Pavel
Curtis
Xerox PARC
Abstract
A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or, sometimes, Multi-User
Dimension) is a network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual
reality whose user interface is entirely textual. Participants (usually called
players) have the appearance of being situated in an artificially-constructed
place that also contains those other players who are connected at the same
time. Players can communicate easily with each other in real time. This virtual
gathering place has many of the social attributes of other places, and many of
the usual social mechanisms operate there. Certain attributes of this virtual
place, however, tend to have significant effects on social phenomena, leading
to new mechanisms and modes of behavior not usually seen `IRL' (in real life).
In this paper, I relate my experiences and observations from having created and
maintained a MUD for over a year.
1. A Brief
Introduction to Mudding
The Machine did not transmit
nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people - an idea that was
good enough for all practical purposes. E.M. Forster [1]
A MUD is a software program that accepts `connections' from
multiple users across some kind of
network (e.g., telephone lines or the Internet) and provides to each user access to a shared database of
`rooms', `exits', and other objects. Each user browses and manipulates this
database from `inside' one of those rooms, seeing only those objects that are
in the same room and moving from room to room mostly via the exits that connect
them. A MUD, therefore, is a kind of virtual reality, an
electronically-represented `place' that users can visit.MUDs are not, however,
like the kinds of virtual realities that one usually hears about, with fancy
graphics and special hardware to sense the position and orientation of the
user's real-world body. A MUD user's interface to the database is entirely
text-based; all commands are typed in by the users and all feedback is printed
as unformatted text on their terminal. The typical MUD user interface is most
reminiscent of old computer games like Adventure and Zork [5]; a typical
interaction is shown in Figure 1.
>look
Corridor The corridor from the west continues to the east here, but the way is
blocked by a purple-velvet rope stretched across the hall. There are doorways
leading to the north and south. You see a sign hanging from the middle of the
rope here.
>read
sign This point marks the end of the currently-occupied portion of the house.
Guests proceed beyond this point at their own risk.
-- The
residents
>go
east You step disdainfully over the velvet rope and enter the dusty darkness of
the unused portion of the house.
Figure 1: A typical MUD
database interaction
Three major factors distinguish a MUD from an
Adventure-style computer game, though:
·
A MUD is not goal-oriented; it has no beginning or end, no
`score', and no notion of `winning' or `success'. In short, even though users
of MUDs are commonly called players, a MUD isn't really a game at all.
·
A MUD is extensible from within; a user can add new objects
to the database such as rooms, exits, `things', and notes. Certain MUDs,
including the one I run, even support an embedded programming language in which
a user can describe whole new kinds of behavior for the objects they create.
·
A MUD generally has more than one user connected at a time.
All of the connected users are browsing and manipulating the same database and
can encounter the new objects created by others. The multiple users on a MUD
can communicate with each other in real time.
This last factor has a
profound effect on the ways in which users interact with the system; it
transforms the activity from a solitary one into a social one. Most inter-player
communication on MUDs follows rules that fit within the framework of the
virtual reality. If a player `says' something (using the say command), then every other player in the
same room will `hear' them. For example, suppose that a player named Munchkin typed
the command say Can anyone hear me? Then Munchkin would see the feedback You
say, "Can anyone hear me?" and every other player in the same room
would see Munchkin says, "Can anyone hear me?" Similarly, the emote
command allows players to express various forms of `non- verbal' communication.
If Munchkin types emote smiles. then every player in the same room sees
Munchkin smiles.
Most interplayer communication relies entirely on these two
commands.*
* In fact, these two commands are so frequently used that
single-character abbreviations are provided for them. The two example commands
would usually be typed as follows:
"Can anyone hear me? :smiles.
There are two circumstances in which the realistic
limitations of say and emote have proved sufficiently annoying that new
mechanisms were developed. It sometimes happens that one player wishes to speak
to another player in the same room, but without anyone else in the room being
aware of the communication. If Munchkin uses the whisper command whisper "I
wish he'd just go away..." to Frebble then only Frebble will see Munchkin
whispers, "I wish he'd just go away..." The other players in the room
see nothing of this at all. Finally, if one player wishes to say something to
another who is connected to the MUD but currently in a different and perhaps
`remote' room, the page command is appropriate. It is invoked with a syntax
very like that of the whisper command and the recipient sees output like this:
You sense
that Munchkin is looking for you in The Hall. He pages, "Come see this
clock, it's tres cool!"
Aside from conversation, MUD players can most directly
express themselves in three ways: by their choice of player name, by their
choice of gender, and by their self-description.
When a player first connects to a MUD, they choose a name by
which the other players will know them. This choice, like almost all others in
MUDs, is not cast in stone; any player can rename themself at any time, though
not to a name currently in use by some other player. Typically, MUD names are
single words, in contrast to the longer `full' names used in real life.
Initially, MUD players appear to be neuter;
automatically-generated messages that refer to such a player use the family of
pronouns including `it', `its', etc. Players can choose to appear as a
different gender, though, and not only male or female. On many MUDs, players
can also choose to be plural (appearing to be a kind of `colony' creature:
"ChupChups leave the room, closing the door behind them"), or to use
one of several sets of gender-neutral pronouns (e.g., `s/he', `him/her' and
`his/her', or `e', `em' and `eir').
Every object in a MUD optionally has a textual description
which players can view with the look command. For example, the description of a
room is automatically shown to a player when they enter that room and can be
seen again just by typing `look'. To see another player's description, one
might type `look Bert'.
Players can set or change their descriptions at any time.
The lengths of player descriptions typically vary from short one-liners to
dozen-line paragraphs.
Aside from direct communication and responses to player
commands, messages are printed to players when other players enter or leave the
same room, when others connect or disconnect and are already in the same room,
and when objects in the virtual reality have asynchronous behavior (e.g., a
cuckoo clock chiming the hours).
MUD players typically spend their connected time socializing
with each other, exploring the various rooms and other objects in the database,
and adding new such objects of their own design. They vary widely in the amount
of time they spend connected on each visit, ranging from only a minute to
several hours; some players stay connected (and almost always idle) for days at
a time, only occasionally actively participating.
This very brief description of the technical aspects of
mudding suffices for the purposes of this paper. It has been my experience,
however, that it is quite difficult to properly convey the `sense' of the
experience in words. Readers desiring more detailed information are advised to
try mudding themselves, as described in the final section of this paper.
Man is the measure. Ibid.
In October of 1990, I began running an Internet-accessible
MUD server on my personal workstation here at PARC. Since then, it has been
running continuously, with interruptions of only a few hours at most. In
January of 1991, the existence of the MUD (called LambdaMOO*) was announced
publicly, via the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.mud. As of this writing, well over
3,500 different players have connected to the server from over a dozen
countries around the world and, at any given time, over 750 players have
connected at least once in the last week. Recent statistics concerning the
number of players connected at a given time of day (Pacific Standard Time)
appear in Figure 2.Omited for the sake of sanity. Jason LambdaMOO is clearly a
reasonably active place, with new and old players coming and going frequently throughout
the day. This popularity has provided me with a position from which to observe
the social patterns of a fairly large and diverse MUD clientele. I want to
point out to the reader, however, that I have no formal training in sociology,
anthropology, or psychology, so I cannot make any claims about methodology or
even my own objectivity. What I relate below is merely my personal observations
made over a year of mudding. In most cases, my discussions of the motivations
and feelings of individual players is based upon in-MUD conversations with
them; I have no means of checking the veracity of their statements concerning
their real-life genders, identities, or (obviously) feelings. On the other
hand, in most cases, I also have no reason to doubt them.
I have grouped my observations into three categories:
phenomena related to the behavior and motivations of individual players,
phenomena related to interactions between small groups of players (especially
observations concerning MUD conversation), and phenomena related to the
behavior of a MUD's community as a whole.
Cutting across all of these categories is a recurring theme
to which I would like to draw the reader's attention in advance. Social
behavior on MUDs is in some ways a direct mirror of behavior in real life, with
mechanisms being drawn nearly unchanged from real-life, and in some ways very
new and different, taking root in the new opportunities that MUDs provide over
real life.
* The `MOO' in `LambdaMOO' stands for `MUD,
Object-Oriented'. The origin of the `Lambda' part is more obscure, based on my
years of experience with the Lisp programming language.
2.1
Observations about individuals
** The mudding population**
The people who have an opportunity to connect to LambdaMOO
are not a representative sample of the world population; they all read and
write English with at least passable proficiency and they have access to the
Internet. Based on the names of their network hosts, I believe that well over
90% of them are affiliated with colleges and universities, mostly as students
and, to a lesser extent, mostly undergraduates. Because they have Internet
access, it might be supposed that the vast majority of players are involved in
the computing field, but I do not believe that this is the case. It appears to
me that no more than half (and probably less) of them are so employed; the
increasing general availability of computing resources on college campuses and
in industry appears to be having an effect, allowing a broader community to
participate.
In any case, it appears that the educational background of
the mudding community is generally above average and it is likely that the
economic background is similarly above the norm. Based on my conversations with
people and on the names of those who have asked to join a mailing list about
programming in LambdaMOO, I would guess that over 70% of the players are male;
it is very difficult to give any firm justification for this number, however.
** Player presentation**
As described in the introduction to mudding, players have a
number of choices about how to present themselves in the MUD; the first such
decision is the name they will use. Figure 3 shows some of the names used by
players on LambdaMOO.
Toon Gemba
Gary_Severn Ford Frand li'ir Maya Rincewind yduJ funky Grump Foodslave Arthur
EbbTide Anathae yrx Satan byte Booga tek chupchups waffle Miranda Gus Merlin
Moonlight MrNatural Winger Drazz'zt Kendal RedJack Snooze Shin lostboy foobar
Ted_Logan Xephyr King_Claudius Bruce Puff Dirque Coyote Vastin Player Cool Amy
Thorgeir Cyberhuman Gandalf blip Jayhirazan Firefoot JoeFeedback ZZZzzz...
Lyssa Avatar zipo Blackwinter viz Kilik Maelstorm Love Terryann Chrystal
arkanoiv
Figure 3:
A selection of player names from LambdaMOO
One can pick out a few common styles for names (e.g., names
from or inspired by myth, fantasy, or other literature, common names from real
life, names of concepts, animals, and everyday objects that have representative
connotations, etc.), but it is clear that no such category includes a majority
of the names.
Note that a significant minority of the names are in lower
case; this appears to be a stylistic choice (players with such names describe
the practice as `cool') and not, as might be supposed, an indication of a
depressed ego.
Players can be quite possessive about their names, resenting
others who choose names that are similarly spelt or pronounced or even that are
taken from the same mythology or work of literature. In one case, for example,
a player named `ZigZag' complained to me about other players taking the names
`ZigZag!' and `Zig'.
The choice of a player's gender is, for some, one of great
consequence and forethought; for others (mostly males), it is simple and
without any questions.
For all that this choice involves the fewest options for the
player (unlike their name or description, which are limited only by their
imagination), it is also the choice that can generate the greatest concern and
interest on the part of other players.
As I've said before, 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. (I say more about
anonymity later on.)
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 report a number of problems. Many
of them 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 female-presenting. 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.
Because of these problems, many players who are female in
real life choose to present themselves otherwise, choosing either male, neuter,
or gender-neutral pronouns. As one might expect, the neuter and gender-neutral
presenters are still subject to demands that they divulge their real gender.
Some players apparently find it quite difficult to interact with those whose
true gender has been called into question; since this phenomenon is rarely
manifest in real life, they have grown dependent on `knowing where they stand',
on knowing what gender roles are `appropriate'. Some players (and not only
males) also feel that it is dishonest to present oneself as being a different
gender than in real life; they report feeling `mad' and `used' when they
discover the deception.
While I can spare no more space for this topic, I
enthusiastically encourage the interested reader to look up Van Gelder's
fascinating article [3] for many more examples and insights, as well as the
story of a remarkably successful deception via "electronic transvestism".
The final part of a player's self-presentation, and the only
part involving prose, is the player's description. This is where players can,
and often do, establish the details of a persona or role they wish to play in
the virtual reality. It is also a significant factor in other players' first
impressions, since new players are commonly looked at soon after entering a
common room. Some players use extremely short descriptions, either intending to
be cryptic (e.g., `the possessor of the infinity gems') or straightforward
(e.g., `an average-sized dark elf with lavender eyes') or, often, just
insufficiently motivated to create a more complex description for themselves.
Other players go to great efforts in writing their descriptions; one moderately
long example appears in Figure 4.
You see a
quiet, unassuming figure, wreathed in an oversized, dull-green Army jacket
which is pulled up to nearly conceal his face. His long, unkempt blond hair
blows back from his face as he tosses his head to meet your gaze. Small round
gold-rimmed glasses, tinted slightly grey, rest on his nose. On a shoulder
strap he carries an acoustic guitar and he lugs a backpack stuffed to
overflowing with sheet music, sketches, and computer printouts. Under the coat
are faded jeans and a T-Shirt reading `Paranoid CyberPunks International'. He
meets your gaze and smiles faintly, but does not speak with you. As you surmise
him, you notice a glint of red at the rims of his blue eyes, and realize that
his canine teeth seem to protrude slightly. He recoils from your look of horror
and recedes back into himself.
Figure 4: A moderately long player
description
A large proportion of player descriptions contain a degree
of wish fulfillment; I cannot count the number of `mysterious but unmistakably
powerful' figures I have seen wandering around in LambdaMOO. Many players, it
seems, are taking advantage of the MUD to emulate various attractive characters
from fiction.
Given the detail and content of so many player descriptions,
one might expect to find a significant amount of role-playing, players who
adopt a coherent character with features distinct from their real-life
personalities. Such is rarely the case, however. Most players appear to tire of
such an effort quickly and simply interact with the others more-or-less
straightforwardly, at least to the degree one does in normal discourse. One
factor might be that the roles chosen by players are usually taken from a
particular creative work and are not particularly viable as characters outside
of the context of that work; in short, the roles don't make sense in the
context of the MUD.
A notable exception to this rule is one particular MUD I've
heard of, called `PernMUSH'. This appears to be a rigidly-maintained simulacrum
of the world described in Ann McCaffrey's celebrated `Dragon' books. All
players there have names that fit the style of the books and all places built
there are consistent with what is shown in the series and in various fan
materials devoted to it.
PernMUSH apparently holds frequent `hatchings' and other
social events, also derived in great detail from McCaffrey's works. This
exception probably succeeds only because of its single-mindedness; with every
player providing the correct context for every other, it is easier for everyone
to stay more-or-less `in character'.
** Player anonymity**
It seems to me that the most significant social factor in
MUDs is the perfect anonymity provided to the players. There are no commands
available to the players to discover the real-life identity of each other and,
indeed, technical considerations make such commands either very difficult or
impossible to implement.
It is this guarantee of privacy that makes players'
self-presentation so important and, in a sense, successful. Players can only be
known by what they explicitly project and are not `locked into' any factors
beyond their easy control, such as personal appearance, race, etc. In the words
of an old military recruiting commercial, MUD players can `be all that you can
be'.
* Kiesler and her colleagues [2] have investigated
the effects of electronic anonymity on the decision-making and problem-solving
processes in organizations; some of their observations parallel mine given
here.
This also
contributes to what might be called a `shipboard syndrome', the feeling that
since one will likely never meet anyone from the MUD in real life, there is
less social risk involved and inhibitions can safely be lowered. For example,
many players report that they are much more willing to strike up conversations
with strangers they encounter in the MUD than in real life. One obvious factor
is that MUD visitors are implicitly assumed to be interested in conversing,
unlike in most real world contexts. Another deeper reason, though, is that
players do not feel that very much is at risk. At worst, if they feel that
they've made an utter fool of themself, they can always abandon the character
and create a new one, losing only the name and the effort invested in socially
establishing the old one. In effect, a `new lease on life' is always a ready
option.
Players on most MUDs are also emboldened somewhat by the
fact that they are immune from violence, both physical and virtual. The
permissions systems of all MUDs (excepting those whose whole purpose revolves
around adventuring and the slaying of monsters and other players) generally
prevent any player from having any kind of permanent effect on any other
player. Players can certainly annoy each other, but not in any lasting or even
moderately long-lived manner.
This protective anonymity also encourages some players to
behave irresponsibly, rudely, or even obnoxiously. We have had instances of
severe and repeated sexual harassment, crudity, and deliberate offensiveness.
In general, such cruelty seems to be supported by two causes: the offenders
believe (usually correctly) that they cannot be held accountable for their
actions in the real world, and the very same anonymity makes it easier for them
to treat other players impersonally, as other than real people.
** Wizards**
Usually, as I understand it, societies cope with offensive
behavior by various group mechanisms, such as ostracism, and I discuss this
kind of effect in detail in Section 2.3. In certain severe cases, however, it
is left to the `authorities' or `police' of a society to take direct action,
and MUDs are no different in this respect.
On MUDs, it is a special class of players, usually called
wizards or (less frequently) gods, who fulfill both the `authority' and
`police' roles. A wizard is a player who has special permissions and commands
available, usually for the purpose of maintaining the MUD, much like a `system
administrator' or `superuser' in real-life computing systems. Players can only
be transformed into wizards by other wizards, with the maintainer of the actual
MUD server computer program acting as the first such. On most MUDs, the
wizards' first approach to solving serious behavior problems is, as in the best
real-life situations, to attempt a calm dialog with the offender. When this
fails, as it usually does in the worst cases of irresponsibility, the customary
response is to punish the offender with `toading'. This involves (a) either
severely restricting the kinds of actions the player can take or else
preventing them from connecting at all, (b) changing the name and description
of the player to present an unpleasant appearance (often literally that of a
warty toad), and (c) moving the player to some very public place within the
virtual reality. This public humiliation is often sufficient to discourage
repeat visits by the player, even in a different guise.
On LambdaMOO, the wizards as a group decided on a more
low-key approach to the problem; we have, in the handful of cases where such a
severe course was dictated, simply `recycled' the offending player, removing
them from the database of the MUD entirely. This is a more permanent solution
than toading, but also lacks the public spectacle of toading, a practice none
of us were comfortable with.
Wizards, in general, have a very different experience of
mudding than other players. Because of their palpable and extensive extra
powers over other players, and because of their special role in MUD society,
they are frequently treated differently by other players.
Most players on LambdaMOO, for example, upon first
encountering my wizard player, treat me with almost exaggerated deference and
respect. I am frequently called `sir' and players often apologize for `wasting'
my time. A significant minority, however, appear to go to great lengths to
prove that they are not impressed by my office or power, speaking to me quite
bluntly and making demands that I assist them with their problems using the
system, sometimes to the point of rudeness.
Because of other demands on my time, I am almost always
connected to the MUD but idle, located in a special room I built (my `den')
that players require my permission to enter. This room is useful, for example,
as a place in which to hold sensitive conversations without fear of
interruption. This constant presence and unapproachability, however, has had
significant and unanticipated side-effects. I am told by players who get more
circulation than I do that I am widely perceived as a kind of mythic figure, a
mysterious wizard in his magical tower. Rumor and hearsay have spread word of
my supposed opinions on matters of MUD policy. One effect is that players are
often afraid to contact me for fear of capricious retaliation at their
presumption.
While I find this situation disturbing and wish that I had
more time to spend out walking among the `mortal' members of the LambdaMOO
community, I am told that player fears of wizardly caprice are justified on
certain other MUDs. It is certainly easy to believe the stories I hear of MUD
wizards who demand deference and severely punish those who transgress; there is
a certain ego boost to those who wield even simple administrative power in
virtual worlds and it would be remarkable indeed if no one had ever started a
MUD for that reason alone.
In fact, one player sent me a copy of an article, written by
a former MUD wizard, based on Machiavelli's `The Prince'; it details a wide
variety of more-or-less creative ways for wizards to make ordinary MUD players
miserable. If this wizard actually used these techniques, as he claims, then
some players' desires to avoid wizards are quite understandable.
2.2
Observations about small groups
** MUD conversation**
The majority of players spend the majority of their active
time on MUDs in conversation with other players. The mechanisms by which those
conversations get started generally mirror those that operate in real life,
though sometimes in interesting ways.
Chance encounters between players exploring the same parts
of the database are common and almost always cause for conversation. As
mentioned above, the anonymity of MUDs tends to lower social barriers and to
encourage players to be more outgoing than in real life. Strangers on MUDs
greet each other with the same kinds of questions as in real life: "Are
you new here? I don't think we've met." The very first greetings, however,
are usually gestural rather than verbal: "Munchkin waves. Lorelei waves
back."
The @who (or WHO) command on MUDs allows players to see who
else is currently connected and, on some MUDs, where those people are. An
example of the output of this command appears in Figure 5.
Player name Connected Idle time Location -----------
--------- ----------------- Haakon (#2) 3 days a second Lambda's Den Lynx
(#8910) a minute 2 seconds Lynx' Abode Garin (#23393) an hour 2 seconds
Carnival Grounds Gilmore (#19194) an hour 10 seconds Heart of Darkness TamLin
(#21864) an hour 21 seconds Heart of Darkness Quimby (#23279) 3 minutes 2
minutes Quimby's room koosh (#24639) 50 minutes 5 minutes Corridor Nosredna
(#2487) 7 hours 36 minutes Nosredna's Hideaway yduJ (#68) 7 hours 47 minutes
Hackers' Heaven Zachary (#4670) an hour an hour Zachary's Workshop Woodlock
(#2520) 2 hours 2 hours Woodlock's Room Total: 11 players, 6 of whom have been
active recently.
Figure 5: Sample output from LambdaMOO's
@who command
This is, in a sense, the MUD analog of scanning the room in
a real-life gathering to see who's present.
Players consult the @who list to see if their friends are
connected and to see which areas, if any, seem to have a concentration of
players in them. If more than a couple of players are in the same room, the
presumption is that an interesting conversation may be in progress there;
players are thus more attracted to more populated areas. I call this phenomenon
`social gravity'; it has a real-world analog in the tendency of people to be
attracted to conspicuous crowds, such as two or more people at the door of a
colleague's office.
It is sometimes the case on a MUD, as in real life, that one
wishes to avoid getting into a conversation, either because of the particular
other player involved or because of some other activity one does not wish to
interrupt. In the real world, one can refrain from answering the phone, screen
calls using an answering machine, or even, in copresent situations, pretend not
to have heard the other party. In the latter case, with luck, the person will
give up rather than repeat themself more loudly.
The mechanisms are both similar and interestingly different
on MUDs. It is often the case that MUD players are connected but idle, perhaps
because they have stepped away from their terminal for a while. Thus, it often
happens that one receives no response to an utterance in a MUD simply because
the other party wasn't really present to see it. This commonly-understood fact
of MUD life provides for the MUD equivalent of pretending not to hear. I know
of players who take care after such a pretense not to type anything more to the
MUD until the would-be conversant has left, thus preserving the apparent
validity of their excuse.
Another mechanism for avoiding conversation is available to
MUD players but, as far as I can see, not to people in real life situations.
Most MUDs provide a mechanism by which each player can designate a set of other
players as `gagged';
the effect is that nothing will be printed to the gagging
player if someone they've gagged speaks, moves, emotes, etc. There is generally
no mechanism by which the gagged player can tell a priori that someone is
gagging them; indeed, unless the gagged player attempts to address the gagging
player directly, the responses from the other players in the room (who may not
be gagging the speaker) may cause the speaker never even to suspect that some
are not hearing them.
We provide a gagging facility on LambdaMOO, but it is fairly
rarely used; a recent check revealed only 45 players out of almost 3,000 who
are gagging other players. The general feeling appears to be that gagging is
quite rude and is only appropriate (if ever) when someone persists in annoying
you in spite of polite requests to the contrary. It is not clear, though, quite
how universal this feeling is. For example, I know of some players who, on
being told that some other players were offended by their speech, suggested
that gagging was the solution: "If they don't want to hear me, let them
gag me; I won't be offended."
Also, I am given to understand that gagging is much more
commonly employed on some other MUDs.
The course of a MUD conversation is remarkably like and
unlike one in the real world. Participants in MUD conversations commonly use
the emote command to make gestures, such as nodding to urge someone to
continue, waving at player arrivals and departures, raising eyebrows, hugging
to apologize or soothe, etc. As in electronic mail (though much more
frequently), players employ standard `smiley-face' glyphs (e.g., `:-)', `:-(`,
and `:-|') to clarify the `tone' with which they say things. Utterances are
also frequently addressed to specific participants, as opposed to the room as a
whole (e.g., "Munchkin nods to Frebble. `You tell `em!'").
The most obvious difference between MUD conversations and
those in real life is that the utterances must be typed rather than simply
spoken. This introduces significant delays into the interaction and, like
nature, MUD society abhors a vacuum.
Even when there are only two participants in a MUD
conversation, it is very rare for there to be only one thread of discussion;
during the pause while one player is typing a response, the other player
commonly thinks of something else to say and does so, introducing at least
another level to the conversation, if not a completely new topic. These
multi-topic conversations are a bit disorienting and bewildering to the
uninitiated, but it appears that most players quickly become accustomed to them
and handle the multiple levels smoothly. Of course, when more than two players
are involved, the opportunities for multiple levels are only increased. It has
been pointed out that a suitable punishment for truly heinous social offenders
might be to strand them in a room with more than a dozen players actively
conversing. This kind of cognitive time-sharing also arises due to the
existence of the page command. Recall from the introduction that this command
allows a player to send a message to another who is not in the same room. It is
not uncommon (especially for wizards, whose advice is frequently sought by
`distant' players) to be involved in one conversation `face-to-face' and one or
two more conducted via page. Again, while this can be overwhelming at first,
one can actually come to appreciate the relief from the tedious long pauses
waiting for a fellow conversant to type.
Another effect of the typing delay (and of the low bandwidth
of the MUD medium) is a tendency for players to abbreviate their communications,
sometimes past the point of ambiguity. For example, some players often greet
others with `hugs' but the `meanings' of those hugs vary widely from recipient
to recipient. In one case the hug might be a simple friendly greeting, in
another it might be intended to convey a very special affection. In both cases,
the text typed by the hugger is the same (e.g., "Munchkin hugs
Frebble."); it is considered too much trouble for the hugger to type a
description of the act sufficient to distinguish the `kind' of hug intended.
This leads to some MUD interactions having much more ambiguity than usually
encountered in real life, a fact that some mudders consider useful.
The somewhat disjointed nature of MUD conversations, brought
on by the typing pauses, tends to rob them of much of the coherence that makes
real-life conversants resent interruptions. The addition of a new conversant to
a MUD conversation is much less disruptive; the `flow' being disrupted was
never very strong to begin with. Some players go so far as to say the
interruptions are simply impossible on MUDs; I think that this is a minority
impression, however.
Interruptions do exist MUDs; they are simply less
significant than in real life.
** Other small-group interactions**
I would not like to give the impression that conversation is
the only social activity on MUDs. Indeed, MUD society appears to have most of
the same social activities as real life, albeit often in a modified form.
As mentioned before, PernMUSH holds large-scale, organized
social gatherings such as `hatchings' and they are not alone. Most MUDs have at
one time or another organized more or less elaborate parties, often to
celebrate notable events in the MUD itself, such as an anniversary of its
founding. We have so far had only one or two such parties on LambdaMOO, to
celebrate the `opening' of some new area built by a player; if there were any
other major parties, I certainly wasn't invited!
One of the more impressive examples of MUD social activity
is the virtual wedding. There have been many of these on many different MUDs;
we are in the process of planning our first on LambdaMOO, with me officiating
in my role as archwizard.
I have never been present at such a ceremony, but I have
read logs of the conversations at them. As I do not know any of the
participants in the ceremonies I've read about, I cannot say much for certain
about their emotional content. As in real life, they are usually very happy and
celebratory occasions with an intriguing undercurrent of serious feelings. I do
not know and cannot even speculate about whether or not the main participants
in such ceremonies are usually serious or not, whether or not the MUD ceremony
usually (or even ever) mirrors another ceremony in the real world, or even
whether or not the bride and groom have ever met outside of virtual reality.
In the specific case of the upcoming LambdaMOO wedding, the
participants first met on LambdaMOO, became quite friendly, and eventually
decided to meet in real life. They have subsequently become romantically
involved in the real world and are using the MUD wedding as a celebration of
that fact. This phenomenon of couples meeting in virtual reality and then
pursuing a real-life relationship, is not uncommon; in one notable case, they
did this even though one of them lived in Australia and the other in
Pittsburgh!
It is interesting to note that the virtual reality wedding
is not specific to the kinds of MUDs I've been discussing; Van Gelder [7]
mentions an on-line reception on CompuServe and weddings are quite common on
Habitat [4], a half-graphical, half-textual virtual reality popular in Japan.
The very idea, however, brings up interesting and
potentially important questions about the legal standing of commitments made
only in virtual reality.
Suppose, for example, that two people make a contract in
virtual reality. Is the contract binding? Under which state's (or country's)
laws? Is it a written or verbal contract? What constitutes proof of signature
in such a context? I suspect that our real-world society will have to face and
resolve these issues in the not-too-distant future.
Those who frequent MUDs tend also to be interested in games
and puzzles, so it is no surprise that many real-world examples have been
implemented inside MUDs.
What may be surprising, however, is the extent to which this
is so.
On LambdaMOO alone, we have machine-mediated Scrabble,
Monopoly, Mastermind, Backgammon, Ghost, Chess, Go, and Reversi boards. These
attract small groups of players on occasion, with the Go players being the most
committed; in fact, there are a number of Go players who come to LambdaMOO only
for that purpose. I say more about these more specialized uses of social
virtual realities later on.
In many ways, though, such games so far have little, if
anything, to offer over their real-world counterparts except perhaps a better
chance of finding an opponent.
Perhaps more interesting are the other kinds of games
imported into MUDs from real life, the ones that might be far less feasible in
a non-virtual reality. A player on LambdaMOO, for example, implemented a
facility for holding food fights. Players throw food items at each other,
attempt to duck oncoming items, and, if unsuccessful, are `splattered' with
messes that cannot easily be removed. After a short interval, a semi-animate
`Mr. Clean' arrives and one-by-one removes the messes from the participants,
turning them back into the food items from which they came, ready for the next
fight. Although the game was rather simple to implement, it has remained
enormously popular nearly a year later.
Another player on LambdaMOO created a trainable Frisbee,
which any player could teach to do tricks when they threw or caught it. Players
who used the Frisbee seemed to take great pleasure in trying to out-do each
other's trick descrip-tions. My catching description, for example, reads
"Haakon stops the frisbee dead in the air in front of himself and then
daintily plucks it, like a flower." I have also heard of MUD versions of
paint-ball combat and fantastical games of Capture the Flag.
2.3
Observations about the MUD community as a whole
MUD communities tend to be very large in comparison to the
number of players actually active at any given time. On LambdaMOO, for example,
we have between 700 and 800 players connecting in any week but rarely more than
40 simultaneously. A good real-world analog might be a bar with a large number
of `regulars', all of whom are transients without fixed schedules.
The continuity of MUD society is thus somewhat tenuous; many
pairs of active players exist who have never met each other. In spite of this,
MUDs do become true communities after a time. The participants slowly come to
consensus about a common (private) language, about appropriate standards of
behavior, and about the social roles of various public areas (e.g., where big
discussions usually happen, where certain `crowds' can be found, etc.).
Some people appear to thrive on the constant turnover of MUD
players throughout a day, enjoying the novelty of always having someone new to
talk to. In some cases, this enjoyment goes so far as to become a serious kind
of addiction, with some players spending as much as 35 hours out of 48
constantly connected and conversing on MUDs. I know of many players who have
taken more-or-less drastic steps to curtail their participation on MUDs,
feeling that their habits had gotten significantly out of control.
One college-student player related to me his own
particularly dramatic case of MUD addiction. It seems that he was supposed to
go home for the Christmas holidays but missed the train by no less than five
hours because he had been unable to tear himself away from his MUD
conversations. After calling his parents to relieve their worrying by lying
about the cause of his delay, he eventually boarded a train for home. However,
on arrival there at 12:30 a.m. the next morning, he did not go directly to his
parents' house but instead went to an open terminal room in the local
university, where he spent another two and a half hours connected before
finally going home. His parents, meanwhile, had called the police in fear for
their son's safety in traveling.
It should not be supposed that this kind of problem is now
commonly-understand phenomenon of `computer addiction'; the fact that there is
a computer involved here is more-or-less irrelevant. These people are not
addicted to computers, but to communication; the global scope of Internet MUDs
implies not only a great variety in potential conversants, but also 24-hour
access. As Figure 2 shows, the sun never really sets on LambdaMOO's community.
While it is at the more macroscopic scale of whole MUD
communities that I feel least qualified to make reliable observations, I do
have one striking example of societal consensus having concrete results on
LambdaMOO. From time to time, we wizards are asked to arbitrate in disputes
among players concerning what is or is not appropriate behavior. My approach
generally has been to ask a number of other players for their opinions and to
present the defendant in the complaint with a precis of the plaintiff's
grievance, always looking for the common threads in their responses. After many
such episodes, I was approached by a number of players asking that a written
statement on LambdaMOO `manners' be prepared and made available to the
community. I wrote up a list of those rules that seemed implied by the set of
arbitrations we had performed and published them for public comment. Very
little comment has ever been received, but the groups of players I've asked
generally agree that the rules reflect their own understandings of the common
will. For the curious, I have included our list of rules in Figure 6; the
actual `help manners' document goes into a bit more detail about each of these
points.
It should be noted that different MUDs are truly different
communities and have different societal agreements concerning appropriate
behavior. There even exist a few MUDs where the only rule in the social
contract is that there is no social contract. Such `anarchy' MUDs have appeared
a few times in my experience and seem to be quite popular for a time before
eventually fading away.
·
Be polite.
Avoid being rude. The MOO is worth participating in because it is a pleasant
place for people to be. When people are rude or nasty to one another, it stops
being so pleasant.
·
`Revenge
is ours,' sayeth the wizards. If someone is nasty to you, please either ignore
it or tell a wizard about it. Please don't try to take revenge on the person;
this just escalates the level of rudeness and makes the MOO a less pleasant
place for everyone involved.
·
Respect
other players' sensibilities. The participants on the MOO come from a wide
range of cultures and backgrounds. Your ideas about what constitutes offensive
speech or descriptions are likely to differ from those of other players. Please
keep the text that players can casually run across as free of
potentially-offensive material as you can.
·
Don't
spoof. Spoofing is loosely defined as `causing misleading output to be printed
to other players'. For example, it would be spoofing for anyone but Munchkin to
print out a message like `Munchkin sticks out his tongue at Potrzebie.' This
makes it look like Munchkin is unhappy with Potrzebie even though that may not
be the case at all.
·
Don't
shout. It is easy to write a MOO command that prints a message to every
connected player. Please don't.
·
Only
teleport your own things. By default, most objects (including other players)
allow themselves to be moved freely from place to place. This fact makes it
easier to build certain useful objects. Unfortunately, it also makes it easy to
annoy people by moving them or their objects around without their permission.
Please don't.
·
Don't
teleport silently or obscurely. It is easy to write MOO commands that move you
instantly from place to place. Please remember in such programs to print a
clear, understandable message to all players in both the place you're leaving
and the place you're going to.
·
Don't hog
the server. The server is carefully shared among all of the connected players
so that everyone gets a chance to execute their commands. This sharing is, by
necessity, somewhat approximate. Please don't abuse it with tasks that run for
a long time without pausing.
·
Don't
waste object numbers. Some people, in a quest to own objects with `interesting'
numbers (e.g., #17000, #18181, etc.) have written MOO programs that loop
forever creating and recycling objects until the `good' numbers come up. Please
don't do this.
Figure 6: The main points of LambdaMOO manners
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long
since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms.
Seated in her arm-chair, she spoke, while they in their arm-chairs heard her,
fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. Ibid.
A recent listing of Internet-accessible MUDs showed almost
200 active around the world, mostly in the United States and Scandinavia. A
conservative guess that these MUDs average 100 active players each gives a
total of 20,000 active mudders in the world today; this is almost certainly a
significant undercount already and the numbers appear to be growing as more and
more people gain Internet access.
In addition, at least one MUD-like area exists on the
commercial CompuServe network in the United States and there are several more
commercial MUDs active in the United Kingdom. Finally, there is Habitat[4], a
half-graphical, half textual virtual reality in Japan, with well over 10,000
users.
I believe that text-based virtual realities and wide-area
interactive `chat' facilities [6] are becoming more and more common and will
continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Like CB radios and telephone
party lines before them, MUDs seem to provide a necessary social outlet.
The MUD model is also being extended in new ways for new
audiences. For example, I am currently involved in adapting the LambdaMOO
server for use as an international teleconferencing and image database system
for astronomers. Our plans include allowing scientists to give on-line
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. 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.
On another front, I am engaged with some colleagues in the
design of a MUD for general use here at Xerox PARC. The idea here is to use
virtual reality to help break down the geographical barriers of a large
building, of people increasingly working from their homes, and of having a
sister research laboratory in Cambridge, England. In this context, we intend to
investigate the addition of digital voice to MUDs, with the conventions of the
virtual reality providing a simple and intuitive style of connection management:
if two people are in the same virtual room, then their audio channels are
connected. Some virtual rooms may even overlap real-world rooms, such as those
in which talks or other meetings are held.
Of course, one can expect a number of important differences
in the social phenomena on MUDs in a professional setting. In particular, I
would guess that anonymity might well be frowned upon in such places, though it
may have some interesting special uses, for example in the area of refereeing
papers. Some of my colleagues have suggested that the term `text-based virtual
reality' is an oxymoron, that `virtual reality' refers only to the fancy
graphical and motion-sensing environments being worked on in many places. They
go on to predict that these more physically-involving systems will supplant the
text-based variety as soon as the special equipment becomes a bit more widely
and cheaply available. I do not believe that this is the case. While I agree
that the fancier systems are likely to become very popular for certain
applications and among those who can afford them, I believe that MUDs have
certain enduring advantages that will save them from obsolescence.
The equipment necessary to participate fully in a MUD is
significantly cheaper, more widely available, and more generally useful than
that for the fancy systems; this is likely to remain the case for a long time
to come. For example, it is already possible to purchase palm-sized portable
computers with network connectivity and text displays, making it possible to
use MUDs even while riding the bus, etc. Is similarly-flexible hardware for
fancy virtual realities even on the horizon?
It is substantially easier for players to give themselves
vivid, detailed, and interesting descriptions (and to do the same for the
descriptions and behavior of the new objects they create) in a text-based
system than in a graphics-based one. In McLuhan's terminology [3], this is
because MUDs are a `cold' medium, while ore graphically-based media are `hot';
that is, the sensorial parsimony of plain text tends to entice users into
engaging their imaginations to fill in missing details while, comparatively
speaking, the richness of stimuli in fancy virtual realities has an opposite
tendency, pushing users' imaginations into a more passive role. I also find it
difficult to believe that a graphics-based system will be able to compete with
text for average users on the metric of believable detail per unit of effort
expended; this is certainly the case now and I see little reason to believe it
will change in the near future.
Finally, one of the great strengths of MUDs lies in the
users' ability to customize them, to extend them, and to specialize them to the
users' particular needs. The ease with which this can be done in MUDs is
directly related to the fact that they are purely text-based; in a
graphics-based system, the overhead of creating new moderate-quality graphics
would put the task beyond the inclinations of the average user. Whereas, with
MUDs, it is easy to imagine an almost arbitrarily small community investing in
the creation of a virtual reality that was truly customized for that community,
it seems very unlikely that any but the largest communities would invest the
greatly-increased effort required for a fancier system.
Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct
experience. She shrank back into her room, and the wall closed up again. Ibid.
The emergence of MUDs has created a new kind of social
sphere, both like and radically unlike the environments that have existed
before. As they become more and more popular and more widely accessible, it
appears likely that an increas- ingly significant proportion of the population
will at least become familiar with mudding and perhaps become frequent
participants in text-based virtual realities.
It thus behooves us to begin to try to understand these new
societies, to make sense of these electronic places where we'll be spending
increasing amounts of our time, both doing business and seeking pleasure. I
would hope that social scientists will be at least intrigued by my amateur
observations and perhaps inspired to more properly study MUDs and their
players. In particular, as MUDs become more widespread, ever more people are
likely to be susceptible to the kind of addiction I discuss in an earlier
section; we must, as a society, begin to wrestle with the social and ethical
issues brought out by such cases. Those readers interested in trying out MUDs
for themselves are encouraged to do so.
The Usenet news group rec.games.mud periodically carries
comprehensive lists of publicly-available, Internet-accessible MUDs, including
their detailed network addresses. My own MUD, LambdaMOO, can be reached via the
standard Internet telnet protocol at the host lambda.parc.xerox.com (the numeric
address is 13.2.116.36), port 8888. On a UNIX machine, for example, the command
telnet lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888 will suffice to make a connection. Once
connected, feel free to page me; I connect under the names `Haakon' and
`Lambda'.
I was originally prodded into writing down my mudding
experiences by Eric Roberts. In trying to get a better handle on an
organization for the material, I was aided immeasurably by my conversations
with Francoise Brun-Cottan; she consistently brought to my attention phenomena
that I had become too familiar with to notice. Susan Irwin and David Nichols
have been instrumental in helping me to understand some of the issues that
might arise as MUDs become more sophisticated and widespread. The reviewers of
this paper provided several pointers to important related work that I might
otherwise never have encountered. Finally, I must also give credit to the
LambdaMOO players who participated in my on-line brainstorming session; their
ideas, experiences, and perceptions provided a necessary perspective to my own
understanding.
[1] Forster, E.M., "The Machine Stops". In Ben
Bova, editor, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. IIB,
Avon, 1973. Originally in E.M.
Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1928.
[2] Kiesler, Sara, et al., "Social Psychological
Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication", in Charles
Dunlop and Robert Kling, editors,
Computerization and Controversy, Academic Press, 1991.
[3] McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, McGraw-Hill,
1964.
[4] Morningstar, Chip, and F. Randall Farmer, "The
Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", in Cyberspace, edited
by Michael Benedikt, MIT Press,
1991.
[5] Raymond, Eric S., editor, The New Hacker's Dictionary.
MIT Press, 1991.
[6] Reid, Elizabeth M., "Electropolis: Communication
and Community on Internet Relay Chat", Intertek, v.
3.3, Winter, 1992.
[7] Van Gelder, Lindsy, "The Strange Case of the
Electronic Lover", in Charles Dunlop and Robert Kling,
editors, Computerization and Controversy,
Academic Press, 1991.