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Richard Bartle

Abstract

Richard Bartle (born 1960) was a second-year undergraduate at the University of Essex when Roy Trubshaw handed him the code of MUD, the multi-user dungeon Trubshaw had started on the department’s PDP-10 in the autumn of 1978, and he has been building, running, selling, teaching and theorising shared virtual worlds ever since. He turned MUD into a game, kept it running on the Essex machine until 1987, licensed it to CompuServe as British Legends, and wrote MUD2. His 1996 essay sorting players into achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers is the most cited single piece of writing in online-game design, and his 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds is its textbook. He spent the rest of his career at Essex, part-time, teaching the subject he had invented in its computer room.

Richard Bartle
Richard Bartle, 2011. Image: J. G. Bartle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ripon and Essex

Richard Allan Bartle was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, on January 10, 1960, and went to the University of Essex in 1978 to read computer science. He has said that what he wanted from computers was a way to build worlds where the rules were different from the ones he had grown up under; the working-class boy from a northern town is a recurring figure in his own account of why virtual worlds matter.

MUD

In autumn 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a year ahead of him, wrote a program on the department’s DEC PDP-10 that let several people on the university’s terminals walk through the same set of rooms and see each other. He called it MUD, Multi-User Dungeon, after the Dungeon variant of Zork he had played (see Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction). The first version was in MACRO-10 assembler, the second and the definitive third, in 1980, in BCPL. Trubshaw built the engine and the database; when he graduated in 1980 he gave it to Bartle, who had been writing rooms and puzzles for it, and Bartle made it a game: combat, points, levels, and the rank of wizard, which a player earned by reaching the top and which conferred power over the world and the other players.

Essex was connected to the ARPANET in 1980, which made MUD the first multiplayer role-playing game reachable over the Internet, and from 1983 British Telecom’s Packet Switch Stream let dial-up users in from outside the university, between two and seven in the morning, when the machine had cycles to spare. Compunet licensed it for Commodore 64 owners from 1984. Bartle finished his undergraduate degree, started a doctorate in artificial intelligence, lectured at Essex until 1987, and kept the game alive on the university’s machine the whole time.

In 1985 Bartle, Trubshaw and Simon Dally founded Multi-User Entertainment Ltd to do it commercially, and Bartle wrote MUD2, a rewrite with its own language for defining the world, for a British Telecom service that was slow to arrive. CompuServe licensed MUD1 in 1987 and, as a condition, asked for the free Essex instance to be shut down; it closed that year, and the game ran on CompuServe as British Legends until late 1999, when it was retired in the Y2K clean-up. MUSE ran MUD2 on its own servers and licensed it to online services into the 2000s. Bartle’s doctorate, on AI, was finished in 1988. The hundreds of free MUDs that appeared on university machines from 1987 onwards, AberMUD, LPMud, DikuMUD and the rest, descended from players of Essex MUD, and the whole lineage down to World of Warcraft is in MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds.

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades

In 1996 Bartle published “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” in the Journal of MUD Research, an online journal with more readers than its name suggests. It began from a long argument on a MUD administrators’ mailing list about what players wanted, and concluded that they wanted four different things. Achievers act on the world to win, collecting points and levels. Explorers interact with the world to understand it, mapping its rules and its bugs. Socialisers interact with other players, and the world is the excuse. Killers act on other players, usually by killing them, occasionally by helping them, in either case because the effect on a real person is the point. The value of the scheme was the second half of the essay: the four populations feed on and starve each other, so that a world’s design decides which types stay, and a designer who wants a stable world has to balance the mix rather than maximise any one. Two players, Erwin Andreasen and Brandon Downey, turned it into the Bartle Test in 1999 and 2000, an online questionnaire that has been taken by hundreds of thousands of people and that Bartle has spent years explaining is not what he meant. The taxonomy is now taught in every game-design course and applied to things that are not games.

Designing Virtual Worlds

Designing Virtual Worlds (2003) is seven hundred pages on the history, construction, economics, ethics and meaning of shared worlds, written when EverQuest and Ultima Online were the state of the art and read by the people who built World of Warcraft and its successors. Its argument is that a virtual world is a place, that its players are people with rights the designer cannot simply override, and that the reason people play is to become, through the “hero’s journey” of a character, more fully themselves. MMOs from the Inside Out (2015) and How to Be a God (2022) continue the argument.

Bartle returned to Essex as a part-time professor of computer game design and principal teaching fellow and retired at the end of April 2025 as professor emeritus. He received the International Game Developers Association’s First Penguin award in 2005, for being first off the ice, and the Game Developers Choice Online Awards’ Online Game Legend award in 2010. He still answers questions about MUD on the Internet, at length, and still holds that the free text worlds of the 1980s got some things right that their graphical descendants have not.

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