Since the game, people are not satisfied to be the controller in front of the screen, but dream of entering the gorgeous world of the game, saving the world in the world of swords and magic, known as the slaying dragon praised by the bard. The brave, or in the martial arts world happily enmity and hatred, experience the love and grievances of the rivers and lakes. The emergence of online games makes this dream gradually become something that can be touched until it becomes a reality.
If we want to trace the history of online games, we have to look to the 1970s. As early as 1969, American Rick Blomme used Space War as a model to develop a game of the same name on the PLATO distance learning system that can support two remote connections. Considered the originator of online games. After entering the 1970s, two technologies in the computer field began to develop, and both had a profound impact on the game industry.
One is computer games, a new form of entertainment experience constructed using simple computer graphics and processors. However, computer games at that time were mostly developed by students or scholars using large computers in universities, and their spread and influence were extremely limited. Later, with the development of computer graphics and hardware technology, computer games have also progressed and become popular, becoming an important branch of the game field.
The other is the emergence of computer network technology. Through this technology, players in front of different computers can enter the same game world and realize the interaction of the virtual world. Although the imagination of the network technology for games was very limited for a long time afterwards, after the late 1990s, it affected the development of the entire industry with a prairie fire.
The combination of these two technologies gave birth to online games. In the West, online games such as "Internet Genesis", "Endless Mission", "World of Warcraft" and "Second Life" have changed the entire industry and affected countless players. In places such as South Korea and China in the East, games such as "Paradise", "Legend", "Fantasy Westward Journey" and "Journey" have opened up more new games and business models, making online games a leisure entertainment for tens of millions of players. Choice.
However, in recent years, whether domestic or foreign, the development of online games seems to have entered a maze. It has been a long time since I have seen creative works that shine. A large number of game developers are learning from and imitating successful works. At most, make some detailed adjustments and optimizations on its basis, and then call it micro-innovation. Compared with the works of many years ago, a large number of games on the market have some knowledge about the improvement of picture quality and the change of content, but there is almost no innovation in the game mode.
What is innovation? In the golden decade of game development, there is no doubt that a variety of game types and modes have been introduced. However, as the game types and modes have been greatly enriched and developed today, revolutionary innovation is very difficult. one thing. With years of development and operation, online game developers have become more and more aware that online games are more about providing services to players. Therefore, what some excellent online games do is to improve the details and experience. The optimization is enough to succeed. But if there is no innovation in type and mode, the future development of online games will be an extremely boring thing.
What will happen in the future? We don't know. But we can cast our sights on the past, on those classic online games that create standards and rules, and explore the environment under which they were created, and what kind of influence and enlightenment they have brought to the entire industry.
Chapter One MUD: The Wizard
Who Created the World You stand at a crossroad, and you have two directions in front of you. The road on the left is very flat, but the journey to the destination may be long, while on the right is a winding road, perhaps a shortcut.
You have chosen the road on the right. This road looks like a shortcut, but it is full of thorns and there are many unknown risks ahead.
Three evil wolves jumped out of the grass beside the road, and they launched an attack on you.
you are dead.
Do you want to resurrect and start again?
Y/N?
———————————— Information————————————
Game: MUD1
Development: Roy Trubshaw, Richard Bartle
Engine: MUDDL
Time: 1978
————————— ———Story————————————
In 1977, Roy Trubshaw became a student at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, studying computer science. Like many college students today, Trubshaw has also become addicted to games, but the games of that era are very different from today.
At this time, the world’s first real video game "Space Invaders" has not yet come out. The popular on campus is Dungeons and Dragons tabletop games and the resulting text role-playing games on computers, Trub Xiao is addicted to one of the dungeon-themed text role-playing games "Dungeons"-a game that mimics the popular "Zork" at the time.
As the name suggests, "Dungeon" is a fantasy adventure game that is influenced by "Dungeons and Dragons" and focuses on fighting monsters and collecting loot. The game's combat, exploration, puzzle solving and other parts are all Controlled by simple text commands, the player needs to type to control the action-the only problem is that sometimes the computer does not recognize the player’s text commands.
After a period of indulging in, Trubshaw has an idea in his mind: if he can interact with It would be more interesting to explore the world of Dungeon with friends from other places. However, at the time the online mode was limited to the LAN, Trubshaw’s seemingly simple idea was a complete technical nightmare: you can’t make two people come. Operating on a computer can only allow them to enter the game on their own computer, and the game world and data seen by the players in front of each computer must be synchronized. Fortunately, the British college students in the late 1970s have already had some ideas about the network. Understand, and the University of Essex has its own internal network, which can be connected to any computer on the campus, which gives Trubshaw the opportunity to realize his own whims.
After a period of research, Trub Xiao discovered a shared memory mechanism for the DEC-10 host, which also means that two users of the same program can communicate with each other, which makes his idea much more feasible. In the end, Trubshaw wrote on Dungeon’s code I created a framework, realized my idea of allowing multiple users to play Dungeon online, and created MUD, an important game type.
The MUD1 developed by Trubshaw (in order to distinguish this game from the MUD game type, the following game name is unified as MUD1) is still a pure text world without any pictures, but players in front of different computers can play the game Take risks and communicate together. Compared with the previous games with online functions, MUD1 is the first real-time multiplayer interactive online game. Its biggest feature is that it can ensure the continuous development of the entire virtual world and the player's role-whether it is the player exiting After logging in again or the server restarting, the scenes, treasure chests, monsters, and puzzles in the game remain unchanged, and the player's role is still the same as the last time.
However, this change also makes the content of the game more abundant to meet the needs of multi-user players. Trubshaw originally designed the MUD1 version with only one area. After the user logs in, in addition to chatting with other users, the human-computer interaction function is very limited. Therefore, it is necessary to inject more content into the game to make the game more fun. Although Trubshaw is very good at programming, he has no experience in game planning. At this time, his friend Richard Bartle (Richard Bartle) helped him complete the work out of interest: adding more Area, monsters, treasures and puzzles. Later, the two also developed a special language for the game-"MUDDL", and continued to repair and maintain the game.
Batu's improvement and improvement work has increased the fun of MUD1, which is of great significance. On October 20, 1978, the improved MUD1 was launched on the campus network of the University of Essex. The number of players soon exceeded the expectations of Trubshaw and Batu and became the most popular in the university. One of the games. Adventures in the dangerous jungle, fighting monsters, and solving ancient puzzles have become some students' favorite pastimes in their spare time. Compared with the early online games that only support a limited number of players, MUD1 theoretically supports an unlimited number of players, but in reality, due to problems such as system memory limitations, the game quickly reached the upper limit of the number of supporters. Fortunately, there was only Egypt at that time. People in the University of Sex network can access-until 1980, the University of Essex joined the ARPAnet (Advance Research Projects Agency Network, the world’s first packet-switched network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense, and its success It directly contributed to the birth of the Internet and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP).
After joining ARPAnet, players outside the campus can also experience MUD through the Internet. Players from outside the campus network have increased significantly, occupying a lot of system resources. The University of Essex has to limit the user’s login time and only allow teaching Visits at night outside of scientific research hours to reduce the load, but this did not affect the popularity of this game on the nascent Internet. Soon after Trubshaw graduated and left the school, Batu, who was still teaching at the school, took over all the maintenance work. Until 1987, MUD1 was authorized to CompuServe for commercial operation. Batu decided to leave his alma mater and devote himself to the development of MUD games. The MUD server of the University of Sex was also shut down, but the MUD operated by CompuServe lasted for more than 20 years.
During his time in university, Batu uploaded the source code of MUD to the network for scholars and developers to study for the purpose of sharing and communication. The direct consequence of this approach was that a series of derivative and clone works were born in a short period of time. Although this is very harmful to the copyright of MUD, on the other hand, it has also accelerated the popularity of online text role-playing games. Since MUD is the origin of this type of work, this type of work is also called MUD. At the 2005 GDC Game Developers Conference, the organizing committee awarded Richard Batu the Game Pioneer Award in recognition of the contribution made by this pioneer in the online game industry.
In addition to his contributions to the creation and dissemination of MUD, Batu’s greatest contribution is the study of the behavior of game players. During the operation of the MUD, Batu found that the needs and performance of players in the game were different. After analyzing the player's behavior, he formed a set of his own theory. Later generations called his theory the Batu model. In 1996, Batu published an article titled "Hearts, Clubs, Cubes, Spades: Classification of MUD Gamers". In the article, he proposed four classification methods for MUD players, dividing MUD gamers into killer types. The four different types of, achievement, social, and exploratory not only established guiding theories for analyzing the sociological behavior of online game players, but also had a huge impact on later online game developers.
For future online games, MUD’s greatest contribution is to make multiplayer online interaction possible, and it also makes it possible for game makers to create a virtual game world. At the same time, MUD also provides a template for future online games, and MMORPG has not been able to jump out of it for a long time. Batu has more insights about this.
"For example, the introduction of the level system in MUD1 was only one of the several options we faced at the time, but after becoming the benchmark configuration of online games, people thought of'how many levels should our game have' before developing a game? , Instead of “do we need the setting of levels?” In people’s minds, a virtual game world must have levels to make sense, which also means that the game must have an end or culmination."
Batu has criticized the increasingly rigid game modes, including the level system, on many occasions, and hopes that the developers will be able to make a revolution. After doing commercial MUD development in the early years, Batu has now moved away from game development and returned to his alma mater to teach computer game design.
"The work Roy and I did was like planting a tree. As the tree grows, it sows more new seeds. Now it has grown into a forest. No matter what I do now, these trees continue to grow. Although I can continue to plant trees today, it’s more meaningful for me to do my best to maintain the healthy growth of the forest.”
Finally, when our eyes returned to the University of Essex campus in 1978, we couldn’t help but think What is the original intention of the two teenagers who want to create a great virtual world for mankind? The two answered this question in later times, and the answers of the two were not the same: At that time, the 19-year-old Trubshaw wanted to use technology to build a world better than reality, while only 18-year-old Batu I hope to build a world where people can find themselves.
"My interest is to create the world, not to live in a world created by others. I hope that the game world allows people to jump out of the limits of the real world and try new identities...not to reinvent themselves, but to let them find themselves Real belonging".
———————————— Inspiration: Text and Picture————————————
In the early development of online games, due to the limitations of the network itself, it has experienced a long-term MUD era and text adventure Games have occupied the mainstream for nearly two decades, and the formation of very different types of branches will have a profound impact on the development of online games in the future, laying a solid foundation for online games.
Compared with the graphic online games of later generations, the biggest difference of MUD is that it is just a text adventure without the intuitive feeling brought by the picture. This is also the main reason why MUD quickly disappeared in the dust of history after the popularity of graphic online games. First of all, games are a kind of entertainment. Although MUD can provide a more enjoyable interactive experience than book reading, when people can wander immersively in the game world, this kind of fun that only relies on text imagination is inferior. It is true that text can bring imagination, but the screen can bring a more intuitive look and feel, and the mass players do not seem to need much imagination.