In the beginning there was mud.
We all came from mud.
Well before MUD 1 there was Spacewar!, the Brown Box and Turing - who was begat by Lovelace and Babbage, oh and Leibniz. Ye get the picture.
But let’s start with mud.
While events may be linear, history is not – fair enough, and I don’t know the first version of the history of virtual worlds. I was not really there.
But I caught the second epoch - in that one EverQuest was the only MMO that existed, this was followed (but not replaced in V2 history) by WoW. Then there was Second Life. Second Life invented user generated content.
Now it seems we are in the third age.
In this age – and I know this because I’ve sat through numerous presentations in the last couple of months that have told me this – everything started with social networking. There was MySpace. Which got it all wrong. Then Facebook, which got it all right. But that’s not important right now. What is, is that social networking taught us about communities on line. They taught us that people act different there (well here, unless you printed this or something). People bond and play, and play and bond. And now we have online games - these have learned from social networks. So we immerse ourselves in these and bathe in the pixel fountains that are the new amazing. We wonder at their vigor and variety. Their RP and their casual, their manga, space opera and men-in-tights-ness. And we see they are good, and we rest, and count our stats (and our revenues).
And if I go to another presentation that tells me this I really am going to scream.
Oh, you want time-line? Raph got your time-line for ya: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/mudtimeline.shtml
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