by Brian Dear
Similar to Moria’s groups, Oubliette provided mechanisms to travel in “parties” into the dungeons, and when encountering monsters the parties could fight them together, increasing everyone’s odds of survival. In fact, Oubliette, Moria, and Empire, where one played on one of four teams and needed the help of teammates to conquer the galaxy, were usually unwinnable without multiple players teaming up to fight and survive together. To help players find other players to join up with, Oubliette’s clever authors had created various “taverns” in which you could meet other players and form parties. In a way, taverns were Big Boards in disguise, a similar mechanism for players to find others and go down into the dungeons together.
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Renowned computer game designer Will Wright, creator of a series of bestselling videogames including Sim City, The Sims, and Spore, often speaks of two major themes in the field of game design: the balance of technology and psychology, and the “possibility space.” Essential to making a good game, Wright argues, is striking a good balance between the technical aspects of the game’s implementation (the game’s technology) and the model of the game as rendered in a player’s mind (the game’s psychology). “The game is really happening in the player’s mind, the player’s imagination,” says Wright. Early computer games were limited in display complexity, speed, and number of players. Compared to today’s hyper-photorealistic, 3D shoot-’em-ups, it’s amazing that anyone would find the early computer games compelling at all. PLATO IV’s limited bandwidth between mainframe and terminal meant that while fancy graphics were possible, they took a lot of time to come across the wire and form on-screen. For game designers, this often forced a minimalist approach: display as little as possible to keep things moving. While you might think this would translate into uninteresting games, the Fast Round Trip made the games highly responsive and thus eminently playable.
By “possibility space,” Wright refers to the sum total of possible “moves” or “actions” a player may take in a given game. With a board game like Monopoly, the possibility space is distinctly finite. But since the advent of the computer, games can have possibility spaces approaching the infinite. As multiuser games began to evolve on PLATO, many had no required goal or outcome. These games didn’t care if you played the expected way, or did something on your own. They were “micro-worlds” that you could explore and do battle in however it made sense to do so. Thus, PLATO games like Empire and the many MUD games were renowned for large “possibility spaces” long before the term came into being.
The MUD games on PLATO engaged players just as deeply as today’s popular photorealistic 3D video first-person shooter games like Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and Call of Duty. While lacking every bell and whistle that today’s videogames offer, PLATO’s games grabbed hold of a player’s attention just as fiercely. Today’s games require little to no use of a player’s imagination, whereas PLATO’s game authors recognized that the fewer a game’s graphics and multimedia capabilities, the more the player’s own imagination had to take over and fill in the blanks. PLATO’s MUDs had many blanks to fill, but players effortlessly filled them in.
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Between 1976 and 1978, two high school kids, Erik Witz and Nick Boland, created a PLATO game called Futurewar, which never quite took off as much as some of the other MUDs, but is historically significant by its being an eerily similar precursor to the massively successful science-fiction first-person shooter PC game DOOM that would come out from id Software in 1993. Witz, fourteen years old at the time he began work on Futurewar, designed the game not only with a three-dimensional maze that players would walk through, but also as a first-person shooter, a term that would not come into common use until the 1990s. “I wanted Futurewar to be different, so I gave it a futuristic theme,” he says. The game offered a deeper 3D view into the maze than other games like Moria and Oubliette, and instead of preloading a large number of custom graphical characters used to display the monsters in the game, it used TUTOR -char- commands to dynamically load select graphics for monsters as they were encountered, enabling the game to have many more monsters than other games. Some of the monster graphics were even animated. “Like DOOM,” Witz says, “a gun was displayed pointing in front of you. You could use different types of guns that would produce different shooting effects. With the gun you could shoot other players, or monsters….Futurewar had terrains like water, fire, and radioactive waste, like DOOM. Futurewar had exit signs and elevators, just like DOOM. The bottom level of Futurewar was called Hell and featured the Devil, similar to Heretic [a 1994 DOOM offshoot] and DOOM….Futurewar contained almost all the elements of DOOM.” The creators of DOOM, contacted in 1997 regarding Futurewar as possible inspiration, denied any connection between the two games. “None of us ever used a PLATO system,” said developer John Carmack. Futurewar also appears to have influenced the design of a 1987 Atari arcade game called Xybots—perhaps the first 3D first-person shooter arcade game—which takes place in a similar futuristic setting as Futurewar, with similar game design right down to one identical game monster: flies that darted around and were hard to shoot. Xybots’ creator, Ed Logg (also the creator of Asteroids and Centipede) claims no memory of Futurewar, but does say he was familiar with PLATO back in the 1980s.
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Andrew Shapira, his reputation already firmly set as the top Empire player and fastest typist on PLATO, was also drawn to the new dungeon game craze. He and some friends, including Bruce Maggs and David Sides, began thinking about writing a new dungeon game. Unlike other developers, these three took their time.
Bruce Maggs had built a “maze runner” program, of which there were numerous in those days. As a programming exercise, it exposed you to interesting challenges and constraints. How big could you make the display without making the plotting speed unbearable? This had always been a problem with PLATO. Many very popular games, like Empire, Airfight, Moonwar, and Spacewar, wound up not displaying anything at all on the screen (often because users pressed STOP repeatedly, or because the game was too bogged down) when the combat was at its most furious. Other considerations: 2D or 3D? 2D had been done: Pedit5, Dnd. 3D was the future, as Moria, Oubliette, and Futurewar had already made clear.
Shapira saw what Maggs was up to and, he says, “thought it was pretty cool, so I asked him if I could build onto it a little bit.” Soon, a new game was under way. There was a conscious goal to outdo every other dungeon game to date: bigger, better, more monsters, more players, more features, the works. They became fanatical about working on the game. But even so, due to the scale of the ambition, it took time. Shapira, Maggs, and Sides were all in junior high and high school during the development of the game. Years would go by.
An early version, named Darkmoor, was up and running for a while, but not open to the public. Unhappy with how it worked, they decided to rewrite it from scratch. Finally, the project approached being “done.” They named it Avathar, a word right out of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Eventually, out of fears that Tolkien’s estate or publisher might not be happy with them appropriating the Avathar name, they changed the name slightly, to Avatar.
Shapira and Maggs would camp out in two adjoined classrooms full of PLATO terminals on the first floor of CERL and hack away at the game for hours. Numerous authors were experimenting with all kinds of dungeon game designs, including versions where you could see infinitely far until there was something, a wall or other object, blocking the view. The problem with this approach was always display speed, so most experiments remained experiments and didn’t survive into actual games. “That’s really one of the hardest things about writing a dungeon game back then,” says Shapira, “was getting it to run at a reasonable speed and also have it be fun.”
Avatar would officially roll out in late 1979 or early 1980, and it was an instant hit. Nearly four years in the making, and it showed. This MUD was so deep, so ambitious, so complicated, it required a staff of volunteers, called “operators,” to run and administer it. It had dozens of
utility programs and editors that players never saw. Some friends of Shapira, Maggs, and Sides volunteered to take on the data aspect of the game: not only managing the names of magic items, weapons, and monsters, but also tinkering with their attributes, dependencies, and side effects, all of which added a level of detail that no other MUD on PLATO would match. Plus, the game supported sixty simultaneous users. It had a messaging capability that was so busy it was often nearly impossible to keep up with, like a busy Twitter feed today. Players could message individuals, groups, or all players.
The game offered teleportation capabilities like some previous dungeon games on PLATO, but there were new twists. Entire groups of players could be teleported if the leader of the group had enough powers and spells to pull it off. However, like in Oubliette, it was possible to get stoned. You might make herculean efforts to build up a great game character, and then suddenly you were randomly teleported into solid rock. Worst of all, the leader of a group might screw up, transporting the entire group into rock. Says Brian Blackmore, “Oubliette, if you get stoned, you’re dead meat…but in Avatar you could get un-stoned.” It might require what came to be known as “divine intervention,” meaning, a player would seek out and beg one of the game authors or operators to reinstate your character safely back in the city. For a while, unscrupulous players would hang out at the bottom of the stairs from the city, and lure unsuspecting newbies to be teleported, often deliberately, into solid rock. Such shenanigans were not long welcome in the game, however.
When Bill Roper wasn’t exercising his official duties being a grad student working for Stan Smith and his chemistry lessons, he was often in Avatar. “We had site manager privileges in the chemistry annex,” he says, “and we would go over there and we would play Avatar. The way that Avatar was set up was, if you quit the game by pressing SHIFT-STOP on it, you would lose everything. But if the site manager backed you out, you wouldn’t. And so you would sit there with the site manager and if we got into really big trouble, we would hit the button and get out of the game. Which wasn’t exactly sporting, but did certainly improve our life.”
Avatar had boss monsters like Dnd. One was “Reaper of Souls,” probably the worst of the worst. “What a motherfucker of a monster,” says Blackmore. “The thing blew me away so many times before I got to be really, really big. And it could blow away an entire party like that,” he says, fingers snapping.
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It had started at least as far back as Oubliette, and it continued in Avatar: real players paying real cash to other players for all kinds of virtual loot. “I know in Oubliette there was a fair amount of effort to cheat,” says Josh Paley, a UI student at the time, “and I know that Jerry Bucksath was always amused that people would want to give him real money to get him to go change a bit here or there so they could have the best items in the game. The notion of changing one or two bits being worth one hundred or two hundred dollars to people seemed like a very amusing thing.”
Buying and selling virtual items sometimes had a tangible benefit, making it understandable that some college students would participate in the market. If you were not planning on sticking around after receiving your diploma, then your time on PLATO often came to an abrupt end. If not your signon, at least your gaming persona. For dungeon gamers who had dedicated a lot of their college life to PLATO, an attractive potential payoff beckoned. Mike Wei, a UI student at the time, is but one example of what might happen next. “In ’77–’78,” he says, “I was already selling my top items to the poor zbrats and ybrats who needed a leg up in the various dungeon games. I do know that selling off all my chars and items as I left for the ‘professional world’ of programming at BYU in ’79 helped finance my relocation.”
Sometimes things got out of hand. Al Harkrader, who managed the operator team at CERL, remembers one Oubliette incident in which one of CERL’s paid junior systems programmers was going into the Oubliette database and creating the items by using his system privileges, then selling them to all comers for hard cash. “I still remember the last day of chasing him around,” says Harkrader, “because we were closing in, somebody’d told us what was going on.” He and other CERL staffers were inspecting a modified data file they had restored, and while they were looking at it, it disappeared. And then the backups disappeared. The perpetrator was at another terminal, “trying to cover his tracks, ahead of us,” says Harkrader. “It didn’t work. We finally figured out, yes, he was doing it, and I think he also figured out that we knew he was doing it, because he was never seen again.”
For dungeon dwellers who desperately needed “divine intervention,” offering cash rarely worked, because the game authors and operators tended to be strict about keeping cash out of their games. Nevertheless, paying cash worked for many things. If you were stuck down in the dungeon and needed help finding a stairway back up to the city, or a rescue via teleportation, perhaps some kindly master player would help you out—for a fee. If you needed to buy or sell magic items, weapons, or even whole characters, there was a ready black market for such things. You simply needed to know who to ask. Sometimes experienced players would create a new dungeon character with the express intent of selling it. They would take it deep in the dungeon, build the new character up from nothing, fill it up with riches, weapons, and magic items, then sell it off to someone out in the real world. “If we found out there was someone trading money, we would delete [the character],” says Sides. “Because, for one thing, it was kind of dangerous….I mean people trading money, and suddenly our decisions become much more important and I don’t want people angry or threatening me because I’d do something that’d affect monetary gain on their part. Basically our policy, I believe, was that anytime we found that that there was money involved in a trade we would delete the items involved or at least it would become held up or held back or something.”
There were several notesfiles dedicated to Avatar, one to discuss the game, bugs, ideas for improvement, posting questions for help, begging to be brought back to the city, or un-stoned, and so on, and another notesfile, =avatrade=, which turned into an eBay or Craigslist of sorts for trading anything of value in the Avatar virtual world. In theory the players were supposed to trade their items, but the game authors admit knowing that some people secretly used real cash when trading items and characters, and there wasn’t much they could do about it.
It would be many years before the notion of “virtual economies” became an object of media attention and academic study with books, conferences, and journals dedicated to the subject. It exploded once the Internet rose up and multiplayer games had their second coming. By the 2010s, the marketplace for virtual goods had become a multibillion-dollar bonanza worldwide, including venture-backed start-ups providing online marketplaces for the exchange of items from games.
17
The Zoo
This room is never anything o’clock. Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine. This room lingers on the perpetual pitch of here. Its low local twilight outlasts the day’s politics. It hangs fixed, between discovery and invention. It floats in pure potential, a strongbox in the inviolate vault. Time does not keep to these parts, nor do these parts keep time. Time is too straight a line, too limiting. The comic tumbling act of causality never reaches this far. This room spreads under the stilled clock. Only when you step back into the corridor does now revive. Only escaped, beneath the falling sky.
The novelist Richard Powers wrote these words to open his 2000 novel Plowing the Dark. They describe “The Cavern,” his imagined virtual reality room inside a computer lab in a fictional software company in Seattle. A “holodeck” in which anything, anywhere, anywhen is possible.
A real room in a real building had inspired Powers to invent The Cavern: a room that Powers remembered personally, for he had himself spent uncountable hours in it, crowde
d in with others seeking the same thing, usually in the dark—the fluorescent ceiling lights usually off, giving the impression of everyone glued to their terminals like attentive air traffic controllers—all of them there drawn for the same reasons, all of them there outside of time, outside of reality, deep in exploration of the limitless digital world of—and available through—PLATO. The place was known as “the Zoo,” CERL’s fabled, notorious, first-floor pair of adjoining rooms, 165A and B, where students often risked their chances of passing grades, to say nothing of risking wasting their lives away, by playing games, authoring games such as Avatar, reading and writing notes, yakking away in Talkomatic and TERM-talk, hacking code, and generally causing mischief all night long. Everything but education, the purpose for which the PLATO system had been designed at a cost of millions of dollars and years of hard work. It had been meant to revolutionize education and to deliver brilliant students more math, more science, more everything, sooner, faster, cheaper, and more effectively than teachers and conventional instruction. The government was counting on PLATO to pave the way for a bright high-tech future, in which, thanks to all that brainpower, a confident America maintained possession of the high ground of space and shiny little beeping orbs like Sputnik. The Zoo was the very same room in which the ILLIAC I computer had stood back in the 1950s and early 1960s, the very same hulking Iron Beast of a computer on which PLATO I was born. The room in which the ILLIAC’s vacuum tubes had glowed before the Orange Glow even existed. The place from which the first bits of PLATO machine language punched into oily paper tapes and executed through wires and vacuum tubes of the ILLIAC I. All that was gone now, replaced by what, exactly? Officially CERL called it a “classroom”—that was enough to bring a wink and knowing chuckle from the gamer ghouls who crawled out of the woodwork to take over the room in the evening—no doubt they called it “classroom” to keep the powers-that-be happy, keep that educational story going. There was “Learning” going on here, with a capital “L.” You never knew what dignitary or celebrity would be strolling down the hall with their entourage, getting the Tour and the Demo. But to the kids, the gamers, the hackers, the stoners, the punks, the nerds, the loners, the social misfits, the assembled addicts, pilgrims all, who had, down to a person, heard about this weird, cool, impossibly futuristic computer called PLATO, over in that crazy old building called CERL, from which emanated the Orange Glow, it was all about the games. To these “students,” this was the Zoo.
