Over in the comments section of my 'Five most important people in the virtual world' post, Richard Bartle has been answering a reader's suggestion that MUD was not, in fact, the first online RPG and that the original multi-user games actually ran on the University of Illinois' PLATO system - generally regarded as the birthplace of the 'online community' concept.

UPDATE: Richard has pointed out that I've mis-represented the nature of the debate. He was answering this specific reader comment:



"It is unfortunate that the media continues to mistakenly identify Richard Bartle as the creator or co-creator of the first MUD. It's not true. The first MUDs were created on the PLATO system several years earlier"

He'd also like to point out:



"PLATO made major contributions to computer science, and I wouldn't want to give the impression I didn't think so."

Anyway, Bartle's response to the reader's point, also posted in the comments section was too interesting to leave there, so I've pasted it on the front page. He's right about how, in almost all areas of science and culture, working out who's 'first' is a tricky business...

"The PLATO system did have some games on it which could be regarded as proto virtual worlds. Whether you want to count them as actual virtual worlds depends on how far you want to stretch your definition: personally, I don't think they had the persistence to qualify, but pro-PLATO advocates think they do.

"The thing is, though, that even if the likes of Oubliette did count as a virtual world, they had pretty well zero effect on the development of today's virtual worlds. Follow the audit trail back from World of Warcraft, and you wind up at MUD. The only major exceptions are Dark Age of Camelot, which comes from Aradath, and the up-coming Hero's Journey, which has its roots ultimately in Sceptre of Goth. I think possibly Furcadia might have a PLATO origin, but that's about it...

"Did you know golf was invented in China? The Dongxuan Records relate that a game called chuiwan ("hitting ball") was played as early as 945. Did you also know golf was invented in France? There's a picture of it illustrating the September page of a prayerbook, "Les Heures de la Duchesse de Bourgogne". Did you, in addition, know that golf was invented in Ancient Rome (paganica), England (cambuca), Ireland (camanachd) and the Netherlands (kolf)? That's excluding the pictorial evidence that it came from Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt (although the same pictures have been used to say that those civilisations invented hockey).

"The idea of hitting a ball into a hole with a stick is OBVIOUS. It was invented MANY TIMES. Nevertheless, if you track back from the US Masters or any other golf tournament today, you'll find that modern golf is entirely the product of Scotland. It's the same for virtual worlds. Having a computer simulate an imaginary world is an OBVIOUS idea. Virtual worlds have been independently invented at least 7 times: MUD, Sceptre of Goth, Avatar, Island of Kesmai, Aradath, Habitat, Monster. None of the people who wrote those virtual worlds had any idea of the existence of the others: they really did invent them separately. Creating MUD - or any of the others - was not an act of genius, we were always going to get them.

"As for which was chronologically first, OK, well from the above list that would be MUD. As a PLATO advocate, you might want to claim I should have said Oubliette rather than Avatar, to give PLATO the title of "first". Go ahead, I can't stop you. I can, however, point out that "first" does not mean "progenitor", and that even if you do relax the definition of "virtual world" sufficiently to include such games, that won't alter the fact that they had just about zero influence on the development of today's virtual worlds. They might as well have been invented on a different planet.

"Today's golf came from Scotland; that's just how it happened. Today's virtual worlds came from MUD; that's also just how it happened. PLATO was responsible for many innovations and inventions that had major influence on today's software applications; unfortunately for PLATO fans, virtual worlds are not among those applications."