Dr Richard A. Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having co-written in 1978 the first virtual world, MUD, the progenitor of the £30bn Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game industry. His 1996 Player Types model has seen widespread adoption by MMO developers and the games industry in general. His 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, is the standard text on the subject, and he is an influential writer on all aspects of MMO design and development. In 2010, he was the first recipient of the prestigious Game Developers' Conference Online Game Legend award. https://mud.co.uk
Tim works in academic research and commercial development of Artificial Life (ALife) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, with a particular interest in the foundational issues of true autonomy and open-ended creative evolution. He is also interested in the historical development of these ideas, and has recently written a book on the (very) early history of the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines ("The Spectre of Self-Reproducing Machines: An Early History of Evolving Robots", currently under review with publisher). He holds an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge (specialising in Experimental Psychology), followed by a MSc (with distinction) and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He has held a wide variety of positions in academia and in tech companies, including work on evolutionary techniques in the games industry (MathEngine PLC, Oxford), postdoctoral research on swarm robotics (University of Edinburgh) and co-founder and CTO of a company developing continuous learning AI systems for fund management (Timberpost). He is an elected board member of the International Society for Artificial Life and an associate examiner for the University of London Worldwide.
