The 11 Most Influential Online Worlds of All Time
May 17th, 2011 by Benj Edwards
CYBERSPACE (echo, echo, echo…):
The future of mankind or an ingenious scheme to sell virtual furniture for real money?
It’s been a while since I’ve done a slideshow where I attempted to quantify the unquantifiable and rank a series of things in order from least to greatest. I’m typically not a fan of the format because the results are always subjective, but I still think it works because it stimulates public thought and gives me a good excuse to both entertain and educate on a subject I love.
The subject, in this case, is online worlds, where people gather together in virtual space to buy/sell mouse-crafted Furry outfits, chat about LARPing, and construct entire worlds filled with simulated genitalia.
So without further ado, I present to you “The 11 Most Influential Virtual Worlds of All Time” over at PC World. I hope you enjoy it.
When you’re done reading/pounding your fists, feel free to tell us about your favorite online worlds in the comments below.
May 17th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Damn, I didn’t even hear about most of them! 🙂
May 18th, 2011 at 4:45 am
Great to see both Habitat and MUD get mentioned, they were very influential… There was another online game based in the UK called Shades, which had a unique system of commands for interacting with other players. Including a HUG option. I think more virtual worlds should encourage players to be friendly.
May 18th, 2011 at 7:53 am
Not having internet until late in the dialup game, and then not being allowed to use it for a long while, I never got into most of these online worlds. I fiddled with some of the newer ones, but never found them very interesting, especially games like WoW.
However, I did find a MUD a few years back. Sadly, it was on it’s way out by the time I found it, but it was the longest lived of any of my online world explorations. I even went so far as to code up a better telnet interface just for the MUD, because I didn’t like the existing options.
May 18th, 2011 at 9:08 am
There are tons of MUDs still out there, you know. Check out http://www.mudconnector.com.
May 19th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Benj, as someone who regularly gets nostalgic about my digital roots, I heart your blog and I enjoyed your compilation! Yay to see Second Life on there (I work and play inworld) — although the pic you used with the amusingly fugly avatar looks like it’s from YEARS ago, not what we can graphically do today: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Depth_of_field
Interestingly, #2 and #1 inspired me to get into online VR and SL in the first place. Wait, is that Cathode showing off a MUD?