The Lantern Hall
Painting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.
TermDigital term1978

Mob

A computer-controlled creature in an online game, especially a hostile one to be fought. Players talk of pulling, killing and farming mobs.

A computer-controlled creature in an online game, especially a hostile one to be fought. Players talk of pulling, killing and farming mobs.

Origin

From mobile object, Richard Bartle's term for self-moving objects in MUD1 (1978); DikuMUD's code later shortened mobile to mob, and the usage passed to EverQuest and beyond.

Quick answers

What does "Mob" mean?
A computer-controlled creature in an online game, especially a hostile one to be fought. Players talk of pulling, killing and farming mobs.
Where does the term "Mob" come from?
From mobile object, Richard Bartle's term for self-moving objects in MUD1 (1978); DikuMUD's code later shortened mobile to mob, and the usage passed to EverQuest and beyond.

Nearby in the archive

Painting: a 1978 university computer room at night, a single glowing text terminal.

MUD1

MUD1978–1999

Two Essex students turned the solitary text adventure into a shared world: MUD, where strangers met, fought and cooperated in real time on the way to Wizard rank, the seed of every online RPG since.

Richard Bartle

Game designerb. 1960

The Essex student who co-wrote MUD1, gave it points, puzzles and the long climb to Wizard, and then spent four decades explaining why people play online worlds, from the Bartle taxonomy to Designing Virtual Worlds.

MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)

Digital genre1978

A text adventure that many people could inhabit at once: typed commands, prose rooms, strangers typing back. The MUD was the first online world and the direct ancestor of every MMORPG.

Painting: a huge raid of adventurers assembling at dawn at the edge of a vast continent, spell-lights and torches.

EverQuest

MMORPG1999

Sony's 3D world of Norrath turned the text MUD into a nightly obsession: camped spawns, corpse runs, forty-player raids, and a player base so hooked it nicknamed the game EverCrack.

Aggro

Digital term

Short for aggravation or aggression: an enemy's hostile attention. Online RPGs track which player each monster most wants to attack, and managing aggro, keeping it on the tank and off the healer, is central to group play. Pulling too much aggro is the classic way to start a wipe.

Respawn

Digital term

The return of a defeated player or monster to the game world after a delay, usually at a set point. Respawning monsters made endless hunting and Grinding possible, and camping respawn points became a notorious online habit.

Mentioned in 3 other exhibits