Every year, the IGDA Games Developers Choice Awards honours a designer who's leaped into unknown waters with a unique and, occasionally, crazy vision of what interactive entertainment can be. Past recipients have included Masaya Matsuura, creator of music-centred titles like Parappa the Rapper, Hubert Chardot, who inspired the Silent Hills and Resident Evils with the first title of the survival horror genre, Alone in the Dark, and the founders of Activision, who've set the business model standard for the games industry.
This year, the First Penguin Award was given to Richard A. Bartle, the founding father of virtual worlds. He should also have won the award for most hilarious speech.
In 1978, when Bartle and Roy Trubshaw were at the University of Essex, the pair wrote and designed the first Multi-User Dungeon, which later inspired previous Penguins Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar of LucasFilm to create Habitat, the first graphical MUD. Since then, the inspiration has spiralled into contemporary Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), themselves a phenomenon with limitless potential.
Gamesblog was able to distract Richard from his work at Essex, where he currently supervises games design courses in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, to answer a few questions.
As the Game Developer's Choice Awards First Penguin, what was the impetus that caused the first leap into the icy, unknown waters? I like to jump.
At some level, everyone likes to jump. You're born, you live, you die. Everyone has icy waters awaiting them; it's what you do while you're in the air that matters.
For me, the question is not what caused me to jump from the collective warmth of a million close-packed penguins into waters that would be ice if they weren't so salty; for me, the question is why wouldn't I jump?
What inspired you to take the fledgling computer medium and make a virtual world/computer game with it? As a child, I'd always created my own worlds. It was just something I enjoyed doing. Computers were another way to do what I would have been doing on paper or with paper tokens anyway. The only (albeit rather critical!) difference was that with a computer I could give other people free rein in the world, whereas with my other games my imagination was the computer.
What do you feel is the distinction between virtual worlds and computer games? Virtual worlds are places. Computer games are experiences. You can have an experience in a place but you can't have a place in an experience.
What are the essential components of a successful virtual world? Players.
In the evolution of MUDs, what surprising and expected results are you most proud of? I wouldn't use the word "proud" to describe my attitude to anything I've done. Pride is what I have in my children's achievements, not in my own.
I would say I am very pleased at the way some things have turned out. In particular, I like the way that the freedom I tried to give players right from the beginning has held up reasonably well. It would have been very easy for a stigma to become attached to role-playing, but it hasn't: you want to play a male elf when you're a female human in real life, well, OK, you're a male elf. Have fun.
Players can be themselves; players can be whoever they want to be. The process of playing is how they come to realise that these two statements amount to the same thing: what they want is to be themselves. They play because they don't know who their "self" is initially.
I'm actually pessimistic about how things could work out. The concept of what a virtual world IS has become diluted in recent years, and I see it getting worse. It may be that 15 years from now, people wonder what all the fuss was about, virtual worlds being little more than grand portals in which people hook up before heading off into some private sub-game together. Then again, we might all have our own virtual worlds like we all have our own web sites. It could go either way. Long term, virtual worlds as they were conceived will prevail, because they simply DO offer something that regular computer games (even ones disguised as virtual worlds) can't. They offer people the chance to become themselves.
How do you think they'll bring new audiences to accept the medium? That'll happen anyway. They have people in them. Players of single-player games will age, and their priorities will change. 30 years from now, the Prime Minister will have played computer games in his or her youth, and computer games will be as much a mundane part of popular culture as TV or film or radio or comics or novels or ...
It'll happen. I just hope I don't hit the icy waters too soon and miss it.
Bartle's book Designing Virtual Worlds was released 2003. For more information on the current state of MUDs or Richard himself, check out his website.
