[AimHere]

Well it's not just that; at the time, the Bartle MUDs were the only games like it in existence, and so anyone (who happened to have the relevant network access, of course) who wanted to play a multiplayer online game played Bartle's MUD, which is why you got the whole taxonomy playing the same game.

That changed in the late 1980s, when the source code for TinyMUDs and MUSHes and DikuMUDs started becoming publicly available, and the userbase fragmented; the playerkillers went onto their games, the guys who wanted to chat went onto the games optimized for that, the roleplayers to another game, and so on. Nowadays, when there is a clash of playertypes, the misfits tend to get policed off the server - playerkiller types will get kicked out of other servers for griefing, people who optimize their gameplay too hard will get thrown off the roleplaying servers, and so on...

Bartle's insight is actually specific to his time period and his game and the few other MUDs (AberMUD, MIST etc) that were around while running one was hard to do. The insight still holds, but it would have been harder to spot at a later date, when everybody went their separate ways...

[zimpenfish]

> the Bartle MUDS were the only games

He specifically doesn't like being given sole credit - http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2015/QBlog130515A.html

> This is why when people introduce me as "the man who invented online games" or whatever, I always mention that I co-invented them with Roy Trubshaw.

(and the rest of that paragraph)

[AimHere]

Sure, no arguments with the crediting; I was using 'BartleMUDs' as a shorthand term to specify about 3 games (MUD, MIST, LAND) that were based on the same codebase at Essex University, without reference to who actually did what.