As early as in 1964, Daniel F. Galouye published a novel titled Simulacron-3 (retitled in the UK as Counterfeit World), which represents a virtual city with residents who are unaware that they all are nothing more than electronic computer impulses. Galouye’s text had taken an innovative step further from works such as Frederik Pohl’s ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ (1955) and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), which represent non- computerised constructed realities and residents who are unaware of the actual state of the affairs. Around the same time, in the early 1960s, the roots of what we today understand as technological virtual began with the development of computer graphics. Some of the first computer games were designed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The most famous of these early examples was Spacewar! of 1962, which employed rudimentary graphics consisting mostly of simple dots and lines. Even at this early stage, the traditional written word, in form of literature, functioned in a subtle, but important role. The concept of Spacewar! was originally inspired by E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s pulp science fiction novels (‘Story of Spacewar!’). Spacewar! was only playable by two people on the same computer, but its execution came to herald the arcade games of the 1970s and 1980s. It was also a very early example of the role of games in the development of innovative computing
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applications. Spacewar! was consequently used to demonstrate the power of the PDP-1 machine on which it was run (‘Story of Spacewar!’).
A crucial part in the process of emerging computer graphics was played by the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, whose work laid the foundations for future graphical user interfaces and for the broader concept of a computer capable of rendering images, rather than simply handling text alone. Sutherland invented a program called Sketchpad, which allowed a user to draw lines and combine them into shapes on the computer screen. He envisioned computing technology that would be able to render sensations to its users that would seem real to them. The first head-mounted display system intended for ‘virtual reality’ (although the term was not used at the time) was created by him in 1968 (Sutherland 1968). Sutherland’s project was partly supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense. In 1969, the Agency put in place the first network of computers connected to each other, consisting of four US universities. This precursor to the internet, known as ARPANET, remained in place, steadily growing, but, like any computer use in the 1960s or 1970s, it was restricted to the use of academic and military institutions, until its formal decommissioning in early 1990.
Computing students were quick to discover the potential of the early graphics, on their own, or in combination with digital text, for the purposes of new forms of storytelling that included a significant dimension of personal participation. The students would have been influenced by the fledgling video game industry and by the birth of the concept of tabletop roleplaying games. Following Spacewar!, another milestone in the history of computer gaming was Pong in 1972, an arcade game by Atari Interactive (Messinger and Stroulia 2008). Unlike Spacewar!, originally restricted to a computer laboratory, Pong was created for the amusement of the general public. It was followed by such seminal names in computer game cultures as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Arcade games were not networked, and as such they only involved a single player playing against the computer. Away from the public, at NASA Ames Research Center in 1974, players were able to play one game simultaneously on networked computers. Maze War allowed players to enter together a computerized game world, in which they could travel around a maze and ‘shoot’
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each other (Damer 2008). The concept of the computer screen as a ‘window’ to another ‘space’ that could be described in spatial terms was beginning to form.
Arcade games introduced the element of real-time interactivity to existing features of non- computerised games such as problem solving and fantasy roleplaying (Messinger and Stroulia 2008). The latter in particular was rapidly gaining popularity, following the publication in 1974 of Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargame
Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures by Gary Gygax and
Dave Arneson. Dungeons & Dragons (henceforth: D&D) and other subsequent roleplaying systems became inseparable from the development of virtual worlds, with a number of groundbreaking game developers citing D&D as an early influence, as will be seen below. Played without a game board, the only necessary game pieces required by roleplaying games were a pen, paper, the rule book, and, most essentially, vivid imagination. They allowed, for the first time, codified tools for players to enter an imaginary world and to personally participate in a storyline. Children have always played games of let’s-pretend, but roleplaying games enabled teens and adults to weave together a complex interactive narrative and cast them as characters in the story, significantly, with an immediate effect on the story and on the fictional world in which the narrative takes place.
Many of the basic notions from roleplaying games made a later transition to virtual worlds, starting from the concept of an avatar or character representing the player. Other similar features include overt or subtle influence from the high fantasy genre, including fantastic creatures such as dragons or orcs, numerical representation of an avatar’s abilities, and the idea of quests with significant rewards. Tabletop roleplaying (so called because players typically sit around a dining table) has remained reasonably popular, although in recent years its popularity has suffered because of computer games. Offline roleplaying has evolved into new forms such as live-action roleplaying (LARP), in which players act out the narratives, often dressed in appropriate clothing and carrying appropriate props.
Roleplaying gains further significance to the current thesis from its own nature as a deeply ekphrastic form of storytelling. In a roleplaying group, a verbal narrative, guided by the referee/coordinator/facilitator/chief storyteller known as the Game Master (GM), but
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influenced by the entire group, is intended to create a deeply immersive experience. The Game Master describes to the players what their characters see, hear and experience, while the players describe to the Game Master and to the other players what actions their own characters take or how their characters are feeling about the situation. The visuals of another world, its inhabitants, treasures, and locations, are evoked by means of words for the players to picture in their mind’s eye. Further, the players are invited to imagine the entire breadth of sensory experiences described in the otherwise unreachable game world. The key aspect of roleplaying, as it is in the Classical sense of ekphrasis, is the sense of being personally present in the events described. The player does not simply read about a hero slaying of the mighty dragon and taking its hoard of gold, while rooting for the hero; the player becomes the hero who slays the dragon and who takes the hoard. Moreover, the aspect of personal influence in the game world means that if, instead of slaying the dragon, you decide to become its ally and terrorise the people of the land, you are, theoretically, able to do so.5
Having experienced arcade games and D&D, students of the 1970s began transposing their experiences to a computerised format. In 1976, MIT student Will Crowther created the first
D&D influenced, text-based, single player fantasy adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure (Kushner 2008). In text games, players were provided with textual descriptions
of locations and situations, in which they found themselves. The verbal evocation of fantastic visuals present in D&D had become text on a screen, but the living Game Master had become an impersonal computer program, unable to provide feedback other than that in very strictly defined parameters. Players had a certain freedom to move around by typing in simple directions. They could battle monsters by typing in relevant commands. Colossal
Cave Adventure went on to inspire Zork, a significant milestone in the history of computer
gaming, originally developed between 1977 and 1979, also under the tradition of D&D (Anderson and Galley 1985). Although it, too, remained fully textual, a review in the BYTE
5 The freedom of offline roleplaying games suffers in computerised versions. As the GM is replaced by
strictly pre-written plot and pre-programmed events, even if a certain amount of choice and branching storylines are allowed, in computer games and ludic virtual worlds the player’s narrative freedom is still subject to restrictions demanded by the linear, unchanging, ultimately unresponsive setting and plot. Today, so-called ‘sandbox’ games with little or no plot framing the character’s enterprises have responded to the ‘artificial’ restrictiveness, but they typically fail to attract the same amount of interest as strongly plot-focused games.
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magazine in 1981 praised the game, noting that unlike its predecessors, this game could be ‘felt and touched – experienced, if you will’ (Anderson and Galley 1985). Improvements in the user’s ability to interact with the text game had dramatically increased the player’s ekphrastic sense of personal involvement.