Presumably the idea for MUD was from dice and role-play games?

No, not at all.


Where did it come from then, was it purely a mechanism to socialise?

No, we wanted to build a world!  Why wouldn’t you?  If you can build a world, you build a world.  I had a gaming background.  I had played Dungeons and Dragons quite extensively for a couple of years, but I’d also created my own [Role-Play] games and played them.  There were other important concepts which we got from things like Lord of the Rings not because we wanted wizards and orcs, but because it’s possible to create a world which was self-consistent and believable, but utterly different from the real world.


Obviously then, worlds come with rules and laws and constrictions.  Were there any strict rules that needed to be adhered to and how difficult was it to administer people in your world?

Well, there are two ways of applying rules.  The first way is just to code it, if the code says you can’t walk through a wall, then you can’t walk through a wall.  There are other things that the code can’t stop you from doing.  For example bullying.  How can the code stop you from bullying somebody when it doesn’t know you’re doing it?  If I attack you it may be because three days ago you stole something from me, but the code doesn’t know that.  In cases like that you need to manage by conventional norms where you have players themselves saying that they’re not going to help you because what you did was wrong.

We also had wizards and wizards were our equivelent of the end game.  Once you’ve reached the highest level you became a wizard and that gave you administrative rights.  You were an administrator.  You can do what you like, but it wasn't easy getting to the wizard as this was a game with permanent death so you really needed to know your stuff to get there.


Is that something that modern MMO games have lost you think?  The idea of re-spawning, how do you feel about it?

Well it’s part of the paradigm of modern games and it’s what people expect and if you were going to put out a game with permanent death in it then I don’t think many people would play it purely because it has permanent death in it. 


In your book, Designing Virtual Worlds, you break MMO players into four personalities; achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers.  I know that’s the two-dimensional, if you will, version of this, and you later say that it can be split further into eight catergories, but just outline the theory behind this for us.

Well, there are eight player types.  Essentially, each of the four types are split into two.  So there are two types of killer, achiever, socialiser and explorer.  And there’s a lot to do with that, but ultimately, they’re quite compelling arguments as to why people play MMOs.


So what type of person, from the basic four categories, do players usually fall into?  What’s the percentage?

It depends on the MMO.  And also how old the MMO is.  People tend to move through the types as they go on.  People who spend a lot of time in the end game might think of themselves as achievers, but actually they’re not achievers, they’re socialisers.  They enjoy the raids, they enjoy the company, they enjoy working together with all these people they’ve known for ages and that’s a socialiser thing, it’s not an achiever thing.  However they don’t think that because they’ve justified it to themselves by saying I want this particular helm, or this token which I can save up and cash for a sword or something.  They have achiever views, but they’ve moved on.  It’s not the reason they’re doing it, the reason they do it is because they enjoy hanging out with their friends.

Generally what happens is that people start off as a killer or opportunist.  When you arrive in the virtual world you want to know what your boundaries are and what you can do.  Some people go for physical boundaries, so “can I pick up this stone?”, “can I knock down this wall?”, “can I drink with this bottle?”, “can I shoot this arrow?” and they’re trying to find the physical boundaries.  Other people try to find out what their social boundaries are.  So questions like “can I swear?”, “can I pick people’s pockets?”, “can I attack them?”.
Once you’ve found out where the boundaries are you know what you can do physically and socially.

After they’ve done that they use that information to acquire more knowledge.  Sometimes it’ll be through exploring.  So you can go off and find things and do experiments with them.  "If I do this AND this, then THIS will happen", "the last time I was in this river, the flame I was carrying didn’t go out, so I know that this river won’t put out fire".
You’ll tend to see more social players actually asking people where to go, “how do I go up levels?”, “where is this person?”.
So effectively different people work in different ways.  Once the explorers figure out what they need to figure out in terms of fighting and collecting items they’re a lot more comfortable doing quests.  Whereas the socialites are happier not having the information, but going in groups, organising things with their group of friends together.
Generally though, the achiever stage lasts the longest.


Well, what happens then when you achieve everything there is to achieve, why do people hang around.  And when you’re leveled up, what’s to stop you from re-evaluating your position and boundaries?

Once you’ve achieved everything there are two things that can happen.  You either go back and play the game again be old timers and hang around with friends, or become guru’s. 


Stay tuned for more from Bartle, as well as his comments and feelings on the torture quest, his thoughts on current games and how MUD became the first MMO of all time, with a little help from the internet and CompuServe.

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