MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance

Thank you all for uh getting up early this morning or alternatively not having gone to bed yet. Uh feel free to keep your cell phones on ring so that when they go off it'll wake people up. Um this is a talk a bit different to my usual talks. Uh however um I I do tell you things that I've never I haven't actually told anybody else before so uh about the origins of uh of mud. So you're getting some historical data here and 50 years from now interviewers looking to rake up dirt on the origins of these virtual worlds will come to you and say, "What did he say at that conference?" And you'll say, "I I don't know. I was asleep." Right. Um So the reason that I've been asked to

talk here is because I co-wrote the uh very first virtual world mud. Um almost all today's um massively multiplayer online role-playing games descend directly from from mud but that isn't actually relevant. What's relevant is that we hadn't ever played one before. So what was it it wasn't that we were first that was important. It was just the fact that when we wrote it we were unaware of any others. We weren't the only people in this position as these things were always going to get them. They've been invented many times, about six or seven times independently and we would have got them anyway whether Roy or I had done it. Somebody else would in fact some other people did do it. Um but the the important thing from the point of view of this talk is that when we did it,

we didn't have anything else to base it on. Which means um we had to establish some principles, some guidelines. We had to um form some um views on what it was we were making and why we were making it. Because it wasn't just a simple case of, "Well, let's take that one there and make it better." Cuz there was nothing to take to make better. Um and that's why what I'm talking about here may be of interest because you get to find out why some of the things that are in MMOs are in MMOs. Um well, I hope you've all picked up your future antiques. These are 25 years old. So, uh older than some of the people in the audience. Um yeah, they they've all got the go. So, if you need them for I don't know, jimmying open Yale locks or something, just take as many as you want. Um

now, this isn't meant to be um a history lesson. I'm not going to be just standing up here and telling you um this happened and this happened and this happened as historical chronological facts because that's not interesting. You want to know why it happened. Um there are some other things which typically when you're talking about historical things, I could the areas I could go into, but I'm not going to go into them. Um like, why doesn't my zapper work? So, I won't be talking about how large our computers were. Um yeah, they would fit in this room. One would fit in this room. But, that's not really relevant. You know, the weakness of the computers did get mentioned once a bit later, but that's about it. I won't be telling you how great text is over graphics because uh that's an argument that I've won many times and still lost. Uh, I won't be telling you how great

Permadeath is. Well, hey, because God uses it, it can't be bad. Um, I won't be telling you how great it is when you've got customer service of 10 customers per one customer service person. That's really good to have. You can really keep your players in line. Um, except nowadays you got to like pay these people and uh, so it's a bit more expensive, bit hard. So I won't be going into any kind of detail about how we used to manage the games back then. Um, and I won't be trying to tell you how we extracted money from them. Um, and what some legal systems we used or rather um, didn't care about. So none of this, which might be of historical use to some people, uh, to you to find out you know, how do how do you things work in the old days? You know, there's like there's an intellectual curiosity. I'm not going to be talking about that so much. Um, instead what I'm going to be aiming at is discussing um, if I am to create a world, which is what

Roy Trubshaw and I wanted to do, how shall it be? What's the world going to be like? And why? That's the question that I'm going to be answering. Um, oh, this is a picture of a snowman standing in a furnace in World of Warcraft. Right. When uh, when Roy Roy Trubshaw started to work on MUD, um, his main, the main thing that interested him was I the kind of the machinery. It was like building one of those, what do you call them out here? The the those machines where you know, you turn the crank and all these different things happen. Rube something or other. Rube Goldberg, okay, yeah, we we don't call them that in Britain. We call them after our our uh particular same guy who our equivalent, but I don't remember his name either. Um so, Roy was kind of like, I want to build this intricate machine and then

set it going and wow, look it works. Um but also um he was interested in making a world that was separate from and hopefully superior to reality. You see, when you're 17, 18, 19, you don't figure that it's going to take 50 years to make one of those. You just think, well, you know, I can see how to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll start. Um from my point of view, um I was more interested in the world creation side. I wanted to build that it was the world making that was my interesting thing. However, um I also had um a a fascination with systems. So, Roy was mainly he wanted to make a machine that worked so he could get this um world working. I wanted this world working, but I kind of like making the

machinery that would work it. So, we sort of balanced quite well. Um Roy could have done the other stuff, but it was just that's where his interest mainly lied, and I could have done the other stuff, but that's where my interest mainly lied, but we both did both things. Um so, from both these points of view the point of view of wanting a machine which was operating a world so that you um when you went when you entered the world, you felt you were in it. And from the point of view of creating all that was separate from the real world, it didn't feel like a real world, it felt like a different world. Um it was important for both of us that that the players would feel that they were part of that world that when they visited it they were in it. Because if the the underlying systems were all wrong then they wouldn't feel like they were in the world and then we that wouldn't validate it. But if they felt it was right and it was natural and it was working how it should be then that would validate it. Likewise,

if we wanted people to visit a world that was not the real world it should actually be persuasive enough that they would think, "Yeah, this is kind of good. It's this is a real world in its own terms." You know, just like when you read a book and you immersed in a book and you transported off to Middle-earth. Uh it was like that that sort of idea. So um nowadays it's called immersion. We just wanted We didn't have a word for it back then. We just wanted you to believe you're a part of the world. Um because then once you've got that then it it shows that your programming working. I mean, if you want to see uh if I put the marble here or the dominoes and everything collapses and it all goes out in this wonderful spread and it works. Well, that's kind of makes you feel good about your programming. But it also meant that we could give people what the thing was about which was pretty well liberty. We wanted people to be able to escape the confines of the real world

to try on new identities, to be new not so much new people but to try and find out the people they really were. I'll explain this before in the past um where we had um it um computing department 1978 England not a lot of girls around. Uh actually yeah, I was going to say uh after 30 years anyway and then different. I managed to marry one of the two girls two years below me and the um so um yeah, there's not a lot of girls around not a lot of social graces. Everybody sort of um, tries not to interact with the rest of the, you know, the student body cuz if you speak to a girl and uh, and you're a you're basically a nerd or a geek or whatever. You know, I am geek son of nerd. Um, it doesn't really matter what what you look like, how charming you are. They're they're going to say, "All right, yeah, you want to see this?

This is your heart." So, so it's not really, you know, they wouldn't ever go cuz they're completely out done. If you got a virtual world and people can go in there and they can practice their social graces, not not like girls, they'll just actually practice being social to people, helping each other, talking, chatting, which you wouldn't really want to do normally because well, you know, people might talk. Um, so the the worlds were created and that was kind of the thing. We wanted to make a world which was separate from the real world. Um, now when Roy first started working on the first thing he wanted to do was to make sure the technology worked, that he could actually have the mechanism that underpinned it all. And that took him about an hour. Programming in machine code, macro 10 assembler. Yeah, I can send messages from one player to another player um, via a mechanism which I could also use for storing a shared world. Okay,

well, there you go. Roy's a really fast programmer. Um, the next thing he decided to do was to implement the physics of the world. He didn't know what the world was going to look like at this point. He was just building the physics. Building them them them mechanis- mechanisms that underpinned what the world would do. And that took him about a month uh, before he started hitting walls and he he couldn't do things. I I was maybe I shouldn't break it down to molecule level of chemistry. Maybe I should just have like liquid Um Now, supposing today somebody came along and said, "Hi, look, I just uh won the lottery. Here's $30 million and go off and make your own MMO. I don't care if it sucks. I don't care if anybody plays it. Just go and make one and have fun." Well, you might think, "Oh, what should I What should I make it? Should I make it like a you know I have got an idea. I could make it like a fantasy world." Um You might think of what what genre it

was going to be. You might think, "Oh, okay, right. It's going to It's going to All right." And you sit down and maybe you maybe you draw a map just so that you Oh, yeah, I can have like the good guys over here and the bad guys over here and this big block in the middle for my future expansions. But you wouldn't think what is the physics going to be like. Um but this is actually premature. You know, what that that's essentially a marketing point. That's That's like um what kind of game would I like to play? But you're not making a game that you If If you're a game developer, you don't make games that you want to play. You make games that you want to develop. Because if you want to play them, you're you're a player. Developer, you're a developer. When I get prospective students come to me uh and I interview them, one of the questions I ask them is, "Why do you want to study computer game design?" And they say, "Well, ever since I was a small child, I've been I've always been fascinated with computer games. I love playing computer games." Okay, so

do you like beer? Uh why aren't you doing a degree in brewing? Cuz brewing is nothing to do with drinking beer. It's to do with making beer. Developing computer games isn't to do with d- with playing games. It's to do with d- developing the game. Um so if you start thinking like this, you're thinking like what are my players doing? You're kind of defining your the people who are going to play it. But that's kind of premature because you're already falling into a mindset of um what kind of people are going to play, not what are the tools in my toolbox that I could enable. Sometimes when you see a tool, it can help you think of some other group that you hadn't thought of. Um so if you if you start by developing the uh thinking about the world, then you're already already making assumptions about what it's possible to implement. Um if you start by working on the physics, what can we implement?

Then that could go beyond um what you supposed to be possible. So if you start writing your game and you're basing it on the previous game that you liked really, but except that 10% that was no good that sucked and you want to write your new one that's the same except with 10% better that doesn't suck. Well, that's a nice evolutionary approach, but you might be missing some things that you think aren't possible to implement because the previous person didn't implement them. But maybe they didn't implement them because the previous person to them didn't implement them. And maybe they're perfectly possible to implement, it's just that you haven't really thought of it. You're just following a paradigm. But if you don't have a paradigm, like Roy and I didn't, you have to think about these things from scratch. So Roy was think what can I implement? And then knowing what I can implement, what can I use it to implement? Um Roy and I

figured that there was another good reason for trying to uh put physics and other um basic science into virtual worlds. Um this is news to many people in this part of the world, but there's this wacky theory called evolution where peop- where humans have um so the story goes uh developed over millennia and the way they are is pretty much because um if they hadn't been like that 40,000 years ago, they would have been eaten by bears. Uh now one of the things that the human brain has got through evolution is an ability to understand the world and process it in an instant. I can look out here and I can see people. Because my brain is taking all your

images and converting them into people in my head. I I can't stop it. I just see it because it's being done automatically for me. But if I was to look out here and I thought, "What what the hell? That's a Dalek. That's not a person. That's Actually, that's quite bad." Then that would be uh something I would notice because it's different to what my brain is doing automatically for me the whole time. If I look down here, I can see that I'm above the ground. Whoa. But I I don't have to think about it. I just see it cuz I got stereoscopic vision and all these millions of processes are going around in the back of my head and saying, "Yeah, that's kind of a bit further away than that." So the brain will do all these things for you. And when it But when there's a dissonance, when there's something different between what you see and what happens then the brain notices, "Well, that's not That's not all right." And and And that's the point at which either immersion is broken or you require an explanation. Um

So what we wanted we if when we're playing when we're designing mud we wanted people to believe that they were in the world. Therefore, we should put as few barriers to them to persuade them that they weren't in the world as possible. So, if you're playing and things keep happening that don't make sense, you will notice it and it will interrupt uh and and too much of that and you will think, "Well, I'm not actually in a world. I'm just looking at this this series of inputs which are then not in any way uh um natural. They're all different. And because of that, we tried to make the world appear to be um as realistic as we could. So, things should happen like you'd expect them to happen. And when they didn't, that's where peop- people should think that there was a a reason for it. So, if you go into a world and

I I I close a door and a window opens, but how do I try to close the door and a window open? Now, either that's a bug or did I type door? Oops, that should have been window back in the code. I'll just change that. Or you say, "Oh, there must be some kind of connection between the door and the window. Maybe if I shut the door and the window opens, that means I can get out of the window and then people try to get in." Uh if they get in and the window would shut and they wouldn't know where I'd gone. Huh, you know, but so you can't have reasons for things, but you've always got to have an explanation for them. If there's no explanation, then either it's a bug or they shouldn't notice it at all. Um So, one of our the the rule that we sort of had was if you haven't got a reason not to conform to reality, conform to reality. So, if there's no reason not to do something now not to do something the same way that real life does it, well, do it the same way real life does it. Because that way people aren't

constantly being um challenged to suspend their their um disbelief in this world. It If the If their brain's saying, "Yeah, that's how it should happen. how it should happen. That's how it should happen." it's it's much easier to become immersed. And this was a theory, you know, Roy and I actually discussed this and and put and that's why we did it. That's why we tried made it more simulationary than you might uh do today. Um conform, when I say here, it's uh it's not actually in great detail. Um So, for us, it's things like if you're carrying an icicle, well, it's kind of going to melt after a while. Maybe if you stay in a cold area, it won't melt. But, if you go into the desert, well, it's going to melt, isn't it? And it's cuz it's ice. And why would anybody carry ice around and it not melt? Um However, we wouldn't go to the level of

uh Q equals H A T2 minus T1. That's only just part of the equation. You've actually got to do figure out the uh reduced surface area due to the melting ice and then you got to integrate it over time. And that's just kind of tricky, but most people don't do that sort of thing in their head. To a to a player, if you are playing a game, uh and you've got an icicle and it doesn't melt, well, that doesn't make sense. Why didn't it melt? Is it like a magic icicle? Well, in that case, can I do things with it? Zap. No, that's not right. And yet, in World of Warcraft, I've got a my warlock is carrying around the same glass of milk in her backpack that she's had for years. It's uh that that should be some kind of living cheese by now. Uh players don't kind of don't really notice it, but but it should make sense. Why hasn't it gone horrible? And there

are actually, you know, gameplay opportunities you can do with things like um if If ice, melting. Um So, when I talk about physics, it's not down at the collision detection s- billiard ball level. It's this kind of thing. Light cannot pass through a closed wooden door. If I'm in a room and I and there's no light in the room, there's light outside, and I shut the door, I can't see. That's the kind of thing. Uh Of course, most MMOs don't have doors these days. You walk into an inn and go to a shop and hey, no doors. Hey. But, who who stole all the doors? Is there like a stack of doors somewhere? Um What happens when you pour four noggin's of water into a glass that holds three noggin's? Uh you could do this in mud. Got a glass here, holds three pints. Jug here, holds four pints.

Pour it into that, you end up with a glass of three pints and a jug of four pints. Yeah. How many MMOs can do that today? Why can't they do it? Um Plate armor doesn't float. Yeah. I mean, I know that they they they special carbon fibers where they uh they incorporate bubbles into the plate armor, but uh Barbarossa was a um like a Middle European leader who on the Crusades uh got really hot and decided to go for a a swim in a stream. Um He was so desperate that he didn't take his armor off. Yeah. And he never came out. Um So, when I say talk about physics or or anything like this, what what I'm basically saying is that it's what an uninformed player would regard should happen without evidence otherwise.

Uh if I um hit you with a sword, what should happen is your head should fall off. Uh what would happen is that you would get a nasty nick and then I would be eating that sword, but that's But it's it's just what should happen. And if things happen as they should happen, that means you don't have to concentrate on believing the world. It's just flowing there and and the more it seems to be real because everything's behaving how it should do, then the more inclined you are to believe that it really is real. Um now this was really useful. I mean in a text world there's not a lot of pictures to persuade you that this is what's going on. And people really did get very immersed in this this this simple world. However, although the principle of a mimicking reality was carried forward, uh the reason for it wasn't I mean as

you see people played MUD thought, well, that's kind of cool, but I could do better. And so they went off and they wrote their own. Some of them were better and some of them I should say most of them were drivel. But you know, that's the way it works, evolution. Some of them work, some of them don't. But if you don't know why something's there then that means that you're more inclined for operational reasons or for um the uh design reasons of your own to ignore it. If you do know why it's there, then you're making a more informed decision. Um and bec- over time people have kind of left this simulationary aspect behind to the extent where it's not so much that they're simulating reality, they're simulating the previous MMO. But they played These are some of the things which are natural in today's um MMOs which would have they would be been by the players of the 1980s. I mean, they would have actually pointed out and

said, "You you expect me to play something with this in it?" If the goblin was carrying a sword, why was it hitting me with a stick? Uh It's got a sword. You kill it. It's got a sword. Well, they're kind of dumb goblins. And I wonder if people kill them. They They carry swords and they think they're like lightning C guards. Uh This is one of my favorites from Lord of the Rings Online. I can dye armor. Okay, just a moment. I Okay, so I've got plate mail and I can dye it. But I mean, like dye doesn't Doesn't that kind of mean maybe need some absorptive quality on the part of what you're dyeing? But hey, okay. But but I can't paint it. So, you know, I've got this paint. I've just made this paint. Craft Worked at my crafting. I can make the paint. But I can't paint my armor. I can only dye it. Even it's plate armor. It's It's like metal. You You should be able to paint metal, surely. Ah, but you can paint the walls of your house. That's what it's for. You go into your

house and you can paint the walls and think, "Oh my god, they made it pink." That's because they want me to level up my paint making so that I can get some decent color instead of a pink wall. But I can't paint any other walls. It's like wall paint. It's It's special paint that only works on the walls of my house. Wow. So it just doesn't make sense. And yet people are playing, "Oh, yep, yep, this is I think I kind of carried through by the visual aspect. But that's only really can I can't really take you so far. Um I can build a snowman in a fire and neither is affected. Yeah. You try that in real life. You build a snowman in a fire and see whether the snowman or the fire is like One of them's going to lose. But in World of Warcraft, no, it's just a kind of Oh, well, at the light it throws on the It's magic fire and magic snow and magic men. Um Actually, another one.

How how come here I am killing something and if I step two yards that way, they'll notice, but here I can see them and I'm slashing away and I'm fireballs boom boom boom, but so long as those fireballs don't actually warm the people that they're in the distance, I I can do it. I can I I can Aren't they stupid? Well, well, yeah, really. I mean, you walk into a dungeon, armor clattering, then there're going to be traps set up, there're going to be all sorts of things happening and you aren't going to be attacked by one guy while the other one's saying, "Okay, well, I'll just see how this is go. Oh god, they killed him. Well, I guess I'll step up to the plate." You're going to stay back there. This would just not make sense in a text I mean, we we we we'd get things like um okay, so you're being attacked by a goat and in the same room there's this like thief guy and well, he's he maybe he would attack you if the goat was doing really well, he might join in on the goat's

side, but on the other hand, if the goat was uh looking like it was going to be um defeated by you, he might leave cuz he doesn't want to be the next in line. I mean, that's the kind of little, you tiny little decisions that they would make, but you don't get that these days. Any any of it. Um it's not that they're not challenging, um they just haven't been considered. I'll give you an example. This is uh something from Mud 2 rather than Mud 1, so this would be about 87, something like that. Um we have these two things, a baton and a bow. Okay, they're basically these just these pointers. Um if the bow's over there and I wave the baton, it teleports me to the bow, drops the baton to the floor. If I pick up the bow and I wave the bow, it teleports me to the baton and the bow drops to the floor. So, it's just a little teleport thing for people to get around quicker. Um if you dropped um the bow, say, into a well, it would fall down the well. Anybody who happened to be in the well could see it going past. They might be able to grab it.

It landed in the bottom where there's a river. And it was picked up by the river, carried away through an underground crevice that you couldn't really get through for humans. That was only things like smaller than people could get through. And then it would get to this great where it would lodge. And there there was a secret room. So, if you dropped the bow in there, and it would fall down, float down the river, get caught in it, you could wave the baton, it would teleport you to where the bow was. You pick up the bow, you're in this room that no one else can get to. You can store all your stuff there. You can do whatever you like there. You can be nasty to people and you're fleeing from a fight and then teleport there and they can't catch you. So, it was really kind of cool. So, one player did all this, realized he was safe from attack cuz there was no other way into the room. And he was right. There was no other way into the room. The two also had a keg of gunpowder. Um cuz we had this wall and there was this cannon facing it and there was all this little puzzly thing where you had to go and get like the gunpowder and from a really hard place and stick it in

the keg and you had to go and get this cannonball and stick it in and then you had to um set fire to it with something that wasn't too hot cuz that would like set the gunpowder off but just something just enough to set hot enough to set it off. Then it would bang and you'd go in and you'd get a bunch of points. Um so, we had this gunpowder. That's what it was for. But cuz it was gunpowder, you know, any fire next to it, it would go boom. So, another player took the gunpowder, put it in a coracle, you know, one of those little hide things that Iron Age people would um use to go on rivers. Put the gunpowder in the coracle, set fire to the coracle, dropped it down the well. Coracle goes down, lands in the water. Doesn't get put out yet, because the this cork is still burning. Uh floats floats down. Catches to the end um where it's stuck on the grate. This guy's asleep in his safe room. At that point, the fire spreads to the gunpowder. Boom. Guy is killed. Haha, serves you right for thinking you

were safe. Now, okay, that's a bit of emergent behavior. But that would work on a machine which had 50 players on a 33 MHz. In other words, that would probably work on this. My remote control. So, it's not sophisticated. This isn't hard to implement. So, why don't we see any of it? Um One thing is saying, "Well, this is just too hard for the players to understand." No, no. What's hard is if you're explaining why when you drop something in a well, it doesn't actually fall down the well. That was That's hard. That the default is it should fall down the well, and that rivers should flow, and that when you get into a river and you've got a uh a backpack full of biscuits, when you get to the other side, you've got a backpack full of biscuit mush. And that makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for it not to have any of these effects.

Um another uh uh argument against it is that um it leaves the door wide open to um exploits. And it can happen. Um um but it only happens when you don't have a consistent physics to to do it. When you don't handle things consistently. If it's always the case that the gunpowder will explode when it gets too hot, then you don't get the kind of exploits that you would do if it only explodes under certain very specific conditions, like it will only explode if it's in a cannon. Um or um or or or in a or if fire spreads through the um It's It's It's hard to explain without going into a to details, but essentially if you've got a if you arrange your objects in in like a a class hierarchy with them multiple parents, which is probably another talk, um then you get a lot of this functionality for free. So, you only have to account

for exploits at a high level like explosive objects. And then it's accounted for everything which could possibly explode. So, you can cover this kind of thing. It But, it's when you've got uh this all works for the the uh the gunpowder, but it doesn't work for the sticks of dynamite. That's when you get the exploits. Um there are, however, um more legitimate reasons not to put this kind of thing in. One of them is it can annoy players. So, my World of Warcraft character has well, one of them has 10,000 gold pieces. Well, how much does a gold piece weigh? British sovereign weighs about just under 8 g. So, if I've got 10,000, that's 80 kg or in American, 176 lb or in English, 12 stone, which is like what I weighed about 20 years ago. So, you Yeah. So, here's my lithesome mage walking around carrying a fully grown man on her back.

Now, yeah, you can see how that might be all right. Maybe we shouldn't simulate that area because that would really annoy the players. But, on the other hand, it could actually add some some gameplay reasons. Yeah. The deeper the physics, the the more uh you're able to write um more subtle puzzles. Um so, all that thing I was saying earlier, you simulate reality in the absence of a reason not to. Um well, exasperating the players is a reason not to. Uh this is why in the movies whenever you see somebody going to the lavatory, you know something bad's going to happen cuz no one ever shows you going to the lavatory in a movie in a in a or or what's the American word for lavatory? Restroom. No one shows you going to uh the the restroom uh in a movie because we don't really want to know about the uh personal habits of movie star characters, but if they are going there, you think, "Oh wow, that dinosaur's going to go stomp on that

that uh that outhouse." Um so like it's not that in MMO. Yeah, in real life everybody has to visit the um bathroom every once in a while unless they're uh British royalty when they get somebody to remove it using a hose if the story of Princess Diana are correct. Or if you're in Star Trek where you get it beamed out of you. Um So there's but but it's not really anything to do with the game. You're you're you're simulating for no purpose. And so you can just abstract that out. Okay, doesn't really serve a purpose. I'll keep it out. People aren't going to notice so much, but occasionally they might. Ah, there's a fire. I got to put the fire out. Well, I don't have anything to put the fire out with. Although hold on, I do remember drinking a bottle of water about half an hour ago. I'm carrying enough water inside me to put the fire out. Therefore, I shall put the fire out um using natural means. You could do that in Mud. You could

actually piss on the fire and it put it out unless you're a female character. Um we did take There were more than cosmetic differences between male and female characters for for some things. The uh the frog wouldn't turn into a prince if a male kissed him. The line being he's a prince, not a queen. Which was put in there because the gay players asked me to, believe it or not. Um, So, yeah, taking things out because it annoys the player is one thing, but it can squander up gameplay opportunities. You can get things out of this. Um, today the uh the modern virtual worlds I'm assured by Google uh translate that rectum universitatis virtual world. I don't speak Latin and I don't see why anybody else should. Um, but I I this really quite superficial today as well. Well, why are they so superficial? You can do it a lot more detail and get more out of it.

Um, this um lack of understanding of immersion has now extended beyond the physics. Um, there are some things that people do just for a laugh which um break immersion. So, you go into the bank in Stormwind and the characters this is they've got the names Olivia Newton and John. Hey, that's like Olivia Newton John out of Grease. Yeah. Yeah, well, what's that got to do with World of Warcraft? You know, you just spoiled my view of um uh that I'm in a fantasy world just cuz you couldn't actually think of any decent names. Um, so but I mean is it really actually all that bad, you know, just a few jokes you tell us people it's a safe space to go and this is a way you can be a hangout rather than play the game. Well, there are arguments for that, but the point is you have to think about it first. If you didn't think, should I um

stick with names which are comical or should I go with names which are more uh um immersion making? If you didn't think it, then well, you you've made a mistake. I'm not saying you shouldn't have people with these kind of names if you want to, but you should know the consequences of it and decide, "Okay, on the whole, making Stonewind Field safe and and breezy and a place where you can hang out with your with your friends cuz it's kind of a really world It's like the real world interface. But well, yeah, that would be a reason to do it." But if you don't think about it beforehand and you just do it because well, they all seem to people seem to like a joke, well, you're missing something. You know, it's just at a superficial level. This is also something This is something that people from the text mud days would be horrified with. Lord Lord of the Rings online, I type salute. What does it say? Doesn't say your character salutes. No. It says you salute smartly. No, I didn't. My salute was like this.

It wasn't smart at all. It was sarcastic or offensive or Hitler. But it says I salute smartly. But I didn't say what it is salute smartly. You're saying I saluted smartly. I didn't salute smartly at all. I saluted um pathetically or ironically or over-enthusiastically. I could have done all these things, but no, no, they just say salute it smartly. Why add that stupid extra adverb? Do you want your players to be immersed or not? If you don't want them to be immersed, that's fair enough. You don't have to. If you do want them to be immersed, then you should do some of the this more simulation-y stuff. But the thing is you should actually ask yourself, do you want them to be immersed and then on the basis of that make your decisions. Oh, here we go. This is a Dagna the dwarf out of Dragon Age: Origins. She's this little perky, preppy um very enthusiastic, eager-to-please

character. Why is she in uh irritating? Um Okay. So, once we had done all the physics, it came to me to do the world. Uh we call it content now. What setting was I going to give it? Um there was no paradigm before and I could have chosen anything. And I did look at multiple settings. I wanted something that was over Earth because I wanted people's I didn't want it to be so crazy that people couldn't understand what was going on but yeah, I wanted it to to be immersive. So it had to be over Earth but not Earth. Um so it had to be um in some ways familiar so people felt they knew what it was like but unfamiliar in its familiarity. So everybody kind of knows what the Wild West is like but if you go to the Wild West you don't know if if it's the kind of Wild West where all the school moms are armed or if it's the kind of Wild West where all the all the all the cattle are vampiric or or what but you do know some

things about the Wild West. Um I decided to root it in English folklore. Um these days this is kind of called fantasy. Uh it wasn't that then. Um there were very few fantasy things around. I just as far as I was concerned it was English folklore I was using, you know, dragons and things like that. Um I'd experimented with this in a board game that I'd made about 5 years earlier. So I did know that I I did know the basic settings. I'd I'd made some changes to the to the board game putting in some like Dungeons and Dragons kind of characters and that hadn't worked out. I I didn't really feel as if it as uh as uh arcane as I wanted it to so I'd taken it out. So um there's the same here. Um I I wanted the the kind of the the more pure form. Um I wanted to make people think they knew enough about the world that they felt that they could survive in it but disquieted enough that

well, you know, I've read these stories. Actually a lot of it was Germanic folk folklore but you know, I've read these stories where the the goats are going to come out and and attack me and I don't I don't know if this is a a friendly goat or not. Um it wasn't friendly. It was mad. Um, so I um I didn't use any of the um other thing. I'd read Tolkien. What Tolkien gave was a notion that you can create a self-consistent world, but I didn't put any orcs in Mud. I'd read Robert E. Howard cuz I was a boy. Um, I'd played Dungeons & Dragons. Um, but I didn't use any of those things. Um, I just went for English folklore. Um, but that wasn't the only thing I could have used. I I came across I thought of several things I could have used. Um, here are some of the other things that were on my short list of what I could have done. The Three Musketeers era France. I played a game called En Garde, and Three Musketeers era France is really

fun if you're a male. It's not so much fun if you're a female cuz there weren't actually all that many female musketeers. And on the basis that we thought female characters should female players should at least maybe have the option of playing a female character, and they don't want to just be playing like mistresses. Uh, so we rejected that. But it was on the short list. Um, Scheherazade's A Thousand and One Nights. That is an excellent area. Of course, it wasn't so excellent in 2000 or whatever it was when the Twin Towers were hit, but prior to that it was certainly excellent, and it will be excellent again. Because that is such a rich culture. Everybody across the world knows about the Arabian Nights. And and it's it's got that kind of magical otherworldliness about it that I really wanted. That was that would have really worked well. Another idea I had was a escape from a prisoner of war camp thing where you're trapped in a in like Colditz Castle, and you're trying to

escape. Um, that was kind of a bit depressing though. Uh, it wasn't when you escaped, but then then you couldn't play anymore cuz you'd escaped. And this would be a surprise, uh, Camelot of Arthurian legend. That was also on my list of things cuz I quite like the the symbolism in that. But eventually I went for um the English mythology. And the reason I did that was because it's a continuum. The mythologies it it it just goes back and back and back and back and back in time. It's not a fixed point. The others are all fixed points in time, but with a continuum you can go back. And what that allowed me to do was to I could use time as a metaphor for menace. See, when you come across something in today's MMOs, it's like, "Oh, wow, this is a zone rated 31 to 35. I'm rated 28. It's going to be a bit tough." But you can't you back then we didn't we we did have what would be equivalent of zones, but the way to flag it was that I that I

chose was using um time. So, if it came from like the 1930s, which was about as late as we got, then it was going to be pretty well safe. You know, a bit different, but you kind of understand, you know, it's got gramophones and things. But if it comes from the 1800s, a broken-down um tin mine, well, that's a bit more dangerous. And if it comes from Neolithic pit times, you know, stone circles, then you are going to die. And and I use it as a as this as this uh um metaphor for menace. Now, how many uh designers today have the luxury of using metaphor? Well, you all do. You just don't. You Why why not? Why why are you designing games? Um Okay, so I'm not going to gloat at your misfortune for not having my

uh genre choice. Um I'm trying to point out you still have the choice. You can still do what these things that I'm telling you about. You just don't have to uh uh just take it as a day job. Why are you creating MMOs? If you want to uh make do it for making money, well, why aren't you working in a bank? My wife works for a bank. She gets three times as much money as me. Um if you're doing it because you want to uh because you like playing the games, well, that you know, that's we're back to the brewing argument there, you know, you you're playing isn't the same as developing. Besides, you won't be play developing the games. You'll be developing the tools that somebody else will be using to code the back end of a horse. You aren't actually developing the game. Only a few people get to do that. Um if you want to do it because you want to bring joy and spread um and help the world, well, go work on a charity. You know, they pay more as well even though they're charities, especially the animal charities.

Uh so, why are you doing this? Well, you're doing it because somehow you want to express something. And yet, people don't express things even though they've got the tools right there before them. Um I chose fantasy because of what it delivered in terms of resonance, very similar to the real world, and dissonance. Whoa, this bit isn't the same. This is important. This is something I have to think about. That's why I chose what you'd now call fantasy. But today people don't choose fantasy for that at all. They choose it because it's a well-understood trope, and it delivers solid, knowledgeable things. You just know what's going to happen. Uh and in today's world, if you're being progressive, that means that your dwarves aren't drunkards who speak with a Scottish accent. So, in Dragon Age, uh Dagna, she's this little perky speaks with an American accent. It's great in Dragon Age. All the All the dwarves speak with American accents and all the humans

speak with English accents. Um which makes them sound like Hollywood villains, but not to an English player. Yeah, it's great. Um and and this deal I mean, you notice that in Dragon Age. Wow, these are These are dwarves, but they're not stereotypical uh Cossack dancing drunkards like I don't know. And and the elves don't don't hug a tree after breakfast. You know, they're actually rounded individuals. It's been thought through. I love Dragon Age. Played it all the way through and then played it all the way through again. Because I have no life. We didn't have dwarves dwarves in mud. We had dwarves as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Many players today don't even know that the word dwarf when pluralized is it's it's it's got an F on the end, not V E S cuz Tolkien couldn't spell. Uh

Um if you're inventive in today's MMOs, then it's saying, "Well, look, we've got these new new character races." Races that that actually sounds pretty bad. Uh isn't that kind of racist? Um or we've got this new class hybrid. This is what we're calling our paladin except um we don't want you to know it's a paladin, so it's like 2/3 fighter and 1/3 healer maybe or maybe this one's 40% fighter and 60% healer. Oh, yeah. But and we're calling it a I don't know, lawgiver or something. It doesn't really matter. We In text muds, there were muds that they had 100 classes, 100. And and character races, yeah, they would advertise it on the basis that they got 30 different character races. Well, that's good. When I start off, if really going to know what to choose here, which selection of vowels with no consonants or consonants with no vowels am I going to be?

Do you even need classes? Oh, um yeah, this is a picture of a a dead ox from South Africa. Right. Um, now some of what Roy and I envisaged because we were I was 18, he was 19 was overambitious. Um we hoped that the world we were going to create was going to be rich and meaningful. Oh man, when's this talk supposed to finish? Like 5 minutes. Ah, ah, yeah, you say that but you haven't got the the tasers. Roy was hoping that the game would be sufficiently richly featured to be self- sustaining so that what you did in the game would be in it would be enough to to give you goals for things to do. So we didn't put a game mechanic in it. Um, he he set it up as a game but with only a partial rule set implied by the physics. So he didn't actually build in points and experience and things like that.

Um it's but it was more evil online than Second Life. You know, you couldn't add random stupid content but you could act within the context. Um, however, the Deck system 10 wasn't up to this. Um so we discussed it and we decided eventually we're going to have to gamify which meant we're going to have to put as part of the physics of the world some game aspects. So things like experience points for example. In the real life you don't have experience points because the physics of the real life don't support it but in a game world where we put it in so you I mean that was the it was a major change in our philosophy. Um I rec- I recognized that you didn't have an obvious sense of purpose in the you went there and it's kind of an Alice in Wonderland world. Fantastic. What a wonderful world, but there was nothing really to do there except for curiouser and curiouser. So, I decided to put in what these days we

call a an achievement system. And I went through a number of options for an achievement system. Um, including equipment. So, the more equipment you had the the better the equipment, the higher you were. That we ruled out because we didn't have the disk disk space to store it. Skills. If you were good at fighting, good at this, then your skills would increase and then you'd be better. Um, levels. So, you do things, you get experience points every so often you trip a thing and you go up to the next level. Experience points without levels. You just do things, you get experience points and then what PR picked 20,000 or whatever your own goal was. Linked quests. You do things ultimately to try and achieve some objective, which would be quite hard and then the more you did it then you get harder and harder ones. Kind of like a choose your own adventure. Um, that we went against because it was too um, too structured for what we wanted.

Um, I did have some other ideas which um, I looked at but they were a bit wacky like democracy. You go up a level when everybody votes you go up a level. Um, I eventually decided to go with the levels which cuz I'd seen it from Dungeons and Dragons and I knew that you could use it as a uh up for a variety of tasks rather than just one task. Um, why should my sword play ability go up for having bartered with a with the level thing you just go up generally. Um, they're easy to understand. Um, and they gave players a uh because it was a level it gave you a a a sense of your current place in the social order. Now, um this is where I'm going into an area that I've not really explored before. I've explained about levels. I mean, they've got a bunch of really good things there. They give you intermediate goals and they give you um

a sense of having achieved things. And And that is why I chose levels. The thing is that some of the other things on that list would have done that. Equipment would have done that. Skills would have done that. So, although that is what I mean, if levels had That is the main reason I chose levels, but I had also to choose between some of the other things that I could have had. It's not that levels are the only thing you can do for that. Um And what tipped the balance in favor of levels was that word current social order. Um See, Rob Topshaw and I I'd only British people here. Yeah? Okay, right. Well, you kind of you maybe understand some what some of what I'm saying a bit more. Um we raged against the British class system. My accent to you, the Americans, sounds as though I'm um intelligent and erudite and a Hollywood villain.

But in Britain, it sounds as like I work on a farm. Yeah? Cuz I've got a northern accent. You know, I And Rob Topshaw he's from Wolverhampton. He speaks uh with a Wolverhampton accent. What do you think you're doing? I'm not doing that. I'm doing this. You go What do you think you're doing here? Uh that's the sort of Wolverhampton accent and he sounds like he's worked in a factory. And when you've got accents like that, either you adopt them or you change them to something else or you're stuffed. Uh I didn't see why I should change mine or I didn't see why he should change his. We should change the world instead. We made our own world where accents didn't matter. Do I hate voice over IP? Yes, I do. So, this was our response. We put in a level system because that led you out of the class system. We only have 10 levels. You can do that kind of thing when you've got perma-death. Each level had its own personality. So, you saw somebody at level three, it was

a swordsman. You knew what a being a swordsman was. It's a level three thing. So, it doesn't really matter. Um You get a sense of what the level was. And when you rise up, you get a better level. Um For example, the the level just before you got to the top, level nine, was legend. Um Crucially, all that stopped you rising a level was your own expertise. Your own skill, your own desire to go up. There was nothing stopping you from going up a level because you were a girl or because you were slightly socially inept or because you were from the north of England or because you were a Scot who didn't drink. Um There was nothing to stop you. It was all down to you.

It was like meritocracy. And it was a kind of meritocracy that everybody could succeed. All they had to overcome was their own sense that they shouldn't succeed. And this is why we put in levels. So, all these people who are playing games now with levels in it, you don't know it, but you're actually raging against the British class system. It was a political statement. I've not told that to anybody else, well, my wife, Roy Trubshaw, obviously, but other than that, this is the first time I've told that. Um You know, this this award I got here, no way would I get that in England. No way at all. Not a chance. Cuz I'm not like the right kind of person in England. Here, I'm a foreigner, so you accept my strange and wacky ways, but in England, they just say, "Oh, yes, yes. What's that? You've done well for yourself, haven't you?" Other English people would either be nodding their heads or thinking, "Well, I

That that good luck to them. I can't help it. I was bloody lucky." Um Now, the people who who wrote me I'm sorry I'm I'm over If you want to leave cuz it's supposed to finish, then you know, feel free. I won't zap you with my laser. Um People who wrote MUDs who followed and the MMOs that followed that, they didn't know any of this. So, they just took it and added other things in, and they didn't understand the soul behind it. Why it was there. Why it worked. What it was saying. Um so, they liberally added up many more levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've got 100. We've got 200 levels. We've got so many levels that are coming out of our ears. We don't even measure our experience points in integers. We use floating points. You You laugh. They they do. Man, um they have no understanding of what they're doing. The point You have to understand what you're doing. I don't mind people having a

million points to go up a level if they know why they're doing it. And that reason isn't merely, "Well, let's just follow the curve, and this level you need a million." Why do you need a million? Why? Why? Well, because in the past it's been put No, no, no, no, no, no. Never mind in the past. Why are you doing it? Um at the moment, equipment, you know, gear, is the preferred achievement system of the level cap. Once you get to the top, you know, you can't get more than level X 18 World of Warcraft for the next few months. So, how do you advance? Well, gear. That's what you do. Now, why are they doing that? Well, because that's obviously the next thing to, you know, just it's a way to do it. But, hold on, what's it saying? Um it's actually kind of consumerist. What it's saying is the more stuff you have, the more important you are. Now, that's a consumerist argument.

I'm not going to make any judgments about consumerist um arguments, cuz if you give me stuff, I'm going to be just as happy as anybody else. Um but, if that's what you're wanting to say, if you're trying to make a a point about doing a consumerist game, then why not do a consumerist game? Why bother with the leveling system at all? Why not have the end game as the game? Start off with everybody's the same level, and the more stuff you get, the more stuff you get, and the better it is. And you don't have to have level your characters through um 80 um levels of what you've done before. See, if you know why you're doing things, what point you're trying to make, then you can remove the distractions and press on with what you're really trying to say. If you say, "Okay, I'm setting this game in the West. West is mainly consumerist. Therefore, um let's give people what they want. Give them all the consumer goods they want." Well,

why bother with a leveling game? That's not anything to do with that. That's British class system. What are you What are you doing that for? If you don't know that, then you're just going to end up with these hybrid games. And some people tooling around in Elwynn Forest, cuz they like shooting bears and running from Hogger, and other people who love getting up at 4:00 in the morning to blast other people out the sky in Eve online. This is a man in a shop. Um Finally, I If I'm really going over here, um I'm going to turn to combat. Um Roy thought that combat would be handled by the underlying system of the game. So, um the physics of the world would handle combat. Um the very first thing I I personally implemented in mud was an ox. And if you hit it with a an axe, it died. And in true simplistic fashion, that was just how it would work in the real life, you know, you hit an ox with an axe, it's going to die.

One blow. Um but that wasn't a lot of fun. Well, it was kind of fun, but not not as much fun. Uh not the kind of fun where you think the ox might actually hurt you. It was the kind of fun where, "Ooh, a toddler." So, easy fun as we call it. As I call it. I called it. Um there are two ways to implement combat um manually, hit ox with axe, and the ox is simultaneously typing, "Gore player with horns." And um or as a stream, where one of you starts the fight, and then there's exchange of blows coming along. Those are the kind of the two ways to do fighting. Roy implemented the second one because he was getting close, he had to finish his degree, and that was it. He really just had to implement something, that's what he did. Um I um took his code and intersperse the other kind. So, what happens is you've got a stream of interactions, and uh but there are individual things you can do to adjust the stream. So, you might try to set

fire to their um their clothes while you're fighting. Well, then they have to try and put the fighting the fire out, but at that point you might decide to try and steal their potions or something. So, there's all these things you could do during the uh fight. So, um this is pretty much how things remain today. You've got a stream of you activate the fight, things happen, boom boom boom, it tries to hit, you try to hit. And then, there are things you can do in to intersperse it. I'm going to shoot off this fireball. Um that isn't part of the fight. The fight's just me hitting them with my my sword, but I'm going to shoot a fireball off. That's an interspersion into the stream. Um the range of things you've got uh is wider, but the choice is narrower. Um we had different weapons affecting different monsters in different ways. Uh if you come across uh something that's a fire elemental, then you don't want to shoot fire at it cuz, you know,

that's kind of good for it. You want to shoot water, this sort of stuff. Um but we didn't have formal character classes. So, we didn't have somebody being a mage because they signed up to be a mage. They were a mage because they used magic more than something else. Um we didn't have races, either. We think that's a bad thing. I still think that's a bad thing. It's like saying, "Well, you're a you're an elf. Where are all the half elves? Where are all the quarter elves? Where are the elf stroke dwarfs? There aren't any." You're essentially saying that when you're born into a race, you have to stay into that race. I think that's racist. But, people don't think that in the play the game, anyway. Um so, uh a lot of the character class stuff that was taken out in the DikuMUD days and just from D&D for no reason other than it was in D&D. Um and it changed an emphasis in the game. Originally, the first 10 15 years of MMOs were all to do with

being yourself. But, now it's more to a guided experience rather than finding your own fun. Um uh I got a different rant there about that. Um the thing about the tanks and the uh DPS and the healers, that came about purely because of the way space was implemented in DikuMUD. That's pretty well the only reason we have tanks. You don't have to have tanks. I think I'm now starting to run into the setup time of the next talk. There is a next talk on um Combat was one of the weakest areas of MUD. Um I wasn't pleased with it at all. And yet it's gone on pretty well unchanged. Why hasn't anybody experimented? You get very few experiments. Age of Conan had a bit of hit location. Um I had hit location in 1980 in a space game I wrote. It was a graphical game as well. It had like up arrows for when your spaceship was going and left arrows and right arrows and a V

and asterisks for stars. It's as if you intend to man shop it. Um Woman shop is where you go to a shop to buy something for somebody and you say something you like and then you go to another shop and another shop and then 3 hours later you choose the best thing you've seen. Man shop is where you go into a shop and you see something that'll do and you say I'll have that. Um it's it's like that with designers. It's like this'll do. I'll just have it. I I can't be bothered to carry to look at every single shoe in every single shoe shop. I just want a pair of shoes. Ah, that's going to work. I'll have it. But don't they know they can do better? You can do better than that. It's as if they don't know that they can do better. They It's like it's that part of In the inventiveness of of multi-user games has been lost. Um Roy and I had to think of the MUD from our first principles. We didn't have a paradigm to work to. We had to make all our decisions for particular reasons.

That's not just us. As I said at the beginning, we weren't the only people who invented these things. Mark Jacobs, Alan Cox, Bob Alberti. Um John Taylor, Kelton Flynn, Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar. I would mention the people who wrote Avatar if I could find out their names. Um they would have similar anecdotes. They will have a reason that they did these things, not just because it just sprung from their minds for Oh, that sounds kind of cool. They will have had a reasons for doing that. They would have been saying something. If you ask them, I'm pretty sure that they will be able to tell you that. Um my objective here today in this talk is to make two points. Firstly, it uh it behooves you all to understand what you're designing and why you are designing it. The why is important. You need to know why you're doing it. And the second point is that all these choices that Roy and I had are still available to you today. You can still make those choices today.

It's not like they've disappeared in the past. I'm just telling you what we did, so you know that you can still do it. Now, there was one other thing. Um normally my slides look like this. So, why did I just give you 26 slides and a too long talk speaking in steampunk? Well, on the face of it, obviously it was because I'm giving you something that's old, oldy worldy, and I can tell you all these things about the past with a past flavor. Um but actually, I was criticizing today's game um design principles, and this was a contrivance. It was just something there which covered my uh that my my real um purpose behind things uh in the guise of the new history lesson. And the thing is, that's what MUD was, a contrivance. It was something that was looking to be a game, looking to be fun, but actually, it was Roy and I ripping into our awful situation in

in the British class system. Uh Ryan and I were the first people in our families ever to go to university, ever. We were very lucky. We These days we wouldn't have been able to afford it. Neither of us came from wealthy backgrounds. What we wanted to do was to say unpalatable things about the real world through the protected frame of a game. We were saying things This is This real world sucks. You are doing this. It wasn't that we had chips on our shoulders. It was like blocks of like mountain. We just did not like what was going on, and we wanted a place where we could be rid of all that. And we Okay, we like programming as well. Um but you can do the same sort of thing. Why are you working in games? You must want to say something. You have to be want to say something. It doesn't matter whether you're working on a conveyor belt game making things for Facebook. At some point you you you'll think I really want to say something. I'm going to say

it. And say it. That's what I'm I'm telling you If you're a game designer, you have to have some of your soul in the game design. Because otherwise, it's just superficial. There's no vision to it, no substance to it. You have to have some of your soul in it. And that's the biggest lesson that I'd like to give you from here. I'm not saying throw away the paradigm. What's worked in the past, if you understand why it was there, then you can use it. But you must understand what's in the paradigm. Then you can throw it away. Okay. There we go. Um Mhm.

Mhm.