One final element of Minecraft’s inventory practices remains unaccounted for: the bar at the bottom that allows rapid access to the contents of the inventory. This is clearly an inventory practice that makes no sense at the tabletop, yet it will hardly be a surprise at this point to demonstrate that it too descends from a lineage that traces its departure point to Dungeons & Dragons. In this case, the pivotal game is Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest (1999), which is the first of the ‘graphical MUDs’ – what would become known as a Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game or MMORPG. Pictured at the top here is an inventory window from EverQuest II (2004), which shows another conventional grid inventory, with the bottom three rows marked with keyboard shortcuts: this is what EverQuest termed a hotbar, and which comes to be known as a quickbar (styled in Minecraft’s case as a quick-bar).

Tracing the practices of MMOs, or indeed any game that is run as a service, requires significantly greater effort than investigating games that were released as products. Game-as-services means constant changes and updates, and this makes archaeology difficult to adequately perform. Nonetheless, the picture here shows a very early (perhaps the first) form of the hotbar in the original EverQuest. The player is able to customise its contents by placing different actions (at this point primarily described in words e.g. “Melee Attack”) onto the bar, where it can be quickly clicked with the mouse, or activated with a hotkey. The name ‘hotbar’ is clearly a reference to the concept of a ‘hotkey’, which has its origin in the graphical interfaces of computer operating systems.

It appears to be EverQuest’s early competitor Dark Age of Camelot (2001) which coins the term quickbar, and as with all games of this style, the design varies radically throughout its life. The images above depict one of the last versions of the iconography used (top), and the original green and gold iconography (bottom). The functionality, however, remains parallel to the equivalent practices of EverQuest.

Computer RPGs were already moving towards this kind of customisable inventory practice as the available hardware resources increased and games took advantage of this to add more functionality. The action bar at the bottom of the screen in Baldur’s Gate (1998) is a proto-quickbar, even though inventory items are a small part of the space allocated for it. Similarly, Diablo II (2000) offers a quickbar-like system that is presented as being part of the world of the game by linking its functionality to belt items. Each belt provides the capacity to access potions, with different belts having varying capacities. However, by Diablo III, this experiment had merged with the main lineage of quickbar practices, which blossomed in the MMORPGs. To appreciate why, we should examine the two decades before the first MMORPGs, and the lineages of the original multiplayer fictional worlds: MUDs.

MUD1 and its Descendants (1978)

When I met Richard Bartle in Dundee this year for the first international joint conference of DiGRA and FDG, where he was giving a keynote, I asked him about the influences that fed into MUD1, the 1978 game that took a simple database, hooked it up with a parser, and connected it to the outside world with BT’s packet switch stream (a precursor to the internet). Bartle was keen to play down the influence of the text adventures, admitting that the parser idea had come from them, but suggesting if it hadn’t been from games like Colossal Cave Adventure (1977) or Zork (1977/1980) it would have come from elsewhere. I’ve already suggested we should set aside such counter-factual reasoning: a history is a narrative that connects the events that occurred, and we should not be too distracted by mere possibilities when constructing one.

Similarly, while Bartle and his co-designer Roy Trubshaw, had played Dungeons & Dragons, which clearly serves as an influence in the trajectory of the MUDs, Bartle was keen to note single-player games of his own devising which were similar in form to early tabletops that had influenced him in making MUD1. This isn’t entirely surprising, since while it was D&D that spread the practices widely by being published, there were numerous proto-RPGs in circulation in the time preceding it. The collision of tabletop player practices with the world practices of novels created unique conditions for the creation of new player practices focussed on narrative play, out of which springs the explosion of inventiveness for which D&D is a key locus of influence.

The early MUDs, however, were much more exercises in world building and community play than adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons. It is the LP MUDs (1989) and especially the DIKU MUDs (1990), originating in Sweden and Denmark respectively, that saw in the MUDs the opportunity to (yet again) adapt D&D for computer form, repeating what had happened back in 1974 on the PLATO educational network. From its first publication through to the early 1990s, wherever there was an opportunity to adapt the various player practices of D&D into a computerised form, it was taken.

The inventory systems of all these games remains resolutely in the style of the early text adventures, and thus in the form of D&D: a list of words. A text command ‘inventory’, often available as just ‘i’, would list all the items that the player was carrying in a simple linear list. Each item was specified in the design of the game, either as a unique object (in most adventure games) or as a class to be instanced (in computer RPGs and MUDs). As long as these games were represented in text, there was no possibility of it being otherwise.

Where, then, is the connection to the highly customisable quickbar? Players of MUDs often found that there were actions (or clusters of actions) that they needed to perform frequently, and swiftly hit upon a solution via running additional software in parallel to the MUD supporting macros. A macro was simply a script of text actions coupled to a key press to trigger it, typically (but not exclusively) the function keys (F1-F12), which were ideally suited for such purposes. Later client software for MUDs began to build these macro systems in automatically, because the player practices had become dependent upon the macro concept for smooth play. Note also that it was the players who added this element to the MUDs, with no involvement from the game developers.

Because the developers of EverQuest were MUD players, they appear to have been drawn to providing customisable interface elements like the hotbar, and thus accelerating the development of what would become called the quickbar: they were (on this reading) a graphical substitute for macros, a customisable element that could tailor to the individual player’s practices. MUDs required more actions in part because they brought together multiple players, which necessitated communication and performance irrelevant in a single player game. MMORPGs inherited this requirement, and developed the quickbar practices to deal with it.

Here, in this final element of Minecraft’s inventory design, is an example of why examining the history of games as player practices can reveal aspects that are invisible if they are examined solely as artefacts, since it is only through the actions of the players that the practices of games are sustained. The design of every game is conditioned by the conservation of player practices, which sustains those practices that are effective at satisfying the visceral or imaginative needs of players. Every example within this serial serves to elucidate this point, and to show how games are never isolated objects: they are always embedded in the manifold of player practices responsible for their creation, and which they then contribute to maintaining.

The player is the heart of the game, and game design conserves player practices because designers are also players. We can trace lineages not because successful games are the rare exception that borrow their practices from earlier games, but because games that borrow the majority of their practices from earlier games are best positioned to be successful – especially if they can manage to bring something new to the table in the process. Notch probably did not play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, or The Bard’s Tale, or Dungeon Master, or UFO: Enemy Unknown, or EverQuest, but the inventory practices of Minecraft nonetheless inherits the successful variations that these games introduced upon a bedrock of established player practices.

With thanks to Erlend Grefsrud, Griddle Octopus, Doug Hill, Jacobo Luengo, Sketchwhale, Oscar Strik, VR Sam, Worthless Bums, José Zagal and, always when I talk of the history of games, to my friend and colleague Richard Boon.