One of the driving forces of technology, especially computer-based technology, is games. One of the first "applications" (and some would say entire computer systems) developed beyond operating systems and assemblers was a combat game called Spacewar. Chess, of course, followed soon thereafter, and after only a few decades, very powerful computers were becoming a challenge for even the best chess players in the world.

Computers have long been considered very complex and expensive toys by programmers, for whom "teaching" a processor to properly interpret a system of rules is both simple and natural. This ability to understand and implement a rule system is the chief utility of a "game" computer, because consulting rulebooks and sorting random numbers isn't much fun for the players.

Around the same time the first computer games were in development, in 1968, a game system called Chainmail was invented by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. It was a system that later became Dungeons and Dragons. These two phenomena, role-playing games and computer programming, found themselves in close proximity on dozens of college campuses, and it didn't take long for a number of brilliant programmers to combine the two into the first computer-based "dungeon."

The basic mechanics of the "dungeon" category of games is fairly consistent from platform to platform, whether it is paper-and-pencil (and a whole lotta dice), on a single player computer or on a multi-player networked computer. Players play the roles of warriors, wizards or some combination of the two, and search throughout a game "world" for monsters to battle. If they are successful in vanquishing the monsters, they can loot the monster's treasure, which can consist of gold, jewels, magical weapons, or various combinations of strange and wonderful treasures unique to that game world. The monsters, player powers and treasures are limited only by the imaginations of the players, and there are dozens of popular and quite different game systems in a variety of genres, including horror, western, science-fiction and fantasy adventure. What these games have in common are the basic mechanics.

Interestingly enough, it is quite possible that another very popular genre known as "interactive fiction" may have been at least partially responsible for the development of the "multi-user dungeon" or MUD. Some of the first interactive fiction games, which are essentially single-player "dungeon" games like Dungeon and Colossal Cave Adventure, were developed in the late 1970s. These games relied on an interpreter which allowed players to enter strings of words as commands, such as "go north" or "open door." The game Dungeon was later marketed commercially by Infocom as the very popular Zork series.

Because many of the computer systems installed at colleges and universities were multiple-account systems like the venerable PDP-10, it wasn't long before these various elements combined into the first multi-user dungeon. From 1977 to 1979, a number of pioneering games like Moria, Ouibliette and Avatar were made available on various systems like PLATO. Some of these early MUDs even had graphical user interfaces, and some of the games, such as Avatar, are still in operation after nearly 30 years.

The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game or MMORPG is the result of the development of MUDs over the past few decades. An MMORPG is simply a very large multi-user "world" with a graphical interface played on personal computer systems.

One of the chief features the two genres share is the ability to "chat" with other players. Even games like Second Life, which are technically dissimilar to MUDs and MMORPGs because they have no real directed goal such as a "quest" or a "dungeon" to overcome, still retain the "chat" feature of the MMORPG. It is likely that the friendships formed by players in these games are at least as important to the players as the advancement of their character, which is often noted as the primary reason players continue to invest time and, in some games, a monthly fee, in the game.

In 1999, Verant Interactive developed a game called Everquest which set the modern standard for the MMORPG genre. A sequel was released in 2004, and the Everquest universe now covers several hundred "zones" in the fictional world of Norrath and its various surrounding lands. Not long after its release, Everquest became the leading game in its genre, with thousands of players simultaneously participating in adventures in a world of swords and sorcery.

In 2004, Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft, an MMORPG sequel to their popular Warcraft series of real-time strategy games. After two years, World of Warcraft had seven million subscribers worldwide, and had become the most popular and successful MMORPG in the genre.

Even World of Warcraft, or WoW, retains some of the basic features of multi-user dungeons like chat, directed "quests" and multi-player combat. WoW also takes advantage of the graphical capabilities of the newest computers, making the dungeons and the battles against the various monsters visually impressive. A number of players of games like WoW are quite content to spend their time just wandering around and exploring the game world.

Given the extraordinary financial success of World of Warcraft, it is not surprising that there are numerous new MMORPGs in development, such as the soon-to-be-released Warhammer Online. The enthusiasm of the players is likely to only add to the strength of the genre as new games are developed.