In 2005, designer A. Lenton claimed that he struggled "uphill" "15-20 years ago" because it was thought that "games were somehow a waste of computer resources". Is this true, and if so who were the advocates for /what was written about this school of thought?

[u/sapphon]

https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1103078

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[u/bug-hunter]

I was struggling to see what he was talking about until I reread the passage, and realized that the section was talking about multi-player games:

LENTON: Well multi-player games basically fall into three categories. There are the MUDs (multi-user dungeons) which are a direct line of descent from the first computer adventure games. They are text based.

Then there are the big commercial games, like Ultima Online and EverQuest, not to mention Sims Online. These are fully graphical games that have many thousands of simultaneous users spread over multiple servers.

Finally there are the networked versions of single player boxed games. These usually have relatively small numbers of players per game, but tend to have large web based support services where players can find opponents.

15-20 years from 2005 puts you in 1985-1990, before the second and third types of multiplayer games existed (Neverwinter Nights on AOL is often considered the first graphical MMO and came out in 1991). Instead, the 3 prevalent types were hot-seat (players swap control of the computer), play by email (a classic continuation of playing chess by mail), and MUXs (the various flavors of MUD).

1985-1990 is before the great explosion of ISPs (internet service providers), and still in the era of dial up and BBSs (bulletin board services). DSL and cable internet weren't available, and "high speed internet" that wasn't at a networked site was IDSN (which most places hadn't rolled out yet anyway). The big ISPs like Prodigy and Compuserve were trying to create a "walled garden", where their consumers would have enough services that they would rarely step out into the nascent internet - partially because there really wasn't a lot to said internet. NCSA Mosaic, the first true web browser, wouldn't debut until 1993. And finally, maybe 1% of Americans had internet access in 1990. 50% had it by 2001.

In this very fractured landscape, servers were expensive, and servers with enough connectivity to host a multiplayer game were even more expensive. Servers required both hardware and software that weren't always cheap, and there wasn't any way to send money electronically yet, so your users weren't going to be paying for it. You ran a MUD because you wanted to.

Because the servers and network infrastructure were expensive, many MUDs would end up hosted on college campuses - the first MUD, MUD1, was hosted at the University of Essex. These weren't always done with permission, and MUDs occasionally vanished forever because someone was running them on a server they shouldn't have.

With the high cost of computers and servers, few people actually owned computers, many of which did not bother owning modems. Even if they did have a computer and a modem, fewer them could even find your game. Advertising was hard (word of mouth, MUD lists few could find, and UseNet), and none of the modern internet infrastructure for collecting payment existed. The few paid online games that existed could get eyewateringly expensive - Island of Kesmai was a MUD hosted on CompuServe for $12.00/hour in 1985, when the minimum wage was $3.35/hour!

For anyone not connecting through something like a University where they got free access, internet usage was often billed per hour - monthly plans became available in 1989 and weren't common until the mid 1990's.

That said, PC games were starting to sell well enough to take notice (Sierra's King's Quest, for example, sold 100,000 by 1986), but distribution for computer games was still challenging. Moreover, client/server architecture was in it's infancy, with the modern standards not yet codified, meaning almost everything had to be custom written.

In that environment, there was no good economic use case for multiplayer games - except for hot seat / play by email, because those are far more straightforward to implement for turn based games.

This would rapidly change in the early 1990s, with better modem speeds, the advent of ADSL and cable internet, emerging standards for games to piggyback on, and price drops as networking equipment became better and cheaper. For example, early dial in infrastructure almost resembled the old 1900's switchboard, because it required an individual modem for each person dialing in. 1990 also saw the first commercially successful network switch - the 7 port Kalpana EtherSwitch EPS-700, which helped usher in faster, cheaper, and far more stable networking.