Mike Musgrove, Post I.T. (Washington Post)

One computer historian joked that the game’s release “set the entire computer industry back two weeks” when it appeared on Arpanet, the U.S. government-designed Internet precursor, about 30 years ago.

That link, by the way, connects to the page of associate English professor Dennis G. Jerz, of Seton Hill University, who published an article last year about Adventure that made a splash on techy sites such as Slashdot.
Jerz, who attended the MITH event, wrote about how the classic game’s
virtual world is actually based on a real cave in Kentucky.

Fraistat said he thinks that virtual worlds will come to be seen as
a type of literature. “Definitely,” he said. “These games are literary
in their founding. The more evocative the text, the more it seems like
a novel you can travel through.”