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The world being simulated typically appears similar to the real world, with real world rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, and communication. Communication has been in the form of text in current examples of an online world. This type of virtual world is now most common in massively multiplayer online games ( The Sims Online, There), particularly massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online or Lineage. The first large scale virtual world was WebWorld, which later evolved into Active Worlds.
One perception of virtual worlds requires a persistent online world, active and available 24 hours a day and seven days a week, to qualify as a true virtual world. Although this is possible with smaller virtual worlds, especially those that are not actually online, no massively multiplayer game runs all day, every day. All the online games listed above include downtime for maintenance that is not included as time passing in the virtual world. While the interaction with other participants is done in real-time, time consistency is not always maintained in online virtual worlds. For example, EverQuest time passes faster than real-time despite using the same calendar and time units to present game time.
Many single player games also exist in a virtual world where the same rules and perception of a graphical reality exist. Many of these allow you to save the current state of this world instance to allow stopping and restarting the virtual world at a later date. (This can be done with some multiplayer environments as well.)
The virtual worlds found in video games are often split into discrete levels.
The earliest virtual worlds were not games. The first virtual worlds presented on the Internet were communities and chat rooms, some of which evolved into MUDThis article is about a type of online computer game. For other uses of the word "mud," see mud In computer gaming, a MUD (multi-user dungeon, dimension, or sometimes domain) is a multi-player computer role-playing game typically running on a bulletin boas and MUSHA MUSH M ulti U ser S hared H abitat, or H allucination) is a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time. MUSH are often used for online social intercourse and role-playing games, although the first forms of MUSes. They attempted to create sets of avatars for virtual interaction. Community virtual worlds allowed access to the environment and encouraged creating buildings, art, and structures (and many did not include avatars).
One of the early prototyptes was WorldsAway , a prototype interactive community featuring a virtual world by CompuServeCompuServe was a major online service during the 1980s and 1990s before it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online. One of the "big three" US based services, both The Source and GEnie were squeezed out of the market because called Dreamscape and avatarSee Avatar (disambiguation) for other meanings. In Hinduism, an Avatar is defined as the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of an Immortal Being, or of the Ultimate Being. It derives from the Sanskrit word "Avatara" which means "descent" and usually implis representing the participants.