Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Bunten's greatest game, and the one with the most relevance to today's multiplayer world, was M.U.L.E. Named for the stubborn electronic beasts ("Multiple Use Labor Elements") that players haul out to plots of land on the planet Irata ("Atari" spelled backward), it took advantage of the Atari home computer's four-joystick setup to let players cooperate and compete in an artificial economy. Designers still admire its flawless balancing of ruthlessness and interdependence. A player can make a tidy sum using such tricks as monopolizing the planet's energy supply, but a robot Ken Lay who takes it too far will bring the economy crashing down for all four players, dooming the colony.
As anyone who has played it knows, bloodshed is unnecessary in the good-naturedly cut-throat competition of M.U.L.E. Today, journalists writing about the massively multiplayer Everquest find it remarkable that a game can teach us about free markets. But on a much smaller scale, M.U.L.E. staked out this territory on an Atari computer with four players gripping leathery joysticks.
The subject -- robots developing real estate -- is seemingly as dry as it gets. But the concept and execution were sublime, even "genius," according to Meier.
The game turns the economy of a planet into a simple visual arena. As a timer ticks down, buyer robots and seller robots walk up and down the screen trying to lure each other to a meeting place. Sometimes, in days past, someone would tilt a joystick to run away at the last moment, and chaos ensued, typically characterized -- as is still common at today's LAN parties, where gamers gather to play networked games -- by people laughing at each other's failures and hubris. "It made economics and capitalism fun," Meier says.
In M.U.L.E. you, the player, are a robot entrepreneur. You pick a species of robot -- such as the Leggite or the simian Bonzoid. Then you begin each turn walking around a Town. So long as the Town has Smithore (a valuable mineral) with which to produce M.U.L.E.'s, a nearby pen is full of the creatures. Typically, you begin the turn by buying one of the robotic beasts of burden and trotting it out to a plot of land, being careful not to let it run away. Then, after "installing" it in the right location to earn money for you, you race back to town, where you convert your remaining time into cash by gambling at the Pub. After everyone has completed a turn, it's time for the Auction -- at which the plots of land and other commodities are sold.
M.U.L.E. was beloved in the small world of computer hobbyists -- science fiction author Orson Scott Card wrote in Compute that it "faces the fundamental ethical dilemma of humanity, while teaching you, firsthand, the principles of economics. Sounds deadly, doesn't it?"
But for decades the industry ignored M.U.L.E.'s lessons. At Chris Crawford's game development conferences, Bunten's sermons preached that a large, untapped market of gameplayers could be reached with socially oriented games that appealed to non-programmer types. Anything was possible back then. In the mid-'80s, Crawford could release a game like Balance of Power, which was one part Cold War sim, one part social commentary. A Massachusetts company called Infocom sold nothing but witty text adventure games (Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging). Strategic Simulations, meanwhile, focused on detailed strategy wargames for military history buffs. Then there were quirky life simulations like Alter Ego and Little Computer People -- and unclassifiable games such as M.U.L.E., singular in its designer's strange faith in multiplayer gaming.
Most of the above genres are extinct today. Instead, the industry has narrowed its focus to just a few, mostly violent, niches, guaranteed to sell: the D&D franchise product, the first-person shooter, the real-time strategy game. Increasingly, Bunten found the gaming industry unreceptive to her ideas.
Somewhere during this sad evolution, the twice-divorced Bunten struggled not only with the difficult task of finding appreciation for her work but also with a growing uncertainty about her identity.
When Bunten became more reclusive in the early 1990s, Computer Gaming World's Sipe was one of the few people in the industry she kept updated on her personal life. This included the looming, final phase of what Bunten called the "pronoun change," completed in 1992. Not long after, Sipe ran into Dani at one of Crawford's game design conferences, sporting a perm. He asked how "it" went.
"I had to call it off," Bunten said. "They wanted to add guns and bombs in there."
The two had a good laugh when they realized Bunten thought Sipe was talking about her other life's struggle: to remake M.U.L.E. for the '90s.
"Some asshole at E.A. insisted there had to be combat in it," says Crawford, although company founder Hawkins says he has no recollection of that.
Unfortunately, a weird and wonderful multiplayer game about capitalistic robots was destined for trouble in the dawning mass market of late '80s solo games. With graphics-intensive games like Wing Commander, glitzy "bells and whistles" were becoming increasingly important in selling software. And games themselves were doing double-duty as advertisements for extravagant graphics hardware.
"Dan did not adapt well as the market became more focused on video games for kids that required more action and better graphics," says Hawkins. M.U.L.E.'s primitive look did not fit the bill.
Throughout the 1990s, the industry -- driven by the consumer lust for graphics and the accompanying demand for upgrades -- became something very different from the puckish world of early games. In the 8-bit era, memory and hard disk space was at a premium and the Dani Buntens of the world strove endlessly to cram better and more efficiently coded games into a tight squeeze. But now, formerly inconceivable amounts of computing power are splurged on the visceral thrill of the death match.
Today the massively multiplayer game is trumpeted as the next big thing; the game industry is finally beginning to take human interaction seriously. But its open-ended chaos is the polar opposite of Bunten's meticulous arrangement of rules. Has something been lost?
Yes: innocent charm -- a kind of gentle 1980s engineering student humor that would produce something like M.U.L.E. or Robot Rascals. There is also less willingness to let game designers take risks. When was the last time a computer game felt like something other than a sequel or an incremental improvement? And how many young would-be Buntens are stuck coding yet another snowboarding game?
