Nationality British Spouse Gail Bartle | Role Writer Name Richard Bartle | |
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Occupation writer, professor, game researcher Children Jennifer Bartle, Madeleine Bartle Books Designing Virtual Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games, Design of Virtual Worlds Known for |
innovation in game design by richard bartle
Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher, best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 (an early MUD) and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry.
Contents
- innovation in game design by richard bartle
- Matt chat 296 richard bartle on muds and british snobbery
- Life and career
- Awards
- Games
- Books
- References

Matt chat 296 richard bartle on muds and british snobbery
Life and career

Bartle received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Essex, where he created MUD1 with Roy Trubshaw in 1978.

He lectured at Essex until 1987, when he left to work full-time on MUD (known as MUD2 in its present version). Recently he has returned to the university as a part-time professor and principal teaching fellow in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems, supervising courses on computer game design as part of the department's degree course on computer game development.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In 2003, he wrote Designing Virtual Worlds, a book about the history, ethics, structure, and technology of massively multiplayer games.
Bartle is also a contributing editor to Terra Nova, a collaborative blog that deals with virtual world issues.
Bartle did research on player personality types in virtual worlds. In Bartle's analysis, players of virtual worlds can be divided into four types: achievers, explorers, socializers and killers. This idea has been adapted into an online test generally referred to as the Bartle Test, which is quite popular, with scores often exchanged on massively multiplayer online games forums and networking sites.
Circa 2003, Bartle was reported as living in a village near Colchester, England, with his wife Gail and their two children Jennifer and Madeleine.
Richard Bartle has compared game players' distaste for permanent death to general distaste for pedophilia.
Bartle is an atheist.