Multiplayer Gaming’s Quiet Revolution

A new article on Mindjack entitled “Multiplayer Gaming’s Quiet Revolution” discusses how the community aspect of online games has evolved from simple chatting to commands that cause characters to laugh and cry. Here’s a snip:

Back in the dial-up days of the early 1980s, text-based multi-user dimensions (MUDs) relied entirely on user-typed chat, descriptions, and acronyms to construct characters and scenes within computer-moderated worlds. One’s quality of experience was entirely contingent on the eloquence, style, and typing abilities of fellow participants. Gestures such as waving and laughing would remain text-exclusive for years to come, but the medium was substantially improved when participants began inserting “emoticons” into their chats. Still in wide use today, these text-cobbled representations of perpendicular human facial expressions were the first purely visual method of interpersonal communication in multiplayer games.