The History & Evolution of Massively Multiplayer Games (with Raph Koster) - /noclip

- All right, you should be aware, I speak in complete paragraphs and at length, so. - (laughs) That's okay. No, that's great.

I want you to do most of the talking. - Okay. (laughs) All right. Just warn me if I'm just going on too long.

(lighthearted music)

(lighthearted music continues) MUDs are the original online worlds. When we think about what MMOs or holodecks or VR worlds, like, depicted in anime, like "Sword Art Online" or whatever, all of that starts with text MUDs.

And they have been around since 1978. They don't look like an MMO. They're not VR. They're not even graphical at all in their original form.

They're just text. But that doesn't mean that they don't have game servers with simulated places and hundreds of people running around that you can interact with in real time.

They do, so that means everything that you've seen in MMOs happened in the text MUDs. All of it happened.

We have 40 years of history there to go look at and lessons to learn. Generating systems in text can be freeing because it's really low cost, it's super fast to iterate, so it's really easy to try doing things that with graphics are very expensive.

"LegendMUD," which I worked on, we had a quest that was based on Kipling's "Jungle Book." And there was a moment where you can go to the city of the Bandar-log, the apes, and see that it used to be an inhabited ruined city.

If you did the quest right, all the apes transmogrified back into the people that used to live there.

All the ruined environment returned, only sort of ghost-like and translucent. And then over time, the illusion broke, almost like soap bubbles popping over time.

That would be just phenomenally expensive to do today in graphics, right? But you could do it fairly easily in text.