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As Richard began programming in 1977, the same inspiring collision of
influences—Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series,
Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and the power of computer programming—was being replayed across the world.
In a way, all three influences were about magic, even if the last was a technological wizardry. Fantasy novels immersed
readers in fantasy worlds where power, evil, and good had significance. It was an increasingly compelling idea in the late
1970s, when Vietnam and Watergate and the rest of the real world’s disillusioning events had watered down the idealism of
the previous decade with cynicism and discontent. Spreading from college students outward to other communities, the game
gave people a way to act out the roles of the fantasy books they loved.
Computers added a new dimension of power and mystery to the mix, even if they were still simplistic. Computers
allowed people control, and computer games gave them the ability to wander through a world that was presented fully
formed, without interruption from the Dungeon Master. Even the earliest games had an incredible power to grasp people’s
wondering attention and spit them out hours later, wholly unaware of the passage of time.
It could be something as simple
as Pong, batting a blob of light back and forth across a digital field that barely qualified as the representation of a
ping-pong table. It could be the later adventure games like Richard’s that let people delve into the worlds of dragons,
orcs, and treasure.
The games in Richard’s house, low-tech as they were, contained all the seeds of later computer gaming communities. Like
any community—a family, a neighborhood, or a collection of gamers—they fed off the diversity of their members. The
storytellers created the worlds. The players lived in them. Others, from Richard’s mother to the people who brought their
books and dice, made the games run.
The later computer gaming communities fell into much the same mold. They would have their urban planners in the persons
of the game creators and storytellers. Those creators’ worlds would work on the same principles as any city’s new
neighborhood: People would visit if the worlds sounded interesting, and if people liked them—if, in the case of games,
they were fun— then people would stay.
These virtual communities would have their architects and construction companies,
the people who built them just for the fun of building and who made it possible to have the equivalents of running water
and flush toilets and electricity. In the game world, these infrastructure builders would be the hard-core coders, the
3D modelers and graphics engine programmers, even the T-shirted guys happily stringing wires to connect computers so that
people could play together.
Ultimately people would wander in to look at the new neighborhood, to test out the infrastructure a little to see if it
was a place they wanted to stay; if they liked it, they’d settle down and start playing. They’d put down roots, make
friends, form little groups that could be as tight as family inside the game world. They would develop their own mythologies
and oral histories about the people who had been there before them, and about people who did heroic or exceptional things
by their adopted community’s standards.
What would make the computer game communities that developed over the next 20 years so dynamic would be the real feedback
that occurred among all of these groups—planners, builders, and players. For the most part, it wouldn’t be like Monopoly
or poker, where the rules were set, the implements of the game were handed down from above, and the game went on as it
always had. Computer game worlds would constantly evolve, pushed by new advances from the technology developers and by
new ideas from the players themselves. Years later, it would not at all be unusual to find little pockets of colonists in
a game world, using it for something wholly different than what its creators intended.
These colonists would be among the first to establish communities that were wholly digital, that interacted and fought
and loved and had sex and killed each other all virtually, first through text alone and later with the help of increasingly
realistic graphics. Gamers wouldn’t be the only people to found digital communities, certainly.
But they would consistently test the boundaries of whatever digital mediums they found. They would be the Puritans, off to foreign shores to find a
better world, even if for only a few hours a day. They would take what they found and build something new, impose their own
rules and lifestyles on it, and the worlds they found would change them right back.
For Richard, all this would start with simple 1500-line programs running on a new invention—the Apple II home computer.
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