Drift Reality > London, England > The Role of the Everyday User in the Evolution of MMORPGs - Part 2

The Internet

The Internet is a prime medium for analyzing the innovative role of the ordinary user. There is a precedence of innovation that has been woven into the fabric of the medium. According to Castells (2001), the Internet “highlights people’s capacity to transcend institutional goals, overcome bureaucratic barriers, and subvert established values.” Its roots in the government-funded Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and connection with the private sector might be construed as setting a tone of top-down innovation and implementation, if not for two key points: First, the goal of ARPAnet was to develop a network for communications that was decentralized and open-ended, key characteristics that allowed ordinary users to experiment with the medium. Secondly, many of the forces that helped shape the Internet stem from a culture of openness and creativity that pervaded the college campuses where ARPAnet was developed. It was this culture, manifest in policies such as the open-source movement, which has been attributed for the rapid development of the Internet.

Multi-user Domains (MUDS)

In the late 70s, two students at Essex University collaborated on a project that sought to leverage the Internet as a platform for text-based role-playing. Working on a DECsystem-10 mainframe, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle constructed the world’s first MUD, often referred to a MUD1. Initially, the game was only accessible by students at Essex University. As word spread, users began dialing-in to the MUD using modems. The first MUD was heavily influenced by the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In the MUD, users would explore virtual landscapes and engage in combat with other users and programmed “monsters.” In the SCOT model, Bartle and Trubshaw could be considered a social group, proposing an interpretation of a multi-user online role-playing game, on the emptiness of cyberspace.

MUD1 grew in popularity to the point where users began encountering technological barriers, most notably limited bandwidth. In response, many users began to code their own MUDs, using MUD1 as a guiding model. In just a short time, hundreds of MUDs had sprung up throughout Europe and North America. The online buzz surrounding MUDs began leaking into the mainstream, and it was not long until they began to gain exposure in hobbyist and special-interest magazines. By 1984, Bartle and Trubshaw realized they had collaboratively developed a potentially profitable technology, and formed MUSE Ltd. in an attempt to capitalize on it. They rewrote the software, naming it MUD2, and ran it on 32-bit computers owned by Network Information Services (NIS) a division of BT. Despite the incredible success of MUD1, MUD2 failed to be a lucrative undertaking, as did numerous other commercial ventures involving MUDs. The “dominant commercial” interests never had a substantial impact on the shape of the technology; rather, the ordinary user continued to dictate the shaping process as we shall see in the following example.

The initial MUDs were limiting in terms of what the user could or could not do within the virtual world. In most cases, a user could interact with pre-coded objects and locations, but these objects and locations themselves were not editable. According to Bakardjieva’s statement on the role of the ordinary user, the vibrancy observed during the formative stages of the technologies development would be expected to wane as dominant commercial interests took hold. Although there were continued commercial ventures into MUDs, the most successful MUDs were largely non-commercial endeavors coded by ordinary users. Furthermore, many of the subsequent iterations proved to be more innovative than the original MUDs. For instance, Tiny-MUD, developed by Jim Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon University, provided users with the ability to code and create new objects and landscapes within the MUD (Pargman, 2000). Tiny-MUD was not only innovative in its design, but also in the new social practices it inspired. Whereas user activity in previous MUDs had been primarily restricted to exploring landscapes and combating monsters, the central activity in Tiny-MUD involved social interactions between various users. In both these capacities, Tiny-MUD’s model had a profound effect on the shape of future MUDs.

Throughout the 1990s, the number of user-run MUDs increased dramatically. According to Pargman (2000), there were between 1500 – 3000 publicly available MUDs by the year 2000. The majority of successful MUDs continued to be managed and developed by communities of ordinary users. Throughout the lifespan of MUDs, the dominant commercial interests that would be expected according to Bakardjieva, never appeared. It proved to be a similar and related ICT, where dominant forces would begin to have an impact.

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