Welcome to the wild side of cyberspace culture, where magic is real and identity is a fluid.
MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeons--imaginary worlds in computer databases where people use
words and programming languages to improvise melodramas, build worlds and all the objects
in them, solve puzzles, invent amusements and tools, compete for prestige and power, gain
wisdom, seek revenge, indulge greed and lust and violent impulses. You can find disembodied
sex in some MUDs. In the right kind of MUD, you can even kill--or die.
It all started on a computer in a university in England in 1980. By July 1992, there were more
than 170 different multi-user games on Internet, using nineteen different world-building
languages. The most popular worlds have thousands of users. Richard Bartle, one of the fathers
of MUDding, estimated one hundred thousand past and present MUDders worldwide by 1992. MUD
researcher Pavel Curtis estimates twenty thousand active MUDders in 1992. The MUDding
population now is far smaller than the populations of other parts of the Net, but it is
growing fast, and spawning new forms at an impressive rate.
MUDs are living laboratories for studying the first-level impacts of virtual communities--
the impacts on our psyches, on our thoughts and feelings as individuals. And our attempts
to analyze the second-level impacts of phenomena like MUDs on our real-life relationships
and communities lead to fundamental questions about social values in an age when so many of
our human relationships are mediated by communications technology.
"What is the matter with these people?" is a question that many people ask when they first
learn about MUDding. "Don't they have lives?" This is the most serious question that emerges
from the early history of the medium--is this a dangerous form of addiction? The strongest
case for the possibility that CMC might present grave social dangers as well as opportunities
stems from the documented instances of MUDders who spend most of their waking lives in
their alternate worlds. The question of communication addiction isn't as simple as it
seems at first. One of my guides to the MUD universe, herself a student of the phenomenon,
is Amy Bruckman of MIT's Media Lab. She put it this way: "How do we feel about tens of
thousands of college students spending their time and government-sponsored resources to
chase virtual dragons? To answer this question, you have to dive in and explore assumptions
about what is a meaningful way to spend one's time. What are the value judgments
implicit in various answers to that question?"
First, it is necessary to look at the fascination, the allure, the reasons why people use
the medium so enthusiastically, even obsessively. What are the unique features of this medium
that appeal to people psychologically, and what does that say about people's psychological
needs? I believe the answer lies in the changing notions of identity that were precipitated
by previous communications media. Some people are primed for the kind of communication
saturation that MUDs offer because of the communication-saturated environments that have
occupied their attention since birth.
MUDs are part of the latest phase in a long sequence
of mental changes brought about by the invention and widespread use of symbolic tools.
Previous communications media dissolved ancient barriers of time and space that had separated
people, and in the process changed the way people thought; first, alphabetic language and
then printing technology created a kind of community memory, a stored groupmind accessible
to many, not just to the bards and priests who had been the keepers of collective knowledge
in the era of oral cultures. The nature of the individual psyche changed when it became
possible for so many people outside the priesthood to take advantage of the collected
knowledge of the culture. Literate people think differently from people in nonliterate
or postliterate cultures, and they think of themselves differently. The telegraph,
telephone, radio, and television, as Marshall McLuhan
pointed out, turned everywhere
and every time into here and now. An ordinary person today with a coin and access to a
telephone booth commands powers over time and space that the potentates of antiquity never
dared covet. People who routinely accept such power as part of their reality think of
themselves in a certain way. Like previous historical changes, such as the transformation
from people who thought of themselves as subjects of royalty to people who thought of
themselves as citizens of democracy, this one has started at the fringes and is working
its way toward the center.
Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space,
the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of
identity as well.
One of the things that we "McLuhan's children" around the world
who grew up with television and direct-dialing seem to be doing with our time, via
Minitel in Paris and commercial computer chat services in Japan, England, and the United
States, as well as intercontinental Internet zones like MUDs, is pretending to be
somebody else, or even pretending to be several different people at the same time.
I know a respectable computer scientist who spends hours as an imaginary ensign aboard a
virtual starship full of other real people around the world who pretend they are
characters in a Star Trek adventure. I have three or four personae myself, in different
virtual communities around the Net. I know a person who spends hours of his day as a
fantasy character who resembles "a cross between Thorin Oakenshield and the
Little Prince," and is an architect and educator and bit of a magician aboard an
imaginary space colony: By day, David is an energy economist in Boulder, Colorado,
father of three; at night, he's Spark of Cyberion City--a place where I'm known only
as Pollenator.
Some people seem to use these depersonalized modes of communication to get very
personal with each other. For these people, at the right times, CMC is a way to connect
with another human being. But the authenticity of human relationships is always in
question in cyberspace, because of the masking and distancing of the medium, in a way
that it is not in question in real life. Masks and self-disclosures are part of the
grammar of cyberspace, the way quick cuts and intense images are part of the grammar
of television. The grammar of CMC media involves a syntax of identity play: new
identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available
in different manifestations of the medium.
Once inside a MUD, you can be a man or a woman or something else entirely. You can be a
hive identity. The Net that to others represents access to the Library of Congress or
political debates or scientific data or idle chat is, to MUDders, just the road they have
to travel to get to the virtual places where their other identities dwell.
Identity is the first thing you create in a MUD. You have to decide the name of your
alternate identity--what MUDders call your character. And you have to describe who
this character is, for the benefit of the other people who inhabit the same MUD. By
creating your identity, you help create a world. Your character's role and the roles
of the others who play with you are part of the architecture of belief that upholds for
everybody in the MUD the illusion of being a wizard in a castle or a navigator aboard
a starship:
the roles give people new stages on which to exercise new identities, and
their new identities affirm the reality of the scenario.
In MUDs, as in the WELL, participants can communicate with each other through a number of
public and private channels: MUD dwellers can send each other private e-mail that is stored
in the recipients electronic mailbox to be read and replied to at the recipient's leisure;
they can page each other in different parts of the MUD with person-to-person chat, like a
person-to-person telephone call; they can "say," "whisper," and "pose" to anybody else
in the same room--a form of group chat that uses the boundaries of metaphorical rooms as
social boundaries; they can turn on or off special-interest CB channels for other
semipublic conversations across different parts of the MUD that take place while you
are talking and emoting in a specific place. It's
dizzying at first, like learning a
new kind of communication gymnastics.
The use of poses as well as words to convey meaning gives MUDs an odd but definitely
useful kind of disembodied body language. Posing (also known as emoting) can be used
in polite, informal conversation, in more structured discourse, and in that radically
informal behavior known as tinysex. If you are a character named "hivemind," and you
give the command "emote leaps onstage," everybody else in the same room sees the message
"hivemind leaps onstage" on their computer screens.
It adds a new dimension to your
communications.
Instead of replying to a statement, you can smirk. Instead of leaving
the room, you can disappear in a cloud of iridescent, bubble-gum-flavored bubbles.
Emoting seems awkward and artificial at first, but once you get the hang of it, poses
give you some added control over the atmosphere in which a conversation takes place--a
taste of the all-important context that is often missing from words alone.
A MUD is communications soup in real time, with a flavor of improvisatory theater.
Unlike computer conferencing systems or bulletin boards, people's social interactions
are in different varieties of real-time chat mode, not the kind of bulletin-board style
communication you can find on BBSs or places like the WELL. MUDs are very much about
who is in the place at the same time and how they interact. It's more of a hangout
than a publication, more like a game board than a bulletin board.
In MUDs, however, unlike computer conferencing systems or ordinary chat services,
participants also create objects with powers, such as magic carpets that transport
their owners to secret parts of the kingdom. Other participants can buy or steal
those carpets; people can gain power to make even more useful carpets, but only
after amassing sufficient knowledge of the MUDs' lore as well as formal mastery of
the MUDs' world-building languages and meeting certain challenges. There are quests
and trials by fire. In some worlds, the only way to gain the most potent secrets on
the road to extraordinary powers is to kill another character or cast a crippling spell.
In other worlds, a majority of the other MUDders have to agree that you have built
something worth keeping for public use before you can gain wizard powers.
There are worlds where you have to look out for a dagger in the back, and worlds in which
building something together rather than dueling to the death is the acceptable mode of
discourse. Gaining the power to modify the environment in which the game takes place
is a primary goal for newcomers in both the "adventure" and "social" MUDs. When you
log off the WELL, all you leave are the words you have posted. When you log off a MUD,
many of the dwellings you have built, the cities you have constructed, the tools and
toys and weapons you have created, can be explored or used by other people.
The communities that have arisen in MUDworlds are distinctly different from places like
the WELL or the vast electronic chatauqua of Usenet or the innumerable town halls and
pool parlors of small BBSs. In a MUD, you are communicating with other people elsewhere
on the Net, via your characters, but
you are also playing a role and
learning your way
around a world where knowledge of how that world works can translate into power over
the other inhabitants.
People who have traded enough hours of their lives to become
"wizzes" (the informal, gender-neutral term for wizards, MUD experts who have earned
special powers), for example, can gain the power of invisibility, which gives them the
ability to spy on other conversations. One notorious trick in less reputable corners
of the MUD universe is to talk somebody into going into a dark corner of a MUD for
some tinysex--dirty talking via computer screen, within character for the MUD,
along with explicit posing--a dark corner where some invisible wizzes are hiding.
The misuse of wiz-level "snoop" powers is a recurrent theme of debate in the parts
of Usenet where MUDders debate.
Net.sleazing, as the practice of aggressively soliciting mutual narrative stimulation
is known, is an unsavory but perennially popular behavior in MUDland. Possibly the nastiest
trick to pull on a newcomer to MUD culture is to talk him (most MUDders are males,
including many who present themselves as females) into tinysex, which you clandestinely
record in a text file and consequently post to the worldwide Usenet discussion of
MUDlife. It's akin to seducing someone, videotaping the encounter, and putting out
copies for free at the neighborhood video store. There are MUDs in which outright
orgiastic scenarios are the dominant reality. There are MUDs that are as chaste as
classrooms, but sex talk definitely has a place in the MUD universe.
Tinysex, net.sleazing and gender deception are aspects of MUDs and CMC worth examining,
but it's a mistake to stereotype the very broad range of MUD behavior with images of
its most sophomoric elements. It pays to keep in mind that most of the most notorious
offenders are in fact sophomores in colleges in Indianapolis and Helsinki.
The single
largest category of MUDders are college students, age seventeen to twenty-three, and
the particular uses they find for this technology--identity play and sexual innuendo--reflect
the preoccupations of that population.
But not all undergraduate MUDders are immature,
nor are all MUDders undergraduates. For many, a MUD is a place where they feel more
comfortable in some ways than they do in the real world. Here's how Amy Bruckman
describes the place she likes to spend her time:
It is 3:30 a.m. EST, and I am talking to my friend Tao in my quarters aboard the
Federation Starship the USS Yorktown. Actually, I am in Massachusetts and Tao is
in South Carolina. We are logged onto a Multi-User Simulation Environment (MUSE) based on
a Star Trek theme. At this moment, there are thirty-six people logged on from all over the
world. My character name is Mara. Anything I say or do is seen by Tao, since he is in the
same room; anything which is announced is seen by all thirty-six people logged on. Our
private conversation--about gender roles and the ways female characters are swarmed with
attention--is interwoven with a public conversation filled with computational puns and Star
Trek references.
Amy is describing an intellectual, ironic, media-savvy place, where multileveled metaphors,
puns, wordplay, and clever programming are the coin of the realm. Trek-MUSE is modeled on
the roles played in the television series "Star Trek--The Next Generation." By contrast,
if you entered the original MUD1, created in 1979 and 1980 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard
Bartle, then students at the University of Essex, England, this is what you would see:
You are stood on a narrow road between The Land and whence you came. To the north and south
are the small foothills of a pair of majestic mountains, with a large wall running round.
To the west the road continues, where in the distance you can see a thatched cottage
opposite an ancient cemetery. The way out is to the east, where a shroud of mist covers
the secret pass by which you entered The Land.
The Land is a place where cunning can be essential to life, and the friendship of a
wizard a shortcut to prosperity. It's a place where your character can lose its life
if you aren't careful where you tell it to go. You'll need a shield and a sword if you
want to last long, and if you happen upon an object or being, you better think twice about
what you intend to do with it.
By typing commands, traveling around, getting bearings, gaining knowledge, making
friends, and demonstrating your own contributions to the collective enterprise,
you can gain enough knowledge and power from your wanderings in a MUD to be able
to build additions to the fantasy world yourself and make life interesting for the
people who come to play there. The wizzes are only the junior grade of the MUD
illuminati. The people who attain the senior grade of MUD freemasonry by starting their
own MUD, with all due hubris, are known as gods. Wizzes make life interesting for
players, and gods are the ultimate arbiters.
But to the hardest-core MUDders, the traditional online epithet "Get a life" is more
the issue. When you are putting in seventy or eighty hours a week on your fantasy
character, you don't have much time left for a healthy social life. If you are a
college student, as the majority of MUDders are, MUDding for seventy hours a week
can be as destructive to the course of your life as chemical dependency. Computer
scientist Pavel Curtis created an experimental MUD, LambdaMOO, on his workstation at
Xerox Corporation's renowned Palo Alto Research Center. At a panel discussion in Berkeley,
California, Curtis had this to say about the addictive potential of MUDding:
I am concerned about the degree to which people find virtual communities enchanting.
We have people who use LambdaMOO who are
not in control of their usage who are, I believe, seriously and clinically addicted. . . .
These people aren't addicted to playing video games. It wouldn't do the same thing for them.
They're communication addicted. They're addicted to being able to go out and find people
twenty-four hours a day and have interesting conversations with them. We're talking about
people who spend up to seventy hours a week connected and active on a MUD. Seventy hours
a week, while they're trying to put themselves through school at Cambridge. I'm talking
about a fellow who's supposed to be at home in Cambridge to see his family for the holidays,
missed his train by five hours, phoned his parents, lied about why he was late, got on the
next train, got home at 12:30 in the morning, didn't go home, went to a terminal room at
Cambridge University and MUDded for another two hours. He arrived home at 2:30 in the
morning to find the police and some panicked parents, and then began to wonder if maybe
he wasn't in control.
These are very enticing places for a segment of the community. And it's not like the
kinds of addictions that we've dealt with as a society in the past. If they're out
of control, I think that's a problem. But if someone is spending a large portion of
their time being social with people who live thousands of miles away, you can't say
that they've turned inward. They aren't shunning society. They're actively seeking it.
They're probably doing it more actively than anyone around them. It's a whole new
ballgame. That's what I'm saying about virtual societies.
Amy Bruckman used the rich social worlds she discovered in her favorite MUDs as the
subject of her MIT graduate studies of the psychological and social significance of
MUD culture. In 1992, Bruckman wrote about MUDs as "Identity Workshops." In 1993, she
instigated the creation of MediaMOO
, the Media Lab's version of a MUD--one designed to
become a serious adjunct to scientific conferences. Bruckman's 1992 study dealt with the
question of what it was about the MUDs that addicts people. Like Pavel Curtis, Amy
Bruckman touched on the problems of judging hastily whether prolonged MUDding is good
or bad for a particular person in a particular situation. In her paper, Bruckman cites
the case of a MUDder of her acquaintance who managed to maintain a B average as an
undergraduate, hold down a part-time job, and still find time to MUD for seventy hours
a week or more. This person met his responsibilities in life, so whose cultural police
are going to tell him he's an addict who needs help?
One of Bruckman's mentors, MIT professor Dr. Sherry Turkle,
wrote something about the
behavior of young, compulsive computer programmers that seems to offer a key to
understanding MUDding's addictive potential. Turkle focused on the notion of
mastery as a crucial missing element in the lives of some of these young people:
The issue of mastery has an important role in the development of each individual. For the
developing child, there is a point, usually at the start of the school years, when mastery
takes on a privileged, central role. It becomes the key to autonomy, to the growth of
confidence in one's ability to move beyond the world of parents to the world of peers.
Later, when adolescence begins, with new sexual pressures and new social demands from
peers and parents, mastery can provide respite. The safe microworlds the child master
has built--the microworlds of sports, chess, cars, literature, or mathematical
expertise--can become places of escape. Most children use these platforms from which to
test the difficult waters of adolescence. They move out at their own pace. But for some
the issues that arise during adolescence are so threatening that the safe place is never
abandoned. Sexuality is too threatening to be embraced. Intimacy with other people is
unpredictable to the point of being intolerable. As we grow up, we forge our identities
by building on the last place in psychological development where we felt safe.
As a result, many people come to define themselves in terms of competence, in terms of
what they can control.
Pride in one's ability to master a medium is a positive thing. But if the sense of
self becomes defined in terms of those things over which one can exert perfect control,
the world of safe things becomes severely limited--because those things tend to be
things, not people. Mastery can cease to be a growing force in individual development
and take on another face. It becomes a way of masking fears about the self and the
complexities of the world beyond. People can become trapped.
Knowledge of MUDlore and skill at communicating with people to help you achieve your ends,
and the ability to create places and puzzles for others to explore, are a form of mastery,
a way for people who might lack social status in their real-world community to gain
status through their MUD skills in their alternate community.
For people whose lives
are controlled by parents or professors or bosses, there is a certain attraction to a
world in which mastery and the admiration of peers is available to anyone with
imagination and intellectual curiosity.
In one family I met in a MUD, the father tutors his kids in programming, science,
and the sheer art of having literate fantasies. In fact, the education these
children are getting is taking place in small part in Cyberion City, a special
MUD where such educational experiments are encouraged. For this family, is MUDding
an addiction or a model of the way education ought to take place? This question can
be generalized to the use of other CMC media in other social contexts. You have to
examine the way a person uses the medium, and the way that use of the technology
affects the person's behavior, thoughts, and relationships with other people,
before you can begin to determine whether an eighty-hour-a-week MUDder is an
addict or a virtuoso.
You can have different identities in several different kinds of places. I am
represented by a character known as Pollenator in Cyberion City and Funhead
in WELLMUSE. When I use the "look" command to examine Spark in Cyberion City,
his identity description informs me of his resemblance to Thorin Oakenshield:
look Spark
You see a cross between Thorin Oakenshield and the Little Prince. Always smiling and whistling. Mostly tunes that are 600 years old by now.
Carrying:
Spark's hoverboard (#41221vI)
The Enlightened Creator (#1255v)
mg
flame
apple
Looking at any of the objects that Spark carries would reveal further descriptions,
perhaps even instructions on how to use them.
In MUDworlds, description is the same as
creation. MUDs are evidence that text still has its powers, even in this highly visual
era.
When you weave text into the kind of interactive landscape that computer models
provide, you can build a kind of magic into the environment. Amy Bruckman remembers
that the first object she created in a MUD was a plate of pasta that "squirmed
uneasily" whenever anyone in the room mentioned the word hungry. Even if
Amy's character wasn't there in the MUD at the time, everyone in the room of the
MUD where she left the plate of pasta would see on their screens, on utterance of
the word hungry in public conversation, the message that "the plate of
spaghetti squirms uneasily."
It makes for a very different kind of context for
communication when you have sentient bowls of spaghetti lying around, waiting to
enter the conversation.
Watching other people's reactions to the objects you
create adds to the excitement of MUDding.
The first object I created in a MUD was a magic camera I learned to create in a
self-guided wizardry class in a virtual university within the MUD. I could put
the camera in my room and it would report to me, wherever else I might be wandering,
any activity that took place in my absence. Jetboy in Cyberion City has an antique
phonograph in his parlor; if you invoke the command "play phonograph," thereafter,
every thirty seconds, the name of a new tune from Jetboy's extensive collection of
Hawaiian classics will be announced in the middle of whatever else is happening.
The roots of MUDs are deep in that part of human nature that delights in storytelling
and playing "let's pretend." Brenda Laurel, in Computers As
Theater, claims that
the strong identification players feel with artificial characters in a computer
database is an example of the same human capacity for mimesis to which Aristotle
attributed the soul-changing (and, thus, society-changing) power of drama.
Richard Bartle, cocreator of the first MUD, the first of the MUD gods,
has his own version
of the mimesis theory. In 1990, he wrote:
MUAs [Multi-User Adventures can exert an influence over a large number of these players out
of all proportion to that of either a chatline or game alone. MUAs have an emotional hold
over their players which stems from the players' ability to project themselves onto their
game personae, feeling as if the things which happen to the game personae are happening
directly to the players themselves.
The first MUD was a Multi-User Dungeon, modeled on a Tolkienesque domain of
dwarves and treasure, warriors and wizards, swordplay and magic, known as "the Land."
Second-generation MUDs encompassed different metaphors. And now we have third-, fourth-,
and fifth-generation variants. A MUSE is a Multi-User Simulation Environment,
one of a variety of MUDs in which all players, not just wizards, are granted powers
to shape the environment itself; MUSEcode also conveys the ability to build automata,
computer simulations that can model real phenomena, which has both scientific and
educational implications.
Narrative is the stuff of which MUDworlds are made.
Everyone and everything and every
place has a story. Every object in a MUD, from your character's identity to the chair
your character is sitting in, has a written description that is revealed when you
choose to look at the object. The story is known in MUDspeke as "the description."
If you have the authorization to do so, you could create a small brown mouse or
purple mountain range or whatever else words can describe. Although the MUD worlds
are fantasies, with no more tangible reality than the settings and characters in
a novel or a soap opera, the people I've met in real life who live in MUDlands
testify passionately that the feelings they have about their characters and worlds
are real to them, and often quite intense.
In a conversation with the author in 1992, Richard Bartle said:
Losing your persona in a game is absolutely terrible. It's the worst thing that can happen
to you and people really get put up about it. They usually say they're gutted. "Gutted"
is the word players use because it's about the only one that describes about how awful it
is. It's not as if "Oh dear, I've lost my persona" in the same way you may say "I've lost
my shoe." It's not even "Oh dear, I've lost my persona" in the same way as "I've lost my
pet hamster." It's more as "Oh dear, I've just died. That's me they've just killed!"
It's not "Oh, I've lost all that work and all that time and effort." It's "I've just
died, this is terrible! Oh my God, I'm dead! Empty!"
In some MUDs, you can reincarnate your character; in others, death is irrevocable.
My first adventure in a MUD--actually, in a MUSE--was a space colony/science museum.
I had heard about Cyberion City from a WELLite I had met in a rather serious
business-oriented private conference; he discovered that I was interested in
virtual communities, so he told me in e-mail that there was a place on the Net
where he and his ten-year-old son were helping build a space colony. My friend,
a man I had never met face-to-face, known as Kline in the WELL and Spark in
Cyberion City, told me that some knowledgeable people who had utopian faith in
the potential of cyberspace as an educational medium had chartered a new kind of
computer conferencing system explicitly as a virtual community.
Aslan and Moulton, the first wizards I encountered in a MUD, were the helpful variety
of wiz. It could have been an altogether different experience if I had appeared,
unsponsored, in a hardcore hack-and-slash world, and attracted the attention of a
foul-tempered wiz or god before I could afford a shield. I can see now that I was
lucky to have chosen Cyberion City. This was before Pollenator existed, before I
devoted a moment's thought to the idea of creating the right name for the identity
I was going to assume in a whole new world. I was, as they say in some of the
rougher neighborhoods of the MUD universe, a "clueless newbie," a bit of public-school
jargon that found its way into MUDspeke via the original MUD's British origins.
Moulton, one of the three directors of MicroMUSE, was there to show me around the first
time I arrived at the arrival gate. This is how Cyberion City looked to me, the first
time I visited:
MUDding
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to MicroMUSE! We are hosted at chezmoto.ai.mit.edu, port 4201.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
REMINDER: Read `NEWS' regularly to keep up on changes and additions to the server.
New commands will be listed in `news' with details provided in `help'. For more information,
new players should type: help getting started
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cyberion City Main Transporter Receiving Station
The bright outlines of the Cyberion City Transporter Station slowly come into focus.
You have been beamed up here (at considerable expense) from one of the Earth Transporter
Stations. You are among the adventurous and moderately wealthy few who have decided to
visit (and perhaps dwell) in Cyberion City, the largest space city in the solar system.
You are welcomed by the transporter attendant, who gives directions to all newcomers to
this space city.
Contents:
Attendant
Obvious exits:
Out
Welcome to MicroMUSE, your name is Guest1
attendant says "Welcome, Guest, to Cyberion City."
attendant says "Feel free to contact any Official for
aid."
attendant says "Be sure to use our extensive on-line help command."
attendant says "I hope you enjoy your stay."
The attendant smiles at you.
You step down off of the MTRS platform.
Main Transporter Lobby
This room has high, vaulted ceilings and white walls. The thick, black carpet makes
no sound beneath your feet. You are just inside the Transporter Lobby, where Visitors
arrive from Earth. To one side is an Information Desk. A door leads to the Tours office,
and another leads Out into Cyberion City proper. A Public Relations Dept. Intercom stands
in the center of the floor; type `look Intercom' for instructions.
Contents:
Spark
Spark's helper, the Firefly
koosh
Mymosh
Ramandu
Intercom
TourBot
Obvious exits:
Information Tours Out
Sparks says "Hi!"
You say "Hi"
Spark says "You wouldn't be Howard, would you?"
You say "yep. got here!"
Spark says "All right!"
Spark says "Wait a sec"
You say "Now what?"
Your wrist communicator quietly announces "Take a flight on a Dragon to the fabled planet
of Pernth, home of the DragonRiders of Pern! Dragon flights depart from Section 0--Arc 7
in the Teleportation and Transportation Center. Go there and `beckon dragon' for a free
discovery flight to Pernth."
Spark says "I think Aslan would like to say hi, and he said he has to leave soon."
Aslan has arrived.
While you're not looking, Aslan appears.
Spark says "Would you like to say hello?"
Spark says "Darn wizards:)"
Aslan says "Hello, Howard. Nice to meet you!"
You say "Hello!"
Guest5 has arrived.
Guest5 leaves the Main Transporter Facility.
Guest5 has left.
Aslan says "Perhaps you would prefer a character with a name other than Guest1?"
You say "I gotta think about that. Name is a big thing. Right now, I'm trying to figure out
where I am.;-)"
Aslan says "Okay:)"
Aslan says "Well, I need to run. Glad you could make it, and Spark will show you around, I
guess."
You say "See you later."
Spark says "I'd recommend staying a guest for a bit. For one thing, you're wearing a sign
that says "Be courteous, I'm a guest" "
Aslan waves.
Spark says "Bye!"
While you're not looking, Aslan disappears.
Aslan goes home.
Aslan has left.
Spark waves
You say "What do you mean, "Spark waves?" How do you do that"?
Spark says "If you type a colon instead of a quote, like in that case ":waves," we all see your
character adopt that pose.
:waves
Guest1 waves.
In the snippet of a MicroMUSE session quoted above, you see that the computer announces
whenever someone enters the same space you occupy. Whenever anyone enters or leaves a space,
a message is sent to the screen of everyone whose character is in that space. So it matters
who is in the place you do your talking, and that means you have to look around and see who
is there. Since Cyberion City and the MicroMUSE planets beyond it consist of many hundreds
of interconnected spaces, you can find both highly populated areas (like the main arrival
area) or private areas (like citizens' homes).
When people enter or leave or talk or emote, everyone in the same room knows it. Or if a
magical object in the room or the room itself has been programmed to react to certain words
or behaviors, everybody in the same room knows it. The public announcement that broke into
my conversation with Spark was on the public channel, a kind of systemwide CB. A number
of channels are available, and anyone can create private channels for themselves and
their friends or work groups. You can turn channels on and off, and you can create
private places where you can be sure a conversation isn't overheard--unless a wizard is
"snooping" on you.
It took me hours of wandering around Cyberion City to get an idea of the scope of the place.
As a new citizen, Pollenator, my character, was granted enough credits to buy a dwelling in
one of the housing districts. Moulton, who seemed to be one of the wizzes in charge (except
here they call them citizens, builders, and administrators instead of newbies, wizzes, and
gods), showed me how to issue the commands that would create ("dig") a few rooms for me
to entertain guests and work on projects. There is a set of self-paced tutorials in Cyberion
City University, and an online glossary of commands, but the way you learn, everybody
tells you, is by asking others. The metaphor of this MUD is a learning colony, where
everyone teaches everyone else. Cyberion City's charter warns you when you enter that
there are children there and educators and librarians and people having fun, and anybody
who abuses the rules of polite communication is likely to have his or her character
removed. After the rough-and-tumble of the WELL or Usenet or a serious adventure-style
MUD, it's an altogether different feeling trying to find your way around a new place
where the locals all seem to go out of their way to show you around.
While I was looking around and making myself at home, I met a few other characters. One
friend I've never met in the material world is Eri, a librarian from North Carolina who
has a wicked sense of humor: a sign on the floor of Eri's dwelling in Cyberion City says
"Caution, black hole." If you make the mistake of looking in the black hole, you fall into
the basement, where you discover that the look command only gets you the message
"The basement is dark." Then you try a bunch of commands, and you get the message
"Say the magic word." And if you say "shazam" or "abracadabra," you get the message
"Say the magic word your mommy taught you." When you say "Please," Eri's black hole
lets you back into her living room.
Moulton taught me how to make objects with MUSE code--an enterprise that is frustratingly
arcane to a nonprogrammer like me. Teenage kids looking for something to do with their
curious minds seem to find MUSE code hypnotically fascinating.
One of the great rewards
in a social MUD comes from creating a tool or a toy or a little astonishment that others
want to adopt or buy or copy.
If you are female-presenting, male wizards sometimes give
you power objects that can be very useful in getting from place to place or shielding
yourself from some kinds of attack.
While he showed me how to become one of the world-builders of Cyberion City, I asked
Moulton how he got into the MUSE business. Moulton, also known as Barry Kort, had a
twenty-year career as a network planner for Bell Laboratories, NASA's space station,
and MITRE, a top software think tank. In the late 1980s, Kort felt compelled to do
something about the state of the world. He decided to concentrate on education, an
area where he thought his expertise might help. Science education, in particular,
is something our society needs badly and is sadly lacking. He knew that high-capacity
networking technology, together with a means of making computer models and simulations,
had a tremendous and almost totally unrealized educational potential. He stumbled onto
the MUDs and became convinced that he could transform the MUD technology into something
with greater social value than just a hack-and-slash game. At one of these MUDs he met
Stan Lim, at the time a senior at California State University
accomplished in systems
design. They started planning a new kind of MUD.
Kort retired as a network planner several years ago. He devotes part of his time as a
volunteer at Boston's Computer Museum and the rest of his time to building MicroMUSE,
the computer universe in which Cyberion City is growing (along with other planets
and colonies). He has the use of some computing hardware and Internet connections at
MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory, and an office at the Cambridge computer
consulting firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman--where the first computer networks were
born twenty years ago.
Kort's self-study of educational theory led him to the work of the Swiss educational
psychologist Jean Piaget, who spent decades directly observing how children play. That
people spend so many hours of their lives in MUDs, often neglecting their other duties,
was, to Kort, evidence of the power locked into the medium--just look at the trouble
people take to learn the esoteric MUD codes. Piaget said that children seem to learn
about the world by exploring it and playing with it--that play is a powerful form of
learning--and that by shaping the way the environment invites discovery, people can
design some of this power into traditional curricula. Piagetians believe that children
can gain more understanding in faster time out of the same material if it is presented
as a world to explore rather than as a package of information to be learned by rote.
"I knew that if we could create a suitable play space," Kort told me during one of our
world-building sessions, "children would learn at remarkable rates, and they would learn
a wide range of skills and subject matter." Kort was also interested in community-building.
Education could also be the focus of an online intentional community.
Kort and Lim modeled the organizational charter of MicroMUSE, the simulation environment
in which Cyberion City exists, on Children's Television Workshop
--as a nonprofit,
noncommercial enterprise dedicated to harnessing the inherent educational power of networks.
The charter--required reading for prospective citizens--sets forth a democratic but
definite standard of behavior, and the personal commitment the MicroMUSE architects
brought into the venture set the tone for the new kind of MUD. Instead of battlefields,
there is a science museum where kids can play with computer simulations that teach
scientific principles, a tutored or self-tutored curriculum in MUSEcode at the university,
playgrounds, magical kingdoms, even spaceports where you can embark on spacecraft
bound for other planets in the MUSE.
Cyberion City and the larger MicroMUSE universe grew to more than two thousand registered
citizens from all over the world. Citizens are free without restriction to build one
hundred objects. If they want to build more, they are asked to build something of public
value. The science center, museum, university, shopping mall, entertainment section, rain
forest, Yellowstone Park, and planetarium were built by citizens who became Builders.
The traditional, or adventure, MUDs in their many forms all depend on a structured game in
which a fixed number of "experience" points gain initiation to higher levels of power and
prestige. In the bloodiest of the worlds spawned by MUD1 from University of Essex and its
descendants, beheading new, inexperienced players as a way of gaining experience points is
frowned on but not outlawed. In some worlds, nothing is frowned on. It can be like
participating in a roll-your-own slasher movie.
If MUDs were nothing more than a way of participating in vicarious violence and other
antisocial behavior, the question of how to deal with them on campuses and tax-supported
networks would be easier to answer. But the evolution of MUDs began to branch when people
began exploring less lurid modes of interaction using the same technology. The genre of
social MUDs, where there might or might not be hierarchies of power but where there are
no fixed goals or point systems, and murder is not possible, emerged when James
Aspnes of
Carnegie-Mellon University created TinyMUD
in 1988. It spawned a variety of different worlds
and new MUD languages based on egalitarian and nonviolent values. When every citizen,
not just wizards, gained the power to build the game, and there was no longer a gain
in killing or stealing, a new variety of MUD enthusiast emerged.
In response to a question from Amy Bruckman about where these ideals came from
--deliberate design on his part, or from the members of the first TinyMUD
community?--Aspnes offered a revealing reply:
Most adventure-style games and earlier MUDs had some sort of scoring system which translated
into rank and often special privileges; I didn't want such a system not because of any strong
egalitarian ideals (although
I think that there are good egalitarian arguments against it) but because I wanted the game
to be open-ended, and any scoring system would have the problem that eventually each player
would hit the maximum rank or level of advancement and have to either abandon the game as
finished or come up with new reasons to play it. This approach attracted people who liked
everybody being equal and drove away people who didn't like a game where you didn't score
points and beat out other players (I did put in a "score" command early on since almost everybody
tried it, but most players soon realized that it was a joke). I think that this effect created
a kind of natural selection which eventually led to the current egalitarian ideals. I like the
egalitarianism, but it wasn't my original goal.
Bruckman treated Aspnes's reply as "a confirmation of Langdon Winner's assertion that
artifacts have politics. The change in the software encouraged different styles of
interaction, and attracted a different type of person. The ethics of the community
emerged. The design of the software was a strong factor in shaping what emerged."
Richard Bartle doesn't have a lot to say about the use of MUDs as social tools, but he
has strong opinions about MUDs as games. In conversation with the author, he emphasized
repeatedly that the real juice of MUDding as he first conceived it is removed if you remove
the possibility that a character will die. People might use it as a social toy or a theatrical
device, but in Bartle's opinion, it isn't a game if you can't die. The evolution of
MUDs forked into two paths over the issue, and each fork--the adventure and the social
varieties of MUD--can be expected to develop further.
***
Dark Side
When you are not just communicating, but building virtual objects in virtual buildings in virtual
kingdoms, you are also taking up much more space in a computer database.
MUDs bring two things
to the computers that host them--increased telecommunications traffic from everywhere and
increased use of computer memory. One of the most famous of the nonviolent MUDs, Islandia, a
TinyMUD at the University of California at Berkeley, grew to more than 3,000 players, of which
more than 1,500 were active, and the database had expanded to 14,900 rooms.
The combination of
the potential for addiction and the drain on local computer system resources led to a ban on
MUDding at Amherst University in 1992.
The increase in telecommunications traffic was the
official reason for the Australian ban on MUDS. The Australian regional network that connects
to Internet must use a satellite to move information to backbone sites on other continents;
NASA, which pays half the bill, asked the Australian network to find ways to cut back on
the growth of traffic. MUDs were an extremely low priority on the network administration's
list of "acceptable uses" for Internet.
Gender
The prevalence of
gender play in MUDs
is one factor that leads more traditionally minded
authorities to discourage MUDding on campus computers. Gender deception and the presence
of impostors is nothing new in cyberspace. Richard Bartle told me the tale of "Sue," who
had captivated so many minds and hearts in the first MUD, in the early 1980s:
Sue lived in South Wales, which is some distance away from the rest of the MUD-playing community,
long phone calls away. And Sue got all the way up to game administrator level, "Arch Witch." She
used to write letters to everybody, great long old-fashioned letters on paper. She enclosed
photographs. She's quite good-looking. As far as we were concerned, Sue was a female. One of
our other wizzes fell quite heavily in love with Sue and sent photographs and gifts and so on,
flowers, and he even proposed marriage. Then Sue started behaving out of character. And all of
a sudden Sue said she was going to Sweden to be an au pair and that was that. We never heard
any more, so we thought something seemed suspicious here.
So a group of the wizzies put together facts from Sue's letters, like her father ran some kind
of a factory and you know she lives in South Wales and we've got the address that we write
to, and went around--I wasn't there--but they went around to see Sue, knocked on the door,
this woman opens the door. "Hello, we've come to see Sue." The woman says, "I think you better
come in. Unfortunately, Sue's name is Steve and he's been arrested for defrauding the
Department of Transport. He's presently in prison. I'm his wife."
The possibility of an electronic impostor invading people's most intimate lives is inherent
in the technology. More than a few people out there want to be impostors. If you count the
messageries rose in Paris, along with the electronic chat services and BBS worldwide,
the population of online gender-switchers numbers in the hundreds of thousands. A very few
can carry their deceptions far enough to turn an entire virtual community inside out.
"The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover," by
Lindsy Van Gelder, a cautionary tale for all
who venture into virtual communities, was published in Ms. magazine in October
1985--when the WELL was six months old.
Van Gelder had been exploring the worlds of online communications, and happened upon
the CB channel on CompuServe. CompuServe is a national commercial information service
that provides access to electronic mail, conferences, and a chat service modeled on the
audio citizens' band radio channels of the 1970s. In 1985, CompuServe already had more
than one hundred thousand subscribers--at prices three to five times higher than what
the WELL was charging. One CB regular Van Gelder met, Joan, was a celebrity on CompuServe.
After Van Gelder encountered Joan in a wide-open, public chat session, she engaged her in
private chat. She learned that Joan was a neuropsychologist, in her late twenties,
living in New York, who had been disfigured, crippled, and left mute by an automobile
accident at the hands of a drunken driver. Joan's mentor had given her a computer,
modem, and subscription to CompuServe, where Joan instantly blossomed.
Not only was Joan a source of wit and warmth to the hundreds of people who participated
in CompuServe CB in the late 1980s, Van Gelder reported, quoting many of Joan's friends,
she had a kind of online charisma. Joan connected with people in a special way, achieved
intimacy rapidly, and gave much valuable advice and support to many others, especially
disabled women. She changed people's lives. So it was a shock to the CB community when
Joan was unmasked as someone who in real life, IRL, was neither disabled, disfigured,
mute, nor female.
Joan was a New York psychiatrist, Alex, who had become obsessed with
his own experiments in being treated as a female and participating in female friendships.
The sense of outrage that followed the revelation of Joan's identity came first from the
direct assault on personal relationships between Joan and others, friendships that had
achieved deep intimacy based on utter deception. But the indirect assault on the sense
of trust essential to any group that thinks of itself as a community, was another betrayal.
Van Gelder put it this way: "Even those who barely knew Joan felt implicated--and somehow
betrayed--by Alex's deception. Many of us online believe that we're a utopian community of
the future, and Alex's experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against
deceit. We lost our innocence, if not our faith." Van Gelder quoted another woman, one of
Joan's best friends, who agreed to the interview only because "although I think this is a
wonderful medium, it's a dangerous one, and it poses more danger to women than men. Men
in this society are more predisposed to pulling these kinds of con games, and women are
predisposed to giving people the benefit of the doubt."
Personally, I think the fundamental understanding that CMC is "no shield against deceit"
is a necessary immunization for the larger, uninitiated populations who are homesteading
cyberspace today. The presence of skilled imposters in every virtual community is information
that must disseminate formally and informally before the online population can develop a
collective immune system to identity predation. People who join virtual communities today
are rarely given any set of formal rules for the finer points of online relationships--like
the possibility of identity deception. The best response from the online world would be to
formulate norms and spread them around so that newcomers can be aware of the darker
possibilities of making friends you can't see.
Although the technology of CMC provides the instrument of deception, the special
importance we place on gender roles and the prevalence of swindlers in a population
are both rooted in social questions that extend far beyond the technology that brings
them into focus. The opportunity for deception, however, is designed into the medium.
Cyberspace explorers ignore that fact at their peril.
Nearly a decade has passed since Van Gelder's article, and more than a decade has
passed since Sue of MUD1, and gender deception occurs often enough in MUDS that
female-presenting characters usually are assumed to be lying until they can prove
otherwise. Pavel Curtis made his own educated guess, in a 1992 paper, about the
reasons for the persistence of gender-switching in MUDS:
It appears that the great majority of players are male and the vast majority of them choose
to present themselves as such. Some males, however, taking advantages of the relative
rarity of females in MUDs, present themselves as female and thus stand out to some degree.
Some use this distinction just for the fun of deceiving others, some of these going so far
as to try to entice male-presenting players into sexually-explicit discussions and
interactions. This is such a widely-noticed phenomenon, in fact, that one is advised by
the common wisdom to assume that any flirtatious female-presenting players are, in real
life, males. Such players are often subject to ostracism based on this assumption.
Some MUD players have suggested to me that such transvestite flirts are perhaps acting
out their own (latent or otherwise) homosexual urges or fantasies, taking advantage of
the perfect safety of the MUD situation to see how it feels to approach other men. While
I have had no personal experience talking to such players, let alone the opportunity to
delve into their motivations, the idea strikes me as plausible given the other ways in
which MUD anonymity seems to free people from their inhibitions.
Other males present themselves as female more out of curiosity than as an attempt at
deception; to some degree, they are interested in seeing "how the other half lives,"
what it feels like to be perceived as female in a community. From what I can tell,
they can be quite successful at this.
Female-presenting players have told me that they are frequently subject both to
harassment and to special treatment. One reported seeing two
newcomers arrive at the same time, one male-presenting and one femalepresenting. The other
players in the room struck up conversations with the putative female and offered to show her
around but completely ignored the putative male, who was left to his own devices. In addition,
probably due mostly to the number of female-presenting males one hears about, many female
players report that they are frequently (and sometimes quite aggressively) challenged to
"prove" that they are, in fact, female. To the best of my knowledge, male-presenting
players are rarely if ever so challenged.
True-life romances, sometimes at the intercontinental level, are no rarity in
MUDding circles. Even online marriages, with or without corresponding corporeal
ceremonies, are nothing new. There are people in different parts of the world who
are married to each other today because they met and fell in love in a MUD before
they met face-to-face.
The technology that can serve to deceive can also serve to connect.
Why do people pretend they are characters in a television program? Perhaps the most well
known "fan culture" in the material world is the international, intergenerational cult of
Star Trek enthusiasts--"trekkies." They have newsletters and fanzines and conventions.
They were even mocked on "Saturday Night Live" when William Shatner, the actor who played
Captain Kirk of the original Starship Enterprise, told an audience of Trekkies at
a fictional convention to "get a life."
One honest answer to the question "Don't these people have lives?" is that
most people
don't have a terribly glamorous life.
They work, they subsist, they are lonely or afraid
or shy or unattractive or feel that they are unattractive. Or they are simply different.
The phenomenon of fandom is evidence that not everyone can have a life as "having a life"
is defined by the mainstream, and some people just go out and try to build an alternate
life. In the Deadhead freemasonry, this failure to conform to normal cultural expectations
is embraced in a similar way as "misfit power." By what criteria does one judge whether a
fan culture is constructive community-building or pathological escapism, and who does the
judging? These questions are the subject of lively debate among students of a discipline
known as reader-response theory.
Amy Bruckman pointed me to the phenomenon of fan culture when I was looking for
reasons that so many people are attracted to MUDding, some of them obsessively so. In her
master's thesis, "Identity Workshops," Bruckman cites the work of Henry Jenkins,
a student
of fan culture, as one key to understanding hard-core MUD culture and its appeal today:
Why are these fictional worlds so popular? Fans of Star Trek attend conventions, write
stories and novels, make videos, and write folk songs about the Star Trek world. In
Textual Poachers, Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins analyzes
fan culture with an emphasis on fan reading and writing practices. Like MUDs, the world of
fandom is an alternative reality that many participants find more compelling than their
mundane lives. The conclusion of Textual Poachers is called "`In My Weekend-Only
World . . .': Reconsidering Fandom," and begins with this epigraph from a fan writer:
In these warm convention halls
In an hour of make-believe
In these warm convention halls
My mind is free to think
And feels so deeply
An intimacy never found
Inside their silent walls
In a year or more
Of what they call reality.
In my weekend-only world,
That they call make-believe,
Are those who share
The visions that I see.
In their real-time life
That they tell me is real,
The things they care about
Aren't real to me.
Jenkins writes about the fan folk song "Weekend-Only World" that it "expresses the fans'
recognition that fandom offers not so much an escape from reality as an alternative reality
whose values may be more humane and democratic than those held by mundane society." The
author of the song "gains power and identity from the time she spends within fan culture;
fandom allows her to maintain her sanity in the face of the indignity and alienation of
everyday life."
"Jenkins' claims here are strong," Bruckman points out, "and I do not know whether
they are true for fandom or whether they translate to the world of MUDding. However,
it is important to recognize that when one makes statements about what is a constructive
use of another person's time, one is making a value judgment. Such judgments often
masquerade as `taste,' and their political and ethical nature can be obscured."
Another way of saying this is that many of the highbrows of Elizabethan England
would have died laughing if they knew that vulgar, nerdy Shakespeare would be
remembered as great literature centuries later; who is to say MUDs and other
alien suburbs of fandom are not as legitimate as Elizabethan theater?
We remember
Shakespeare because of the quality of his insight and his use of English, not
because his contemporaries considered him to be a "great artist" or "in good taste."
Another social commentator, looking more broadly at the way communication technologies
have been changing human psychology, uses the term "technologies of social saturation"
as a kind of media-driven change in the pace of our interpersonal lives.
Kenneth J. Gergen,
in The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life,
makes a case that
modern communication media expose the average person to the "opinions, values, and
lifestyles of others." It is self-evident that many of us communicate with many more
people every day, via telephone, fax, and e-mail, than our great-grandparents
communicated with in a month, year, or lifetime. According to Gergen, social saturation
is an effect of internalizing parts of more people than any humans have ever
internalized before. Our selves have become "populated" by many others, Gergen claims.
I didn't know whether Kenneth Gergen ever heard of MUDs, but one passage he wrote stood
out as another clue to what MUDs might be reflecting about changes in human personality:
In the process of social saturation the numbers, varieties, and intensities of relationship
increasingly crowd the days. A full appreciation of the magnitude of cultural change, and
its probable intensification in future decades, requires that one focus first on the
technological context. For in large measure, an array of technological innovations has
led us to an enormous proliferation of relationships. . . .
In an important sense, as social saturation proceeds we become pastiches, imitative
assemblages of each other. In memory we carry others' patterns of being with us. If
the conditions are favorable, we can place these patterns into action. Each of us
becomes the other, a representative, or a replacement. To put it more broadly, as
the century has progressed selves have become increasingly populated with the character
of others. We are not one, or a few, but like Walt Whitman, we "contain multitudes."
We appear to each other as single identities, unified, of whole cloth. However, with
social saturation, each of us comes to harbor a vast population of hidden potentials--
to be a blues singer, a gypsy, an aristocrat, a criminal. All the selves lie latent,
and under the right conditions may spring to life.
In MUDs, those latent selves are liberated by technology. And boy, do they "spring to life."
Extrapolating the future of MUDs from today's applications of the technology is hazardous
business because the medium is in such creative flux. The social and adventure MUDs are
the ancestor species. Nobody can predict what variations and mutations of this technology
will emerge downstream a few generations hence.
In the summer of 1992, Xerox PARC, where Pavel Curtis initiated the LambdaMOO experiment,
began the Jupiter project--a multimedia, eventually intercontinental MUD,
meant to be a
working tool for designers of virtual workplaces of the future.
Curtis is currently involved in adapting the LambdaMOO server for use as an international
teleconferencing and image database system for astronomers. This would enable scientists
to give online presentations to their colleagues around the world, complete with slides
and illustrations automatically displayed on the participants' workstations. "The same
approach could be used to create on-line meeting places for workers in other disciplines,
as well as for other non-scientific communities," wrote Curtis. "I do not believe that
we are the only researchers planning such facilities. In the near future (a few years at
most), I expect such specialized virtual realities to be commonplace, an accepted part
of at least the academic community."
Another idea guiding research at PARC is to use virtual reality to help break down the
geographical barriers of a large building, of people increasingly working from their
homes, by adding digital voice to MUDs. When two people are in the same virtual room,
their audio channels are connected.
Video Link
Xerox PARC, where personal computers and local networks were invented in the 1970s,
has a sister research facility in Cambridge, England, that fits into this grand scheme
for a future virtual multimedia office linking Xerox researchers worldwide. When I
visited EuroPARC in Cambridge in 1992, I got a taste of what it's like to extend the
networld into the video range. My guide for the day, Paul Dourish, a computer scientist
from Scotland, is a Deadhead Nethead, so we had two overlapping freemasonries to
chat about while I acclimated myself to what was happening. In his office, Paul sat
in front of a large screen, with several windows open to documents and to the Net.
And to his left of that large screen was another screen, only slightly smaller,
that showed a video image. At the moment we came in, it showed the image of the
laboratory's common room, one floor below ours. Above the video monitor was a camera
lens.
About a minute into my conversation with Dourish, we heard a squeaking sound, like a
very old wooden door creaking open. He explained that it was the most commonly used of
a number of sounds EuroPARC researchers had available to signal that somebody was peeking
at them.
"It's important to put something as invasive as a video technology in your office under
social control," Dourish explained, calling up a menu of communications options on his
computer display. I saw a list of people. There were little checks next to some of the
names.
"I can select, from the roster of people who have technical access, which people I give
permission to peek at me," Dourish continued. "Peeking" means that the authorized person
can look into your office, with your permission, at will, for a two-second glance. It's
the equivalent of peeking into your open office door to see if you are occupied or open
for conversation. He showed me the menu where he chose the squeaky door as a means of
reminding him that somebody was peeking. And he showed me the ultimate social control
of the technology on the corner of his desk--a lens cap.
The next time the camera squeaked at us, Dourish looked over at the monitor below the
camera and started talking to it. The scene on his video monitor switched from a long
shot of the common room to a close-up of a young woman. They talked about a document
they were working on. While they talked, they also looked at the document on their
computer screens. Paul introduced me. I looked at the video camera and smiled and
said hello. I could see her face as I was talking to her. Their conversation about
a certain paragraph in their document took about thirty seconds. Then they signed
off and Paul turned back to me. The scene on his video monitor went back to the
common room.
Every ten minutes, there was another sound, a clicking sound like a camera shutter.
That was the slo-scan camera that transmitted a still image across the Atlantic Ocean
and the North American continent to the sister Xerox laboratory in Palo Alto. These
still images were the first stage in what would ultimately be a full video link.
The idea of the common room changes when you know who is in there. One premise behind
going to the trouble of adding a video channel to group communication is that it can
stimulate the kind of informal, serendipitous conversation that takes place in the
hallway or at the coffee machine, but in such a way that the informal space extends
to wherever your colleagues are located. In a sense, they are trying to synthesize
what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls "informal public spaces." Another recent Xerox
experiment linked a wall-sized monitor in a common room in the Palo Alto laboratory
with a common room in a sister laboratory in Oregon. People in Oregon could walk down
the hall in the material world, notice on the monitor that you are in the California half
of the common room, and engage you in conversation.
I didn't see the video wall experiment, but computer pundit John Barlow saw a demonstration.
We are both interested in the possibility of adding video to computer conferencing. Part of
that ontological untrustworthiness of cyberspace is the lack of body language and facial
expression. Misunderstandings that tangle group communications and sour personal
relationships online might be avoided if you could add a raised eyebrow or a playful tone
of voice to the online vocabulary. Barlow told me that he found himself somewhat
disappointed in that hope. Something seemed missing. Barlow told the computer scientist
who was giving him the demonstration about his disappointment.
The researcher, a native
of India, smiled and told him that what the video does not transmit is "the prana,"
the life force, literally the breath of the other people. Judging from the way other
group communication media have proved to be double-edged, it would be prudent to
assume that adding video to CMC will bring both advantages and disadvantages when
trying to achieve communication among groups of people.
The idea of Project Jupiter that grew out of the multimedia MUD Curtis described is a
common space where you can extend your informal space, with voice, text, and video
all mixed together in a virtual office space; the MUD structure gives the different
communication channels coherence in the form of an architectural metaphor. With the
ability to build your own spaces within the MUD, it is possible to create "rooms"
specifically for certain projects; you can keep reference materials there,
communicate with colleagues on a virtual whiteboard, drop in for informal chats.
You can move your character around a map of the MUD space, and make real-life voice
contact with anyone in the same virtual space, while retaining the ability to put
words and graphics up on the common MUD room space. PARC researchers are
attempting to accomplish several goals with this project. At the same time,
they are designing a mental model of cyberspace, experimenting with ways to
use cyberspace as an augmentation of a material office, as well as mixing
several different media together, and using these tools as they build them,
in the bootstrapped research tradition, in their own daily work.
The first multimedia MUDs are beginning to appear. The first ones I heard about,
in Scandinavia, require a powerful graphics workstation and a high-speed connection
to Internet. Now you can steer your character through a visual model of a dungeon
or a space colony, or even create your own visible worlds and share them with other
participants. The advent of multimedia MUDding is too recent to have a significant
body of observations to evaluate. Now people who can express themselves visually,
using computer tools for manipulating graphic language, can add a new element to
the worlds that were formerly limited to text. Text-only worlds will continue to
thrive, considering how much easier it is to construct an entire civilization with
words than with graphics, but it remains to be seen whether multimedia MUDs will
thrive as a medium in their own right.
Amy Bruckman, after finishing her "Identity Workshops" research, extended her
professional exploration of the MUD medium by creating, with colleagues at MIT's
Media Lab, MediaMOO, yet another kind of serious-communication MUD.
Bruckman noticed
another area in her life where a communications medium with some MUD characteristics
could serve a serious purpose, yet retain the fun and informality of a MUD--the virtual
communities that exist around special areas of interest or professional disciplines.
Scientists or scholars or specialists from the private sector meet for face-to-face
conferences and conventions once or twice a year, read the same journals and electronic
journals, and correspond with one another, but
there is a lack of daily, informal
continuity to these communities of interest that span continents. Why not design a MUD
to continue the kind of informal conversation that makes conferences so important to
scientific communication?
The "professional virtual community" that Bruckman and
colleague Mitchel Resnick had in mind was the community of people like themselves--media
researchers.
MediaMOO was announced in 1993. In the abstract for an oral presentation, Bruckman and
Resnick spoke of the relationship between the MUD design and the social goals of the
project:
MediaMOO is a virtual version of MIT's Media Laboratory. . . . The developers have
deliberately chosen not to build the entire Media Lab, but to construct just the public
corridors, stairwells, elevators, and a few interesting public places. It is up to the
community of users to create the rest. This is not a practical limitation, but a
deliberate design decision. The act of collaborating on building a shared world
creates a basis for interaction and community.
Visitors to a conference share not just a set of interests, but also a place and
a set of activities. Interaction is generated as much by the latter two as the former:
Person A: Can you tell me how to get to Ballroom A?
Person B: I'm headed that way now. It's up this way.
Person A: Thanks!
Person B: I see you're at Company X. . . .
Person C: Is this seat taken?
Person D: No, it isn't.
Person C: I'm surprised the room is so packed.
Person D: Well, Y is a really good speaker. . . .
A text-based virtual environment can provide both a shared place (the virtual world),
and a shared set of activities (exploring and extending the virtual world). Like at a
coffee break at a conference, there is a social convention that it is appropriate to
strike up a conversation with strangers simply based on their name tags. In most MU*s,
characters are anonymous; there is no way to match the real world person to the virtual
one. On MediaMOO, a character can either be anonymous or reliably identified with the
person's real world name. Additionally, users are encouraged to wear a description of
their research interests. More information is provided than a name tag, and it is
provided more discreetly--the person is not notified that you looked at their research
interests, and you are therefore free to decide whether or not to use that information
as a basis to strike up a conversation.
The architects of MediaMOO decided to have an inaugural ball on inauguration evening,
January 20, 1993. A week before, at Amy Bruckman's invitation, I showed up early and
designed a few of the men's costumes for the festivities. First, I had to learn my way
to the wardrobe off the main ballroom, which was located two floors above the roof of
the real-life Media Lab. In places, the topology of MediaMoo replicates the real
hallways of the material Media Lab building, and in places, like the ballroom, MediaMOO
just builds its own cyberspace extension. Once I learned the path to the ballroom,
Amy showed me the incantation I would need to create costumes. Each costume thus created
could be added to the rack. When sixty-seven MediaMOO inaugural ball participants
attended from five countries, they were invited to go to the wardrobe, give the "search"
command, and wear one of the costumes. I was one of several costume designers,
contributing a green on orange double-breasted paisley dinner jacket, a minimicro velcro
tuxedo, and a loincloth of many colors.
Besides my costume, others who attended the ball could see my real name, the fact that
I am writing about virtual communities, and my home e-mail address. Although it opened
with a party, and the atmosphere is informal, MediaMOO consists of people who are studying
virtual communities. In that context, meeting someone "socially" at an event like an
inaugural ball has implications for everyone's intellectual and professional life.
Whenever people find something in a new communication medium so attractive that it becomes
the focus of obsessive behavior, several questions arise:
What is it about the way people
are today, and the way we interact, that leaves so many people vulnerable to communication
addiction?
What responsibility do institutions such as universities have to regulate the
online behavior of obsessive users, and what rights do students have to protect them from
invasion of privacy? By what criteria should obsessive use be determined? I do not know the
answers to questions about the value of MUDding, but I do know that the questions are broad
ones, addressing key ambivalences that people have about personal identity and interpersonal
relationships in the information age.
