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This is a biography by someone who is actually a historian but is enamored with the subject and writes very well to the level of the popular audience it was intended for. It is surprisingly good.

And a bigger surprise for someone who isn't familiar at all with this history -- there's black magic!

@Carnivalesque i will try one of those first, thanks for the recommendation. Frenzy is so difficult to find that I put myself on an alert list to be notified when it comes into stock on thriftbooks.com

I listened to an abridged audio performance of this first and ended up liking it more because I found the actual book sprawling and overwhelming. I drifted in and out while reading it. There is a lot of stuff that feels like sketch comedy and then scenes that are deadly serious. I really appreciated how passionate the characters are, even to their detriment.

Also, I have been looking for some fictional material to prepare some introductory role-playing sessions for. Something that a regular person might find approachable without any required background in fantasy, sci-fi, gaming, etc. I think this is it.

Started this due to insomnia last night and it didn’t help me because it is pretty engaging and saying stuff I want to hear.

I thought it was going to be a book about making mmorpgs in C++ and that is exactly what I don’t want.

Instead it is code agnostic and written by someone who was there in the 70s with the development of the first virtual worlds. More than that, his history of MUDs actually correlates with my lived experience. A lot of retrospective stuff online is either wrong or has big gaps.

And two more things I strongly identify with: he encourages creating something out of whole cloth and not something derivative and even dares to suggest that a virtual world doesn’t have to be a game.