Section 01
The Text Era
Before the browser there was the terminal. Four entries on the shared worlds made entirely of words: where the first one was written, what it borrowed from the single-player adventures that came before it, and what watching its players for a decade produced.
One machine, many doors. Every terminal in the row was logged into the same world.
oujouer.com collection
4 entries
A shared world made entirely of words.
- 01.01MUD1 at Essex
In 1978 Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote a persistent shared world made entirely of text at the University of Essex, and everything multiplayer descends from it.
- 01.02Colossal Cave and Zork
Single-player text adventures established the parser and the room graph that the shared worlds then made persistent.
- 01.03MOOs
Object-oriented shared worlds let the inhabitants build the world while they were living in it, which turned out to matter more than the graphics did.
- 01.04Bartle's four players
The taxonomy of achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers came out of watching an actual population, and the industry has argued with it ever since.