As single player text games, such as Zork, received more attention, students accustomed to the tradition of D&D likely wanted to experiment with the multi-player format on developing computer networks. What might be termed as the first ‘true’ virtual world, in the sense of allowing multiple people from separate locations to access a shared computer- generated ‘space’, and to interact with each other and the environment, was created in 1981. Still text-based, the first ‘multi-user dungeon’, abbreviated to ‘MUD’ and simply named MUD1, was the work of Richard Bartle and Roy Traubshaw, both D&D players, while they were undergraduates at the University of Essex (Castronova 2005, Kushner 2008). While MUD1 broadly followed D&D structures and rules, its emphasis was on socializing and ‘chatting’, with players often primarily logging on to converse and to ‘meet up’ with others rather than to focus on the game itself. Such important social aspect of
MUD1 anticipated the similar function that many MMOs today hold. Although the main
purpose of a ludic virtual world is nominally to play a game, to many of the players the social aspect of conversing and ‘doing things’ with friends is equally, if not more important, than progress in the game itself.
These proto-virtual worlds like Zork and MUD1 were restricted to a very small percentage of the population. They were accessible by staff and students in research institutions, using machines, the size and cost of which were completely beyond single individuals at this time. The few personal computers that became available in the late 1970s, such as Apple II in 1977, did not have the processing capacity to run these games. In any case, networked games like MUD1 on personal computers would have been pointless, as domestic connectivity to information networks did not yet exist. Much of Zork’s success in the early years of the 1980s was the result of its developers understanding the availability problem. They compressed the files and invented new programming languages to bring down the
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game’s size. Although the developers enabled more people to become more familiar with the concept of imaginary worlds accessible by means of computer terminals, personal computers would still not become anything resembling mainstream until the arrival of the Commodore 64 (C64) in the second half of 1982, its competitors, and the first Apple Macintosh. Significantly cheaper than Apple II, C64 was soon joined by competitors such as the Atari models and the Amstrad CPC 464. Personal computing was, at this point, considered lucrative enough for several companies to invest in its production. In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh, the first successful personal computer with a graphical interface. A computer was no longer simply considered machinery reserved to academic institutions. Nonetheless, a personal computer remained a state-of-the-art appliance, affordable and justifiable only by a small segment of Western society.
The increasing availability of personal computing and computer games correlates with first texts about virtual worlds as we know them today. The texts were classified as science fiction and intended as entertainment, but as with much of SF, they speculated on the potential of new ideas and their application in society. In 1980, John M. Ford’s Web of
Angels became one of the first texts, if not the very first one, to depict a communications
network in spatial terms. The ‘Web’, as the network is known, allows travel through star systems and contains both desirable treasures and monsters, familiar motifs from roleplaying and text-based games. The novel anticipates the future archetype of a lone male hacker on the fringes of society, whose remarkable programming skills allow him virtuoso control over the network. Another pioneering text was Vernor Vinge’s novella True Names (1981), which presents a full-immersion virtual reality known as ‘Other Plane’. The text employs a number of tropes from fantasy games as well as the motif of the disaffected computer genius, here called ‘wizard’. Vinge had been writing futuristic fiction about the human relationship with technology since the 1960s. Due to his academic career in Mathematics and Computer Science at San Diego University, he had been exposed to information technology from early on.
Film industry responded to the rise of the popularity of computing and computer games with Tron (1982), which imagines users as god-like revered beings amongst the anthropomorphized programs inside arcade games. Tron was also one of the original films
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to employ a significant amount of computer graphics in its technical realization, combining a semi-animated look with the live actors. As one of the first visual representations of the new concept of the ‘space’ behind the computer screen, Tron established much of the ‘cyber’ look in popular culture and fashion for the following two decades, with its imagery of darkness broken by artificial, neon lights, and its preference for exclusively urban landscapes of straight lines and geometrical symbols over curved, irregular outlines of the natural world, daylight and green environments.
The motif of a human programmer with the power to control the frightening, alien, virtual space was developed into its full potential by William Gibson in his Neuromancer, which in 1984 became a turning point in the history of literary representations of virtual worlds. Inspired by Gibson’s observation of teens playing arcade games as much as by the 1960s drug culture (McCaffery 1991), the influence of this text came to be felt not only in the subsequent literary genre of cyberpunk, but also in films, fashion, games and technology itself. The term ‘cyberspace’, coined by Neuromancer to describe the illusionary space between the controls of the computer and the execution of commands, was adopted by other authors, scholars, journalists, advertisers and technology industry alike. The term remained popular for the best part of two decades, until it gradually faded down in the first decade of the 21st century, as the monolithic ‘cyberspace’ fragmented into numerous self- sustaining communities. A significant development in Neuromancer is its rejection of a high fantasy setting or fantasy-inspired motifs, in favour of dysfunctional characters in a gritty and dark underworld of crime and substance abuse. Gibson continued the themes of
Neuromancer in its loose sequels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
As the graphics technology developed, increasing the ability of computers to display and modify images, games and other applications began to incorporate visuals. The Video Graphics Array (VGA), invented in 1987, significantly improved the colour, memory and resolution of images on personal computers. 1988, the first graphical virtual world, Habitat, created by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer in 1985 opened for business (Damer 2008, Rossney 1996). Following the trend of socializing rather than strictly focusing on gameplay, Habitat had a social rather than ludic premise. It was the first virtual world to call the graphical representations of its users ‘avatars’, although the term was not
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popularised until the following decade by the author Neal Stephenson, who independently invented the same term (Damer 2008). The avatars of Habitat ‘talked’, ‘gestured’, and moved around in a coherent, persistent geography and were able to make use of a token- based internal economy (Rossney 1996).