M.U.L.E. and the design of connection
M.U.L.E. was published by Electronic Arts in 1983 and is, by most informed assessments, one of the finest games ever designed. It supported four simultaneous players on a single computer — each player at a corner of the keyboard, or using separate joysticks — in a real-time economic simulation set on a newly colonised planet. Players bid against each other, traded resources, negotiated alliances, and competed for land claim rights, all simultaneously, with the game's procedural economy responding to every decision in ways that no single player could fully predict or control.
The design was built around a specific understanding of what games could do: create the conditions for genuine human interaction. The colony on Irata (Atari backwards) needed resources to survive. Each player controlled one colonist who needed different things and produced different things. The market prices fluctuated based on supply and demand in ways that players influenced but didn't control. Betrayal was possible and sometimes optimal; co-operation was necessary for the colony's long-term survival. The game was a system for producing meaningful interaction between the humans playing it, not a challenge for any individual human to overcome.
The design philosophy
Dan Bunten — who had not yet transitioned and was working under the name Dan Bunten — articulated a specific design philosophy across interviews and talks in the 1980s and early 1990s: that the most meaningful experiences games could create were social ones, and that single-player games were a compromise forced on designers by the difficulty of gathering multiple players in one place.
This was a deeply unfashionable position. The games industry in 1983–1990 was overwhelmingly oriented toward single-player experiences. Home computers were typically used alone. The arcade's social environment was an exception; the norm was one player, one machine. Bunten spent her entire career arguing against that norm and designing games that required or rewarded multiple humans playing together. Modem Wars (1988) was built specifically around modem-to-modem play — two players, each at their own computer, connected by phone line — years before online gaming was commercially significant.
Seven Cities of Gold and the tension
Seven Cities of Gold (1984) was a different kind of game: a solo exploration simulation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, procedurally generating a new continent for each play. It was one of the best-reviewed games of 1984 and, superficially, contradicted Bunten's stated preference for multiplayer design.
But Bunten's comments about Seven Cities of Gold in later interviews were revealing: she loved the procedural generation and the exploration, but found the historical subject matter increasingly uncomfortable. The game asked players to simulate conquest — to meet indigenous peoples, trade with them, and then enslave or destroy them for gold. This was historically accurate to a point, and deliberately so. Bunten later said she regretted not having engaged more directly with the ethics of what the game was simulating, that she'd been too focused on the mechanics to fully reckon with the history she was representing.
The transition and the retrospective
Dan Bunten Berry transitioned in 1992 and began working and speaking under her chosen name. She continued designing games and gave talks at industry events about game design philosophy. Her public reflections on her own work in the final years of her life — she died of lung cancer in 1998 — are among the most honest and searching pieces of game design criticism ever produced by a practitioner.
She spoke about M.U.L.E. specifically as the game she was most proud of — not for technical reasons but because of what she heard players say about it. M.U.L.E. was the game people told her had brought families together, had given them something to argue and laugh about for hours, had produced memories that lasted decades. She had designed it to be a social catalyst, and it had functioned as one. That seemed to her more important than any single-player achievement she could have designed toward.
Her critique of the single-player focus of most game design was, she said at the end of her life, something she believed more strongly than ever. "No one ever says on their deathbed, 'I wish I'd spent more time alone with my computer.'" She had built her career on that belief, in the face of an industry that consistently disagreed with her, and the games she made are still being played and celebrated twenty-five years after her death.