From One Screen to Many
Many of the oldest games were already social. Two players could share a single display and take turns, or sit side by side with separate controllers, as in early arcade and home versions of simple bat-and-ball and space combat games. This kind of play requires no network at all: the machine is shared and everyone is in the same room.
The step to online play required separating the player from the machine. That meant the game had to send information between computers, which brought a new set of problems and possibilities.
Shared Mainframes and Text Worlds
The first networked games grew out of time-sharing systems, in which many people used terminals connected to one large computer. Because everyone was already using the same machine, a program could let different users see one another. Games on the educational PLATO system in the 1970s are often mentioned here, and other university systems hosted similar experiments.
A well-known line of development started in the late 1970s at a university in England, where students built a text-based shared world on a mainframe. Players typed commands to move between described rooms, pick up items and chat with others who were logged in at the same time. Programs of this kind became known as MUDs, short for multi-user dungeons, and later versions spread to many institutions through the growing early internet. They owed much to the tradition of text adventures, but the presence of other real people made them feel different. They also borrowed ideas from tabletop role-playing, which is traced in the article on computer role-playing.
Text worlds had a long life. Many were run by volunteers, hosted on university machines, and supported small but devoted communities. They also raised social questions, such as how to handle disputes and rule-breaking, that later large online games would meet again.
Modems and Bulletin Boards
In the 1980s, home computer owners connected to each other through telephone lines using modems. Bulletin board systems, run by hobbyists on their own machines, offered message areas, file downloads and sometimes simple multiplayer games. Players dialed in one at a time or a few at a time, and turn-based games could last for days as moves were submitted between calls. Commercial online services of the period also offered games, charging by the hour, which made long sessions expensive.
Local Networks and the Shooter Era
In the 1990s, a different kind of multiplayer became popular: several computers wired together on a local area network, often in a home, school or office. Fast-paced three-dimensional shooters allowed several people to play in the same virtual space at once. Many people remember carrying their computers to a friend’s house for an evening of such play, a habit that became known as a LAN party.
Soon, games added support for dial-up internet connections, and then broadband. Online play at this scale meant solving problems that single-player games never faced:
- Latency. Messages take time to travel. A delay between pressing a button and seeing a result can make a fast game hard to play.
- Shared state. Every player’s machine needs a consistent picture of what is happening, even when messages arrive late or in different orders.
- Cheating. If part of the game runs on the player’s own computer, a dishonest player may try to alter it.
- Bandwidth. In the dial-up era, only small amounts of data could be sent each second, so designers had to be careful about what to transmit.
Developers used a mix of techniques, including having a central server make final decisions and letting each player’s machine predict movement in the meantime. These approaches built on advances in network architecture and on the protocols of the wider internet.
Persistent Worlds
Later in the 1990s, studios began to create persistent graphical worlds, where a game kept running whether or not a given player was logged in. Players held characters that developed over weeks or months, traded goods and formed groups. Several large titles of the late 1990s and early 2000s drew very large communities, and some charged monthly fees. Exact subscriber numbers are widely quoted but vary by source, so they are best treated as approximate.
Persistent worlds revealed unexpected social and economic behavior. Players organized guilds, created markets for virtual items and sometimes bought and sold those items for real money, which raised questions about ownership that are still debated.
Consoles, Phones and the Present
Game consoles joined the trend in the early 2000s, with online services offering matchmaking, voice chat and digital downloads. Mobile phones brought another wave, where many people played turn-based or short-session games against friends. Streaming, esports and social features expanded the idea of what it means to play together, since many people now watch others play as a form of entertainment.
Not everything is positive. Online spaces can include harassment, and designers and moderators continue to experiment with tools to handle it. Games that depend on servers can also disappear when a company shuts them down, which is a concern for preservation and one reason people study how online games were built.
The main thread is that each new network technology produced a new kind of shared play, from terminals on a campus to a global internet. The social idea stayed constant while the technical means changed.