentially said if you're going to be screaming in a band you need to have something that you want to scream about. You can't, you know it's not going to work if you just want to scream because you think it sounds nice. You need to find something in you that's worth screaming about um and and it's like it's the soul. It's like capturing the soul of the essence of of why it is that you've turned up to do that thing.

SPEAKER_01 34:24 Yeah virtual worlds which have been crafted as opposed to designed they don't have a soul they're soulless the players know they're soulless but yeah your analogy is um it's perfect the uh the one about screaming you've got to have something to scream about and if you want to design a virtual world well why why you want to design a virtual world why don't you want to design a regular game why don't you want to write songs why don't you want to write novels and the reason is it must be that virtual worlds have something that nothing else has. Regular games have got gameplay virtual worlds don't have to Second Life doesn't have gameplay but what they've got is a reality you speak to people through the reality that you create. The other other games nothing else has a reality that's visitable that that that's lived you can you can live the reality that's that's what virtual worlds have and that's what you must be able to speak to people through if you make one if you can't then you're wasting your time you might as well go off and do something else that's a better and much less lengthy and frustrating um use of your free time.

SPEAKER_00 35:38 Well Richard Barthell I think it's important it may be recent history but to look back in history at what gaming was in order to take it forward through to the future but it's been an absolute pleasure meeting you and and having this conversation. Thank you very much for joining me on what we did before.

SPEAKER_01 35:55 Oh well my pleasure I'm just sorry if I've um rambled and ranted for much longer than you were hoping.

SPEAKER_00 36:03 Not a problem at all it was wonderful. Thank you