Hyper-Connected Entertainment
Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games have been around for decades, connecting millions of people around the globe to virtual worlds. The effects of this are by now well known: economies of scale mean that some truly amazing worlds can be created, but the impact that individual players have is less than negligible. There is a danger that rather than bringing individual players together, hyper-connectivity actually isolates them. There are solutions, though – which will work for other online forms of community beyond entertainment.
About Richard Bartle
Dr Richard A. Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having co-written in 1978 the first virtual world, MUD, the progenitor of the $30bn Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game industry. His 1996 Player Types model has seen widespread adoption by MMO developers and the games industry in general. His 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, is the standard text on the subject, and he is an influential writer on all aspects of MMO design and development. In 2010, he was the first recipient of the prestigious Game Developers' Conference Online Game Legend award.
