Comment by brianstorms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianstorms | Hacker News Reader

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Multi-user graphical online virtual worlds, multi-user dungeons -- these things were already booming on the University of Illinois' PLATO system in 1978; they'd started popping up in 1973, maybe even '72. You had pedit5, moria, oubliette, krozair, dnd, dungeon, then in 1979 avatar, just to mention but a few. Multi-user dnd games were one of the most popular activities on PLATO all during the mid to late 70s. And these games were all graphics-based, not limited to just text like the far more primitive MUD1.

Bartle has gotten a lot of mileage over the years with the MUD1 story, leading to a misinforming of the media and the public, both of whom, when it comes to technology and the history of technology, seem to be perfectly fine with being misinformed. It's a shame to see an institution as prestigious as Stanford fall for the same misinformation and ignore the real history. Five minutes of Wikipedia browsing would have set them straight.

I'm sure MUD1 was very cool during its time, and got a lot of people interested in the ideas of MUDs. Unfortunately, it was not first. Hard as it might be for people to grasp the concept, but more sophisticated multi-user dungeon games existed before MUD1 was even conceived. Deal with it.

I decided to do the "Five minutes of Wikipedia browsing" you suggested.

Under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD I found this:

"In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.[18] Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.[19][20][21]

MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987,[22] becoming the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980, when Essex University connected its internal network to ARPANet."

Sigh. You're making my point for me. But the irony escapes you I guess.

Honest question, does PLATO or any other intranet count for 'first online' anything in the terms of this discussion?

PLATO was a network of systems, not just one. By 1978 there were PLATO systems in Illinois, Minnesota, Delaware, Florida, Belgium, and other locales, all internetworked using what was called "the link", a high-bandwidth connection between these various CYBER mainframes. PLATO had collectively many more users than ARPANET during this time; ARPANET's population wouldn't exceed PLATO's until probably around 1981, though it might even be later.

Here is Wikipedia page on PLATO: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

> Bartle has gotten a lot of mileage over the years with the MUD1 story

It's not really his fault, considering how often he points out how unspecial MUD1 was by doing the same kind of rattling-off you did. He does leverage his fame; I'll agree with you there; but I don't see this as a bad thing considering what he does with it. (Namely, he puts all his effort into advancing game design as an academic.)

It looks like they really mean first game like that on the Internet.

Probably, though that involves a little bit of retroactive attribution: at the time it was just an online game on some network. In 1980, ARPANet, PLATO, and other large multi-site networks were roughly peers. ARPANet turned out to be the one that "won" and evolved into the Internet, the global internetworked system that everything else got rolled into. But I'm not sure that retroactively changes the status of what a game in 1980 was: if one game was on ARPANet and one was one PLATO, you couldn't really say one was one "the internet" and the other wasn't, without being pretty anachronistic.

The article says the source was "donated." Furthermore, the "first ever online virtual world" bit comes from the Gamasutra title, not any Stanford affiliated source. It doesn't seem like they've fallen for anything - rather, Bartle and Trubshaw have just given them permission to publish the source online since their research papers were also donated to the library recently. I'm not sure why this offends you so much.

There are tons of media articles, conferences, books, and other mentions of MUD1 and Bartle, including prominent newspapers, magazines, etc. The MUD1 story is all over the place.

As for your comment "not any Stanford affiliated source" -- if you read the Gamasutra story carefully it has a prominent link to a Standford website page (on game history!) talking about, in its first sentence even,"the first online virtual world, MUD1."

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