We wanted to make a virtual world because we didn't like the real one. You can do the same kind of thing! You don't have to throw away the paradigm, just understand it!
— Richard Bartle
MUD, the first virtual world, was created in 1978 by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw around their twenties. Nowadays, Richard Bartle is a writer, professor and game researcher in the metaverse industry.
In 2010, he gave a talk at GDC (one of the most well-known gaming conferences), on the guiding principles of virtual worlds criticizing game designers.
First time ever building a virtual world
"Almost all today virtual worlds descend directly from MUD", says the inventor of the first multiplayer real-time virtual world. There was nothing before, so they had to design EVERYTHING from scratch. And he challenges the audience to understand why they did it.
He sets the general thesis of his argument on the following question: "If am I to create a world, how shall it be and why?" Bartle and his tech partner Trubshaw had the desire to create a world founded in their enchantment with ENGINEERING, SYSTEMS and FREEDOM.
The first thing when they began to work on MUD was to make sure it was technologically viable to build the virtual world. The next thing was to build how the world was gonna look like, the physics. Finally, they chose the story behind it, the genre.
He warns nowadays gamer designers are choosing first the genre, then they define the physics and then technology. Such actions make ASSUMPTIONS about what it is possible. The physics tells you what is possible, which may be BEYOND what you SUPPOSED to be possible!
Immersion or not?
Bartle had the dream to construct a place superior to reality. His own foremost aspirations were to build a world in which people could be and become themselves. It was crucial to them that people should believe they were in the virtual world. A concept known as immersion.
They gave a step back and determined that Natural Philosophy and the Theory of Evolution are important topics to understand. Due to the fact that human beings have historically undergone several millenia of "evolution", the human brain expects the world in a MUNDANE fashion
"If we wanted people to believe they were in our world then we should PRESENT it in such fashion that the brain would conceive of and believe it to be a REAL world." To this end, they endeavoured to make the virtual world APPEAR to behave as realistically as possible.
When it didn't, players should regard this as INTENTIONAL, rather than a bug. Bartle says the key to immersion is to make everything look "real" unless you have a good reason not to.
"Ask yourself this question, do you WANT your players to be immersed or NOT?" The point is whether you ever contemplated that there might be a reason NOT to do this.
Gamified Lore
What was the first MUD about? They wanted to become a place that was of Earth, but was not Earth. A place that was familiar, yet unfamiliar in its familiarity. They rooted the world in English folklore which today is called Fantasy inspired by Tolkien, Howard and others.
He chose English folklore because it shaped a CONTINUUM into the past and could use time as a METAPHOR. He criticizes: how many designers today have the LUXURY of using metaphor? He answers himself: apart from all of them, if they cared to...
What he envisioned was OVER-AMBITIOUS. He thought the world they created would be sufficiently richly-featured to be self-sustaining. They decided to "gamify" MUD to give players some sense of direction: they implemented purely game-related concepts as part of the physics.
They realised MUD lacked an obvious sense of PURPOSE. To remedy this, they implemented an achievement system such us equipment, skills, levels and experience points.
"I eventually settled on LEVELS with intermediate goals since thy were easy to understand and gave a players an immediate sense of their current place in the social order."
From all achievement systems, they chose levels because it was Bartle and Trubshaw's response against the British class system (!).
MUD had TEN levels, each of which had its own "personality". All that stopped a user from rising levels was their own ABILITY and strength of CHARACTER. It was a POLITICAL statement.
Understand the why
People who kept working on MMOs after MUD didn't know they are employing a system that made sense in one context without appreciation WHY it was there, nor WHY it worked.
"They LIBERALLY added many more levels and other advanced mechanisms when the elder game hit. Did they have ANY understanding of what they were doing?" "Why are so few modern designers willing to EXPERIMENT?. Don't they know they can do BETTER?"
Bartle closes the pitch by mentioning they design MUD from FIRST principales. Without a previous paradigm to work, they had to make their decisions for very PARTICULAR reasons.
His objective was to make two important points:
It behoves all game designers to understand WHAT they are designing and WHY they are defining it.
The choices available to them are still available to all of us, if we have the WILL to make our own.