---INTERACTIVE NETWORKING[6]---In its original design, ARPANET was intended to facilitate the use ofremote computers, and the transfer of computer programs and databetween remote computers.  As something of an afterthought, a tool forinterpersonal communication was provided--electronic mail.  By thesecond year of operation, it became clear to ARPANET's designersthat, despite their expectations, most of the network's users werenot using it to share facilities but to share information.  Filetransfers took up a much greater portion of network traffic than didremote computing, and although it accounted for only a small amount ofnetwork traffic, writing and reading electronic mail took up most ofthe time which users spent on the network.  People were using thenetwork to collaborate on projects, to trade notes, and just to chatand keep in touch.  Less than a year after ARPANET became operational,the mailing list was invented.  This allowed people to send messagesto a single site, where a program would then forward that message onto every person on a list, so facilitating communication between alarge group of people.  One of the earliest and most popular mailinglists was named SF-LOVERS, and was used by science-fiction fans.Since then, many more communications facilities have become availableon the network which ARPANET became: the Internet.  The most popularof these is USENET, which came into being in 1979, the invention ofthree students at the University of North Carolina who wanted todesign a better system for disseminating information between multiplepeople than email and mailing lists provided.  USENET software enabledpeople to read messages stored in a network distributed database ofmessages divided by subject, and to add their own articles to thedatabase.  In its original incarnation, the USENET software wasdesigned to handle a few articles per day from each of a handful ofsubject divisions, or, as they came to be known, 'newsgroups'.  Inthe last fourteen years, USENET has come to encompass over twothousand newsgroups, with many of those groups seeing several hundredsof articles each day.  Today's USENET software relies on ahierarchical arrangement of newsgroups.  The 'top-level' hierarchieshave such names as 'comp', 'talk' and 'rec' (the latter beingfor recreational topics).  Beneath these blanket divisions are suchgroups as comp.os.msdos, comp.os.unix, rec.fishing, sci.anthropology,sci.electronics, rec.juggling and rec.food.vegetarian.  Almost everysite on the Internet allows its users to access USENET, and thearticles that each user posts are very quickly sent on to other sites.Where once it might have taken days for messages to be propagated, itnow takes only minutes.Despite this speed of transmission, electronic mail, mailing lists andUSENET are nevertheless asynchronous methods of communication.Messages are read and responded to in discrete blocks, in acommunicative paradigm similar to that on which the earliest computerswere based.  Early on in the Internet's life, a simple synchronousmethod of communication was developed.  Variously known as 'phone'or 'talk', this facility allowed a user to 'call' another user.If that user decided to accept the call, the two users could typedirectly to each other's screens, allowing a far faster and moreinteractive form of communication than that allowed by email ornewsgroups.  'Talk' programs suggested a new way of figuringcomputer-mediated communication.  Where asynchronous methods of CMCsuch as email or USENET tend to rely on the idea of a computer as atool, as a means for communication, synchronous methods rely on theidea of the computer as providing a space for communication.  The talkprogram took the ideas begun by Spacewar further.  Talk presentedcomputers, and computer networks, not only as a medium for activity,but as the site of it.  Synchronous forms of CMC began to bring thecyberspace of the Internet into the realms of virtual reality.Nominally, all datapaths can be called cyberspaces.  Telephone lines,hard disks, fibre optic cables and satellite links are all parts ofthe global cyberspace that is the Internet.  Where that cyberspacebecomes most tangible to the user, and where it becomes a form ofvirtual reality, is where the users of those networks canimaginatively enter into them.  It was this imagined entrance intovirtual space that was to be developed in MUDs.---MUDS: NETWORKED, INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL REALITIES[7]---The computer aficionados at the Stanford Artificial IntelligenceLaboratory of the early 1970s were well known for being fantasy fans.Rooms in the AI Lab were named after locations described in J.R.R.Tolkien's _Lord_of_the_Rings_, and the printer in the lab was riggedso that it could print in three different Elven fonts.  It was one ofthese fantasy fans who wrote the first virtual reality computer game.Donald Woods, a veteran of MIT's Spacewar, discovered a quitedifferent kind of game being run on a computer at the Xeroxcorporation's Palo Alto Research Centre.  The program depicted anexplorer seeking treasure in a network of caverns.  It was an entirelytext-based game.  There were no spaceships to be shot, no graphics atall, just descriptions of localities and prompts asking players wherethey wished to go or what they wanted to do next.  Woods was entrancedby the game.  He contacted the programmer, Will Crowther, talked tohim about it, and decided to expand Crowther's program into a morecomplex adventure game.  What he wrote was ADVENT, more commonlyreferred to as Adventure, in which a player assumed the role of atraveller in a Tolkienesque setting, fighting off enemies, overcomingobstacles through clever tricks, and eventually discovering treasure.Adventure players were presented with text describing scenes such asthe following:     You are standing at the end of a road before a     small building.  Around you is a forest.  A small     stream flows out of the building and down a     gully.  There is a sword beneath a tree next to     the stream.[8]Simple commands, such as 'get sword', 'look tree' and 'gonorth', allowed the player to navigate and interact with theAdventure universe, with each input item eliciting a new descriptionof the player's environment or of the results of his or her actions.Crowther and Woods were the inventors of the very first computerisedvirtual reality game.  Crowther's caves, and Woods' more complexfantasy world, were figured by players as places which they couldenter through the computer.[9]Simple though it may seem, Adventure quickly became extremely popular,and a host of similar games began to appear.  Copies of these gamesspread through the international tendrils of the Internet, where theycan be found today, played by countless numbers of computer users.The charm of the game lay in the illusion it gave players of beinginside the game universe.  It engaged the imagination in a way that nogame had done before.  Unlike the commercial computer games which werethen starting to be written, the game had no definite aim.  Playerswere not called upon to solve specific problems, or defeat specificenemies.  There were no Pacmen or spaceships, no laser weapons orgobbling globs.  Instead players were free simply to explore the gameuniverse.  They could do whatever they liked.  Users could in theirimagination enter into the game universe, and do in it exactly whatthey would do were the virtual reality an actuality.  Adventureoffered a form of escapism that no computer game previously had byallowing the user to enter the game universe and plot the form thegame would take.Adventure and its cousins did not run on computer networks.  They weresingle player games.  However, at the same time as they were beingwritten, most US universities were, as I have described, joining theARPANET.  By the late 1970s most research institutions in the UnitedStates had joined the ARPANET.  In 1977 the interests of networking,interactivity, and virtual reality games met to produce the firstnetworked, multi-user game.  Mazewar, written by Jim Guyton, involvedthe extremely simple scenario of multiple participants wanderingaround a maze, trying to shoot one another--a kind of multi-participant Spacewar.  Mazewar was soon followed by a more complexmulti-user game which owed its setting to that depicted in Adventure.WIZARD featured a dungeon, and puzzles and monsters.  Players roamedthe WIZARD universe killing dragons and collecting gold.  Moreover,they could do it in teams.  WIZARD introduced the concept of playerinteraction beyond the level of aggression.  Players of WIZARD couldcommunicate with one another, and could share information and objectsthey had accumulated in their exploration of the dungeon.  Teams ofplayers could collaborate on adventures which were often liftedwholesale from the pages of pulp fantasy novels, if not from_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_.In 1979 Alan Klietz, inspired by Adventure and WIZARD, began writingE*M*P*I*R*E, which later came to be known as Scepter.  Klietz wasassociated with the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium, a groupwhich from 1976 to 1983 made use the of the new multi-user 'time-sharing' computer operating systems to provide computer access toschoolchildren.  One of the most popular programs on the system wasAdventure, and Klietz wrote Scepter as a multi-user alternative toAdventure.  Scepter allowed players, as WIZARD had, to communicate,and it also adopted that feature of Mazewar that was to become one ofthe major features of this genre of game.  Scepter allowed players toplay against each other as well as with each other.  Player to playercombat introduced a new level of complexity into the game, whichquickly became so popular that Klietz set about writing a commercialversion, known as Screenplay, under the ownership of his employers,Gambit Incorporated.Scepter was the first game to depart from the fantasy genre that haddominated previous games.  Alan Klietz's game universe featuredvarious themes including areas emulating the wild west, and sciencefiction and detective stories, as well as the more familiarTolkienesque areas.  The latter remained popular, and the sciencefiction areas quickly collected an avid group of fans.  To this daythe fantasy and science fiction genres dominate these games, just asin the forms of Spacewar and Adventure they had inspired their birth.Unfortunately, Klietz was eventually forced to abandon his work.  Thecompany that originally owned the rights to Screenplay, Gambit, wassubsumed into a larger company, Interplay.  Interplay later filed forbankruptcy and its owner was sent to jail on eighteen counts includingtax evasion and running a false church out of his home.[10]Screenplay left the market under a cloud.The name 'MUD' first appeared in 1978 when Roy Trubshaw, then astudent at the University of Essex, England, wrote what he called aMulti-User Dungeon.  The name itself was a tribute to an earliersingle-user Adventure-style game named DUNGEN.[11]  In 1979, RichardBartle joined Trubshaw in working on MUD.  MUD contained many of thefeatures which others, such as Alan Klietz, had developedindependently.  It was a networked multi-user game which allowed usersto communicate with one another, to cooperate on adventures together,or to fight against each other.  In an early version of the game,players were also given the option of extending the game world bycreating new objects and places within it.  However, in the end, theoption of user-extensibility was taken out, partly as a result of thelack of computing resources available to run the game, and partlybecause Bartle felt that the hodge-podge of items created by playersdetracted from rather than enhanced the game.The first MUD universe was a fantasy-style one that encouraged playersto compete with each other for points.  Player went on quests to killmonsters or find treasure.  Killing monsters--or other players--was asource of points, but more were to be gained by finding treasure andbringing it back to a swamp located at a shifting point in the gameuniverse.  On throwing treasure into the swamp, players would berewarded with points which, once they had collected enough, wouldenable them to gain new and greater powers.  Although this originalMUD game did not ever gain a high level of popularity, it neverthelesshas had great influence on those who were to develop later games.  Thenumber of people who played Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD was small, butmany of them went on to design the systems that are popular today.The original MUD game can still be played.  Richard Bartle was askedto design a version for the CompuServe computer facility, and thatversion is still in existence.  Called British Legends, playerscompete to collect enough points, by solving puzzles, killing monstersand finding treasure, to become a 'Wizard', a title recognising theplayer's mastery over the British Legends universe, and giving him orher special powers within that universe.Alan Cox was one of those who spent a lot of time playing the originalMUD game, and in 1987 he decided to design his own.  AberMUD, namedfor the town of Aberystwyth in which Cox lived, has evolved throughnumerous versions and is still played today.  Jim Aspnes of Carnegie-Mellon University was another fan of Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD.  In1989 he began work on TinyMUD, which was to introduce a whole newflavour of game to the genre.  TinyMUD was designed to run oncomputers running the UNIX operating system, and the growingpopularity of UNIX made possible the popularity of Aspnes' creation.TinyMUD was the first of what were to come to be called 'social'MUDs.  Aspnes deliberately set out to get away from the notion thatthese games had to be played with the idea of gaining points, orkilling things--let alone that players should be given the option of