Richard Bartle

Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created "MUD1" (the first MUD) in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book "Designing Virtual Worlds".
Life and career.
In 1988, Bartle received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Essex, where as an undergraduate, 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.
Bartle is an atheist and a patron of Humanists UK.