By Elizabeth Reid (emr@ee.mu.oz.au emr@rmit.edu.au )
A thesis submitted in
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Cultural Studies
Program, Department of English,
University of Melbourne, January 1994
Copyright (C) 1994 by
Elizabeth Reid, all rights reserved. This text may be freely redistributed
among individuals in any medium so long as it remains unedited and appears with
this notice. Any commercial use or republication requires the written
permission of the author.
Beginning with an
understanding of virtual reality as an imaginative experience and thus a cultural
construct rather than a technical construction, this thesis discusses cultural
and social issues raised by interaction on 'MUDs', which are text-based virtual
reality systems run on the international computer network known as the
Internet. MUD usage forces users to deconstruct many of the cultural tools and
understandings that form the basis of more conventional systems of interaction.
Unable to rely on physical cues as a channel of meaning, users of MUDs have
developed ways of substituting for or
by-passing them, resulting in novel methods of textualising the non-verbal. The
nature of the body and sexuality are problematised in these virtual
environments, since the physical is never fixed and gender is a self-selected
attribute. In coming to terms with these aspects of virtual interaction, new
systems of significance have been
developed by users, along
with methods of enforcing that cultural hegemony through power structures
dependant upon manipulation of the virtual environment. These new systems of meaning
and social control define those who use MUDs as constituting a distinct
cultural group.
First and foremost, my
thanks go to Chris Healy, my supervisor, for his support, encouragement and
advice, all of which have been invaluable.
Secondly, I would like to thank the English Department for sponsoring my
use of the University of Melbourne's computing and network facilities, which
enabled me to undertake this research.
I would also like to thank Richard Oxbrow of the Department of Electrical
and Electronic Engineering for allowing me to use the
computing facilities of that
department, and Lochard Environment Systems Pty. Ltd. for providing the printer
used to produce the final version of this thesis. To Pavel Curtis and Kerstin Carosone go my thanks for help with
proof-reading and 'beta-testing', and to Daniel Carosone goes my especial
thanks for emotional, technical and culinary
support. Lastly, I should like thank all the people
who have made this thesis possible by allowing me to join them in their virtual
play and especially for allowing me to quote from examples of this play and
from their reflections upon it.
Parts of this thesis have
been published in "Electronic Chat: Communication and Community on
Internet Relay Chat" in _Media_ _Information_Australia_ No. 67 (February
1993) 61-70. The previously published excerpts are spread throughout this
thesis, and amount in total to approximately 2000 words.
Bibliography
Appendices
Appendix One: The Vanishing Room
Appendix Two: The Double Bluff
Appendix Three: The First Case of Cross-Gendered MUD Playing
Appendix Four: The Evolution of Communication
... Amongst Players
... and Wizards
Appendix Five: The Expression of Feelings on 'Nemesis'
Appendix Six: The LambdaMOO Player Survey
Appendix Seven: Character Generation...
...Complex
...Or Simple
Cyberspace.... A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines
of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
data. Like city lights, receding...[1]
Virtual Reality, or
"cyberspace"... takes alternate reality a step further [beyond books
and movies] by introducing a computer as mediator, or imagination enhancer.[2]
Cyberspace: A new universe,
a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and
communication lines... a new stage, a new and irresistible development in the
elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology.[3]
Since William Gibson coined
the term in his best-selling novel Neuromancer, cyberspace' and virtual reality
have been part of late twentieth century culture, and have been infused with a
variety of cultural and emotional meanings.
Gibson himself envisaged a direct neural connection between humans and
computers against a background of urban decay and personal alienation. The film
The Lawnmower Man depicted a meld of mind-altering drugs and
computer-controlled sensory stimulation
which offered a new stage for the evolution of mankind, either toward godlike
wisdom or satanic evil. The popular media have posed cyberspace as the new
frontier and the new promise of the twentieth century. Gibson's 'console cowboys'--virtuoso
cyberspace users hacking at the edges of the law--have been incarnated in media
coverage of groups such as
the infamous 'Legion of Doom'. rcade
games incorporating datagloves and headsets have become the latest fad in
entertainment. Business Week filled its
October 5 '92 issue with special features introducing virtual reality
technologies and applications to its readers. Clifford Stoll's best-seller “The
Cuckoo's Egg” promoted cyberspace as the site of new levels of international
espionage, betrayal and tyranny, inhabited by glamorous foreign spies and
dedicated heroes.
Technically speaking, the
term 'virtual reality' is most commonly used to refer to systems that offer
users visual, auditory and tactile information about an environment which
exists as data in a computer system rather than as physical objects and
locations. This is the virtual reality depicted in "The Lawnmower
Man" and approximated by the 'Virtuality' arcade games marketed by Horizon
Entertainment. This thesis is not about these kinds of virtual reality. I do
not wish to talk about cyberspace or virtual reality as technological
constructions but as cultural constructs. In common with Howard Rheingold I do
not see virtual reality as a set of technologies, but as an experience.[4] More
than that, I believe that it is primarily an imaginative rather than a sensory
experience. I wish to shift the focus of attention away from the gadgets used
to represent a virtual world, and concentrate on the nature of the user's
experience of such worlds. I contend
that technical definitions of VR beg the question of what it is about such
systems that sustains the illusion of reality in the mind of the user. A list of technical components does not
explain why it is that users are prepared to accept a simulated world as a
valid site for emotional and social response.
The systems that I will
describe in examining virtual reality as a cultural environment are technically
simple. I have chosen to refer to a family of computer programs known as MUDs.
MUDs are networked, multi-participant, user-extensible systems which are most
commonly found on the Internet, the international network that connects many
thousands of educational,
research and commercial institutions. Using a MUD does not require any of the
paraphernalia commonly associated with virtual reality. There is no special
hardware to sense the position and orientation of the user's real-world body,
and no special clothes allowing users to see the virtual world through goggles
and touch it through 'datagloves'. The MUD interface is entirely textual; all
commands are typed in by the user and all feedback is displayed as text on a
monitor. A simple PC can act as a gateway into this kind of virtual world.
Instead of using
sophisticated tools to see, touch and hear the virtual environment, users of
MUD systems are presented with textual descriptions of virtual locations.
Technically, a MUD software program consists of a database of 'rooms', 'exits', and other objects. The
program accepts connections from users on a computer network, and provides each
user with access to that database. As Pavel Curtis describes, users are
presented with textual information describing them as being situated in an
artificially constructed place which also contains those other participants who
are connected to the
MUD program.[5] There are many hundreds of MUD programs
running on the Internet, each with its own unique database of descriptions of
localities and objects. Within each of these systems users can interact with
each other and with the virtual environment which the MUD presents to them.
As Curtis has commented, the
virtual worlds within MUD systems have many of the social attributes of
physical places, and many of the usual social mechanisms apply.[6] Users treat
the worlds depicted by MUD programs as if they were real. However, it is not
the technological interface itself that sustains the willingness of users to
treat this simulated environment as if it were real. Rather it is the degree to
which MUDs act not only as a tool for the expression of each user's
imagination, but mediate between the users' imagination and their communication
to others of what they have imagined. Cyberspace--the realm of electronic
impulses and high-speed data highways where MUDs exist--may be a technological
artefact, but virtual reality is a construct within the mind of a human being.
Within this construct a representation
of a person can be manipulated within a representation of a real or imagined
environment, both of which can be manifested through the use of various
technologies, including computers. Virtual worlds exist not in the technology used to represent them, nor
purely in the mind of the user, but in the relationship between internal mental
constructs and technologically generated representations of these constructs.
The illusion of reality lies not in the machinery itself, but in the users'
willingness to treat the manifestation of their imaginings as if they were real.
The technical attributes of
these virtual places, comments Curtis, have significant effects on social
phenomena, leading to new modes of interaction and new cultural formations.[7]
The lack of actual physical presence, indeed the great physical distances
between individual participants, demands that a new set of behavioural codes be
invented if the participants in such systems are to make sense to one another.
The problems posed by the lack of cultural cues which
physical presence carries
influence behaviour in virtual environments. The solutions to these problems
which participants devise constitute
the culture of the virtual world in which they are played out. It is the
tension between the manifestation of conventional social and cultural patterns,
the invention of new patterns, and the imaginative experience of these
phenomena as taking part in a virtual world that is the subject of my thesis.
My primary sources in this
work fall into three categories. Firstly, I will quote from logs taken of sessions
on MUDs. Secondly, I will quote from
electronic mail, or email, sent to me by MUD players in which they discuss such
usage. Lastly, I will be using articles
from the USENET newsgroups devoted to discussion of MUD and MUD playing.
These groups include
alt.mud, rec.games.mud, rec.games.mud.admin, rec.games.mud.announce,
rec.games.mud.diku, rec.games.mud.lp, rec.games.mud.misc and
rec.games.mud.tiny. I have been monitoring these groups since December 1991,
during which time these groups have seen an average traffic of approximately
fifty articles each day. In all quoted extracts the original (sometimes very
original) grammar and spelling have been preserved, and in all cases I have
secured permission to quote from the individuals concerned. In some cases I
have been asked to withhold identifying information, and where this is the case
I have indicated in the footnotes that the item of mail or the news article is
from "anonymous". However, in most cases the names of players and
characters as well as the names of the MUDs themselves have been preserved. The
most important exception is the case of 'JennyMUSH', which is an alias. For reasons that will be made clear in the
body of this thesis, the unique nature of this system and the experiences of
its users have led to a great concern with the issue of privacy. The
administrator of the MUD has asked me not to reveal any information that might
identify the location of the system, and has suggested 'JennyMUSH' as a
pseudonym which retains the flavour of its actual name.
This thesis will be divided
into three chapters, preceded by a section detailing the historical background
to and context of the evolution of MUD systems. The subject of the first and
second chapters is the nature of the social changes that these forms of virtual
reality engender. I will examine the impact of MUDs on the practices of
interpersonal communication and interaction, and on community formation and
social cohesion. The third chapter will describe how
the nature of human
existence is altered by entrance or translation into virtual reality. In this
last chapter I will explore the nature of social identity, sexuality and the
body in the virtual environment.
[1] William Gibson, “Neuromancer” (London: Grafton Books, 1989) 67.
[2] Nicholas Lavroff, “Virtual Reality
Playhouse” (Corte Madera CA: Waite Group Press, 1992) 7.
[3] Michael, Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps” Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 1991) 1.
[4] Howard Rheingold, “Virtual Reality”, (London: Mandarin, 1992) 46.
[5] Pavel Curtis, "Mudding: Social
Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities," In: Intertek Vol. 3.3 (Winter, 1992)
26.
[6] Curtis, 26.
[7] Curtis, 26.
1)
Interactive Computing [1]
Personal computers are a
relatively recent phenomenon. It is
only within the last ten to twenty years that such machines have become common
in the work place, let alone the home.
The pre-history of computing was largely the domain of educational,
governmental or commercial organisations which owned large mainframe computer
systems.
These huge old systems were
jealousy protected; computer time was heavily booked and access available only
to the privileged few. These computers
of the past generation would hardly be recognisable to the present generation
of Mac and PC users. The old beasts of
the '50s and '60s took up literally rooms of space. Their computing power was
measured not in millions of
instructions per second--MIPS--but in hundreds of instructions. The multiple megabytes of random access
memory we now take for granted in even the most humble of desktop systems were
then only a fantastic dream. The
greatest and most costly super-computers of the sixties counted their memory in
kilobytes, hard and floppy disks were yet to be invented, monitors and
keyboards were only in the experimental stages, and most computers
received instructions and
gave back results on long spools of punched paper tape.
Still, archaic as these
clumping monsters now appear to be, they were the gleaming prize of their
age. Mathematicians, statisticians,
physicists, military engineers and government agencies all fought for the
funding to acquire one of these miraculous new machines. They also attracted the interest of a new
breed of young inquiring minds. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
one of the few educational institutions to invest large sums in the new computing technology, the members of the
Tech Model Railroad Club switched their interest from the construction of
intricate train tracks to the manipulation of complex computer
circuits.[2] Of course these young
students, most of them undergraduates, were not able to get direct access to
the new machines. Instead they took to
hanging around the
computer rooms at midnight
and the small hours of the mornings, begging computer time from the
nightwatchmen on the few occasions when these least attractive hours had not
been booked by others.
Most of the computers of the
time relied on punched paper both to receive instructions and to communicate
results. This forced computer
programmers and users to divide the giving and receiving of data into discrete
blocks. Instructions would be
transcribed into the punched code useable by the computer, the instructions
would be acted on by the computer and the results of its computations spat back
on punched tape. These results would then have to be decoded before any further work could be done. MIT's academics--physicists and
statisticians and mathematicians--relied on and accepted this paradigm of
computer use. Not so the members of the
Tech Model Railroad Club. Their
interest quickly centred on
an experimental computer which the Digital Equipment Corporation had loaned to
the Institute. This computer was much
less powerful than its hulking IBM cousins, and so was virtually ignored by the
academics to whom it had been lent. It
was adopted by the TMRC students because it offered a new paradigm of
computing. DEC's Programmed Data Processor was among the first to incorporate a
screen and a keyboard.
The TMRC members had no
complex scientific problems to solve. Instead they spent their time simply
exploring the capabilities of the PDP machine.
They programmed to demonstrate their skill in understanding how the
machine 'thought'. Staying up all
night, and functioning, so the story goes, on a diet of coke and burgers, these
young 'hackers' set out to colonise the unexplored territory of the
computer. One of their most famous
endeavours was the invention of
the first computer
game. By modern standards it was
uncomplicated. A simple figure of a
spaceship appeared on the screen, to be shot down by the player. At the time, however, it was a marvellous
feat of computer graphics, a miracle of programming. Copies of 'Spacewar', in
punched paper form, were passed around to computer enthusiasts at other
institutions, and began a small revolution in computer use.[3]
The game of Spacewar
depended on human/computer interactivity. It relied on the human user being able to monitor the computer's
actions and modify and correct for them while the machine was actually
operating. The concept of human/computer
interaction did not begin with this invention of the computer game, but the game
made a small instance of this interactivity available to a rapidly expanding
number of computer users and demonstrated that such concepts could be realised
in a simple and 'user-friendly' fashion.
It brought new programming ideas--new algorithms--to the computing
world. It also changed the way that the
academy thought about computers. The
leap between the idea of computers as awesome inhabitants of super-cooled
rooms, tended by white-coated engineers, to the idea of the computer as toy and
expressive tool, was made when that first spaceship was shot down. Spacewar made tangible the idea of the
computer as a medium for human expression.
2)
Networked Computing [4]
The computing expertise of
the TMRC members soon came to the attention of MIT's authorities. Wishing to harness this obvious talent, MIT
gave the students legitimate access to the computers, and legitimate work to
perform on them. One of the first jobs
they were assigned was to solve the problem of the costs involved in buying
enough computers to cater for the increasing numbers of people who wished to
use them. MIT was considering investing in a new form of operating system,
known as the Compatible Time-Sharing System, which would allow more than one
person to use a computer at once. Instead,
in a cost-saving move, they set the TMRC students to designing their own
multi-user operating system. The
multi-user computer system relied on a different hardware to the single user
system. If more than one were to be
accommodated, there needed to be more than one set of input and output devices
connected to the computer. From each of
these multiple terminals, different users could share the same computer
resources. The system
that they designed, and
named the Incompatible Timesharing System, was one of the first of this new
breed of operating system. ITS and other systems like it quickly
supplanted the old single-user systems. Today, the most popular multi-user
operating systems are part of the UNIX family, descendants of a system which
Bell Laboratories began to develop in 1969.
The multi-user paradigm
quickly became popular, as its cost-effectiveness became apparent, and was
followed by the idea of the computer network.
Programmers in the United States Department of Defence built the first
network. In 1969 the DoD began work on
a 'long-haul' network of computers at dispersed sites. This project was funded by the Advanced
Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the DoD. The original purpose of the ARPANET project was to design a
system for use by military control and intelligence. The network was designed to enable authorities to communicate and
weapons to be controlled remotely in the event of a nuclear war. The problem with which the engineers who
designed the system were faced was that during a war any central control point
would most likely be the target of enemy missiles. The solution was a network structure that had no central point
and which was designed from the beginning to withstand physical attack. Each node of the network could operate as a
central point, and there would be no 'right' way for a message to be directed
from one node to another. Messages
could follow any route, and should one node be taken out of operation, messages
would simply skirt around it. This
rather haphazard delivery system could
be extremely resilient--even with large portions of the network knocked out,
information could still be transmitted.[5]
In 1969 ARPA set about
installing the first node of the network at the Los Angeles campus of the
University of California. Shortly
afterward nodes were installed at the Santa Barbara campus of the same
university, at the University of Utah, and at the Stanford Research
Institute. Once the system was up and
running, these universities
were given leave to use it
for research purposes. They jumped to
do so, planning to exploit the network's ability to give users of the computers
at each of these sites access to the resources held by all three. At the same time, DARPA encouraged other
institutions to set up their own network nodes, each of which could be
commandeered in time of war. By 1972
thirty-seven universities and government research organisations were on
ARPANET, and as the network grew these institutions began to demand autonomy
from the military. In 1983 ARPANET was
divided into two networks, known as ARPANET (for research use) and MILNET (for
military use). The ARPANET arm
continued to expand, with local area networks at various government,
educational and commercial sites being added to the system. Other nations also adopted the technology,
and with the advent of satellite communications, it became possible for all
these computer networks to be linked together as one super network. This new international entity became known
as the Internet.
3)
Interactive Networking [6]
In its original design,
ARPANET was intended to facilitate the use of remote computers, and the
transfer of computer programs and data between remote computers. As something of an afterthought, a tool for
interpersonal communication was provided--electronic mail. By the second year of operation, it became
clear to ARPANET's designers that, despite their expectations, most of the
network's users were not using it to share facilities but to share
information. File transfers took up a
much greater portion of network traffic than did remote computing, and although
it accounted for only a small amount of network traffic, writing and reading
electronic mail took up most of the time which users spent on the network. People were using the network to collaborate
on projects, to trade notes, and just to chat and keep in touch. Less than a year after ARPANET became
operational, the mailing list was invented.
This allowed people to send messages to a single site, where a program
would then forward that message on to every person on a list, so facilitating
communication between a large group of people.
One of the earliest and most popular mailing lists was named SF-LOVERS,
and was used by science-fiction fans.
Since then, many more communications
facilities have become available on the network which ARPANET became: the
Internet. The most popular of these is
USENET, which came into being in 1979, the invention of three students at the
University of North Carolina who wanted to design a better system for
disseminating information between multiple
people than email and
mailing lists provided. USENET software
enabled people to read messages stored in a network distributed database of
messages divided by subject, and to add their own articles to the
database. In its original incarnation,
the USENET software was designed to handle a few articles per day from each of
a handful of subject divisions, or, as they came to be known, 'newsgroups'. In the last fourteen years, USENET has come
to encompass over two thousand newsgroups, with many of those groups seeing
several hundreds of articles each day.
Today's USENET software relies on a hierarchical arrangement of
newsgroups. The 'top-level' hierarchies
have such names as 'comp', 'talk' and 'rec' (the latter being for recreational
topics). Beneath these blanket
divisions are such groups as comp.os.msdos, comp.os.unix, rec.fishing,
sci.anthropology, sci.electronics, rec.juggling and rec.food.vegetarian. Almost every site on the Internet allows its
users to access USENET, and the articles that each user posts are very quickly
sent on to other sites. Where once it might have taken days for messages to be
propagated, it now takes only minutes.
Despite this speed of
transmission, electronic mail, mailing lists and USENET are nevertheless
asynchronous methods of communication.
Messages are read and responded to in discrete blocks, in a communicative
paradigm similar to that on which the earliest computers were based. Early on in the Internet's life, a simple
synchronous method of communication was developed. Variously known as 'phone' or 'talk', this facility allowed a
user to 'call' another user.
If that user decided to
accept the call, the two users could type directly to each other's screens,
allowing a far faster and more interactive form of communication than that
allowed by email or newsgroups. 'Talk'
programs suggested a new way of figuring computer-mediated communication. Where asynchronous methods of CMC such as
email or USENET tend to rely on the idea of a computer as a tool, as a means
for communication, synchronous methods rely on the idea of the computer as
providing a space for communication.
The talk program took the ideas begun by Spacewar further. Talk presented computers, and computer
networks, not only as a medium for activity, but as the site of it. Synchronous forms of CMC began to bring the
cyberspace of the Internet into the realms of virtual reality. Nominally, all
datapaths can be called cyberspaces.
Telephone lines, hard disks, fibre optic cables and satellite links are
all parts of the global cyberspace that is the Internet. Where that cyberspace becomes most tangible
to the user, and where it becomes a form of virtual reality, is where the users
of those networks can imaginatively enter into them. It was this imagined entrance into virtual space that was to be
developed in MUDs.
4)
MUDs: Networked, Interactive Virtual Realities [7]
The computer aficionados at
the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the early 1970s were well
known for being fantasy fans. Rooms in the AI Lab were named after locations
described in J.R.R. Tolkien's “Lord of the Rings”, and the printer in the lab
was rigged so that it could print in
three different Elven fonts. It was one
of these fantasy fans who wrote the first virtual reality computer game. Donald
Woods, a veteran of MIT's Spacewar, discovered a quite
different kind of game being
run on a computer at the Xerox corporation's Palo Alto Research Centre. The program depicted an explorer seeking
treasure in a network of caverns. It
was an entirely text-based game. There
were no spaceships to be shot, no graphics at all, just descriptions of
localities and prompts asking players where they wished to go or what they
wanted to do next. Woods was entranced
by the game. He contacted the
programmer, Will Crowther, talked to him about it, and decided to expand
Crowther's program into a more complex adventure game. What he wrote was ADVENT, more commonly
referred to as Adventure, in which a player assumed the role of a traveller in
a Tolkienesque setting, fighting off enemies, overcoming obstacles through
clever tricks, and eventually discovering treasure.
Adventure players were
presented with text describing scenes such as the following:
You are standing at
the end of a road before a small building.
Around you is a forest. A small
stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is a sword beneath a tree next to the stream.[8]
Simple commands, such as
'get sword', 'look tree' and 'go north', allowed the player to navigate and
interact with the
Adventure universe, with
each input item eliciting a new description of the player's environment or of
the results of his or her actions. Crowther and Woods were the inventors of the
very first computerised virtual reality game.
Crowther's caves, and Woods' more complex fantasy world, were figured by
players as places which they could enter through the computer.[9]
Simple though it may seem,
Adventure quickly became extremely popular, and a host of similar games began
to appear. Copies of these games spread
through the international tendrils of the Internet, where they can be found
today, played by countless numbers of computer users. The charm of the game lay
in the illusion it gave players of being
inside the game
universe. It engaged the imagination in
a way that no game had done before.
Unlike the commercial computer games which were then starting to be
written, the game had no definite aim.
Players were not called upon to solve specific problems, or defeat
specific enemies. There were no Pacmen
or spaceships, no laser weapons or gobbling globs. Instead players were free simply to explore the game universe. They could do whatever they liked. Users could in their imagination enter into
the game universe, and do in it exactly what they would do were the virtual
reality an actuality. Adventure offered
a form of escapism that no computer game previously had by allowing the user to
enter the game universe and plot the form the game would take.
Adventure and its cousins
did not run on computer networks. They
were single player games. However, at
the same time as they were being written, most US universities were, as I have
described, joining the ARPANET. By the
late 1970s most research institutions in the United States had joined the
ARPANET. In 1977 the interests of
networking,
interactivity, and virtual
reality games met to produce the first networked, multi-user game. Mazewar, written by Jim Guyton, involved the
extremely simple scenario of multiple participants wandering around a maze,
trying to shoot one another - a kind of multi-participant Spacewar. Mazewar was soon followed by a more complex
multi-user game which owed its setting to that depicted in Adventure. WIZARD featured
a dungeon, and puzzles and monsters.
Players roamed the WIZARD universe killing dragons and collecting
gold. Moreover, they could do it in
teams. WIZARD introduced the concept of
player interaction beyond the level of aggression. Players of WIZARD could communicate with one another, and could
share information and objects they had accumulated in their exploration of the
dungeon. Teams of players could
collaborate on adventures which were often lifted wholesale from the pages of
pulp fantasy novels, if not from “The Lord of the Rings”.
In 1979 Alan Klietz,
inspired by Adventure and WIZARD, began writing E*M*P*I*R*E, which later came
to be known as Scepter. Klietz was
associated with the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium, a group which from
1976 to 1983 made use the of the new multi-user 'time-sharing' computer
operating systems to provide computer access to schoolchildren. One of the most popular programs on the
system was Adventure, and Klietz wrote Scepter as a multi-user alternative to
Adventure. Scepter allowed players, as
WIZARD had, to communicate, and it also adopted that feature of Mazewar that
was to become one of the major features of this genre of game. Scepter allowed players to
play against each other as
well as with each other. Player to
player combat introduced a new level of complexity into the game, which quickly
became so popular that Klietz set about writing a commercial version, known as
Screenplay, under the ownership of his employers, Gambit Incorporated.
Scepter was the first game
to depart from the fantasy genre that had dominated previous games. Alan Klietz's game universe featured various
themes including areas emulating the wild west, and science fiction and detective
stories, as well as the more familiar Tolkienesque areas. The latter remained popular, and the science
fiction areas quickly collected an avid group of fans. To this day the fantasy and science fiction
genres dominate these games, just as in the forms of Spacewar and Adventure
they had inspired their birth. Unfortunately, Klietz was eventually forced to
abandon his work. The company that
originally owned the rights to Screenplay, Gambit, was subsumed into a larger
company, Interplay. Interplay later
filed for bankruptcy and its owner was sent to jail on eighteen counts
including tax evasion and running a false church out of his home.[10]
Screenplay left the market under a cloud.
The name 'MUD' first
appeared in 1978 when Roy Trubshaw, then a student at the University of Essex,
England, wrote what he called a Multi-User Dungeon. The name itself was a tribute to an earlier single-user
Adventure-style game named DUNGEN.[11]
In 1979, Richard Bartle joined Trubshaw in working on MUD. MUD contained many of the
features which others, such
as Alan Klietz, had developed independently.
It was a networked multi-user game which allowed users to communicate
with one another, to cooperate on adventures together, or to fight against each
other. In an early version of the game,
players were also given the option of extending the game world by creating new
objects and places within it. However,
in the end, the option of user-extensibility was taken out, partly as a result
of the lack of computing resources available to run the game, and partly
because Bartle felt that the hodge-podge of items created by players detracted
from rather than enhanced the game.
The first MUD universe was a
fantasy-style one that encouraged players to compete with each other for
points. Player went on quests to kill
monsters or find treasure. Killing
monsters--or other players--was a source of points, but more were to be gained
by finding treasure and bringing it back to a swamp located at a shifting point
in the game universe. On throwing
treasure into the swamp, players would be rewarded with points which, once they
had collected enough, would enable them to gain new and greater powers. Although this original MUD game did not ever
gain a high level of popularity, it nevertheless has had great influence on
those who were to develop later games.
The number of people who played Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD was small, but
many of them went on to design the systems that are popular today. The original
MUD game can still be played. Richard
Bartle was asked to design a version for the CompuServe computer facility, and
that version is still in existence.
Called British Legends, players compete to collect enough points, by
solving puzzles, killing monsters and finding treasure, to become a 'Wizard', a
title recognising the player's mastery over the British Legends universe, and
giving him or her special powers within that universe.
Alan Cox was one of those
who spent a lot of time playing the original MUD game, and in 1987 he decided
to design his own. AberMUD, named for
the town of Aberystwyth in which Cox lived, has evolved through numerous
versions and is still played today. Jim
Aspnes of Carnegie-Mellon University was another fan of Bartle and Trubshaw's
MUD. In 1989 he began work on TinyMUD,
which was to introduce a whole new flavour of game to the genre. TinyMUD was designed to run on computers
running the UNIX operating system, and the growing popularity of UNIX made
possible the popularity of Aspnes' creation. TinyMUD was the first of what were
to come to be called 'social' MUDs.
Aspnes deliberately set out to get away from the notion that these games
had to be played with the idea of gaining points, or killing things--let alone
that players should be given the option of killing each other. Instead of being given access to commands
such as 'kill', TinyMUD players were encouraged to centre their play around
communication and world creation.
Although none of the features of TinyMUD were new to the growing MUD
genre, it was the first system to combine them in a fashion that stressed
cooperation and interaction rather than competition and mastery.
>From 1990 onward the
number of MUD programs in circulation increased rapidly. There are, among others, COOLMUDs, ColdMUDs,
DikuMUDs, DUMs, LP-MUDs, MAGEs, MOOs, MUCKs, MUSEs, MUSHes, TeenyMUDs,
TinyMUDs, UberMUDs, UnterMUDs, UriMUDs and YAMUDs (the latter being an acronym
for 'yet another MUD'). Each program offers its own technical
advantages and disadvantages, such as the amount of computer hard disk space or
memory needed to run the program. The
environments portrayed on MUDs have become far more varied. The Tolkienesque fantasy worlds are still
the most common, closely followed by science fiction worlds, but MUD environments based on actual or historical
places--such as Moscow, the ante-bellum South, the Wild West, the prehistoric
era, or a medieval village--have appeared.
The meaning of the term 'MUD' has changed to reflect this. The original acronym 'Multi-User Dungeon'
has been joined by 'Multi-User Dimension' and 'Multi-User Domain', and the term
has come to refer not to the original program written by Richard Bartle and Roy
Trubshaw but to the entire program genre.[12]
Many of today's MUD systems are not games, but are being used for
academic purposes. The first of these
academic systems was MediaMOO, run by Amy Bruckman of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, which provides a virtual meeting place for students
and academics working in the area of media and communications. Several more such systems have followed in
MediaMOO's steps, including PMCMOO, which serves literary and cultural
theorists, and BioMOO, which serves biologists.[13] These systems use the virtual environments created by MUD
programs to collapse the distances between academics from around the world, and
to provide materials such as course outlines, papers and conference information
in an easily accessed form.
Nevertheless, the majority
of MUD systems run on the Internet are intended to be used for social or
entertainment purposes, and it is these
systems with which I am concerned.
These MUDs tend to fall into one of two categories, commonly referred to
by MUD players as 'adventure' and 'social' MUDs. The first category--the adventure- style MUDs--refers to MUD
programs that descended directly from Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD; the
second--the social MUDs--refers to systems that were inspired by TinyMUD. Whether a particular MUD program belongs in
either category is dependant not purely on any technical considerations of its
programming or implementation, but on the style of play which it encourages.
On adventure-style MUDs,
such as those based on the LPMUD and DikuMUD programs, there exists a strict
hierarchy of privileges. The person
with the most control over the system is the one running the MUD program. He, or she, has access to every computer
file in the program, and can modify any of them. This person is commonly known as the God of the MUD, and he or
she has complete control over the elements of the virtual world. Gods may create or destroy virtual areas and
objects, and destroy or protect players' characters. The players, on the other hand, have very little control over the
system. They cannot cannot build new objects or areas, and have no power over
those that already exist. They can only
interact with the MUD environment. They
can kill monsters, collect treasure and solve puzzles, and communicate with one
another. By doing these things players
on adventure MUDs gain points, and once a player has a certain number of points
they gain certain privileges. Once a
player has collected enough points he or she may be elevated to the rank of
Wizard.[14] Wizards do not have the
complete degree of control which is available to the God of the MUD. They cannot alter the MUD software itself,
but they do have the ability to create and control objects and places within
the MUD universe.
Social MUDs, many of which
are based on the MUSH or MUCK software, are not so evidently hierarchical. Early versions of Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD
allowed players to add items and rooms to the game database, an idea that was
incorporated into the TinyMUD program. This feature is common to all social
MUDs. While social MUDs have Gods as do
adventure MUDs, who control the actual software, and Wizards who have privileged
powers, these powers in the same
universe are not unique in kind but only in degree. Players do not have to fight to gain points and levels before
they can build simple objects and create new areas of the game universe. Novice players on a social MUD are able to
do these things. They do not have
access to the actual computer files of the game program, but they have access
to a
library of commands that
allow them to create and describe objects and areas, and make them behave in
certain ways in response to input from other players. The rank of Wizard is not dependant upon gainingpoints, and
elevation to this rank is at the discretion of the Gods. Players of these MUDs
are, as were the original players of TinyMUD, encouraged to interact with and extend
the virtual environment rather than compete within it.
In this thesis I have chosen
to concentrate on four MUDs representing four different environments and the
two different styles of MUD, although I shall refer briefly to other
systems. These four MUDs are known as
LambdaMOO, FurryMUCK, Revenge of the End of the Line and JennyMUSH.[15] The first is a social-style MUD, set in a
rambling
mansion. The second, also a social MUD, involves
players in a world in which each individual adopts the persona of an
anthropomorphised animal. Revenge of
the End of the Line (or EOTL as its players refer to it) is an adventure-style
MUD, and JennyMUSH is a social MUD used as a virtual support centre by
survivors of sexual assault. I have
chosen to concentrate on these MUDs because each lends itself to a discussion
of virtual reality from a different perspective. LambdaMOO, which of the three
most nearly attempts to recreate reality inside virtuality--the core of
the LambdaMOO mansion is a virtual
recreation of the God's actual home--provides an insight into changed
communicative and cultural practices.
EOTL, with its competitive and hierarchical structures, shows the
evolution of power and social control in cyberspatial environments, as does a
painful episode on JennyMUSH.
FurryMUCK, with its emphasis on anthropomorphic characters lends itself
to an exploration of the fate of the human body and human
identity inside virtual
realities.
[1] The story presented in this chapter is
based, unless otherwise noted, on information contained in Tracey L.
Laquey, “The User's Directory of
Computer Networks” (Massachusetts: Digital Press, 1990), Steven Levy, Hackers:
“Heroes of the Computer Revolution” (New York: Dell, 1984), and Timothy Trainor
and Diane Krasnewich, “Computers!” (New York: Mitchell, 1989), as well as on
anecdotes related to me by some of the 'hackers' in the Computer Science
Department and Electrical Engineering Faculty at Melbourne University. This history is by no means perfect--many of
my sources, and the memories of the people who lived through these times,
contradict each other. In writing this
section I have tried to reconcile these differences and produce a narrative
that accounts as far as possible for the differences amongst my sources.
[2] The Tech Model Railroad Club featured
heavily in Levy, particularly in Chapter One.
[3] The invention of Spacewar is detailed in
Chapter Three of Levy.
[4] This history of computer networking and the
Internet is based on: Philip Leverton and Ross Millward, “Technical note 82:
Using the UNIX Mail System” (Melbourne: Melbourne University Computing
Services, 1989); a USENET article on the history of UNIX written by Pierre
Lewis (Newsgroup: comp.unix.questions, Subject: A very brief look at Unix
history, From: "Pierre (P.) Lewis" <lew@bnr.ca> Date: Fri
Jan 8 14:56:22 EST 1993); "The
Strange History of the Internet," an article by Bruce Sterling published
in the “!mindgun” 'zine produced by the Society for Digital Redistribution
(originally published in the February 1993 issue of “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction”); and information in the works by Laquey and
Levy detailed above.
[5] This paragraph is based on information
contained in Sterling.
[6] Information on the early development of
USENET has been taken from articles by Gene Spafford and Brian Reid which are
regularly posted to the USENET group news.answers.
[7] My sources for this history include
first-hand accounts related to me in electronic mail by Richard Bartle, Alan
Klietz, Alan Cox, Jim Aspnes and Jim Finnis, information included in Levy
(especially Chapters Three and Seven), user documentation included with the
AberMUD, TinyMUD and LPMUD programs, and postings made to the Usenet newsgroup
rec.games.mud in response to a query from Amy Bruckman.
[8] Levy, 141.
[9] See Levy, 138-144 for more details on the
invention of Adventure.
[10] This anecdote has been
taken from a USENET article with the following headers: From: alberti@mudhoney.micro.umn.edu (Albatross); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud;
Subject: Re: history: VMS Monster, Sceptre of Goth; Date: 23 Mar 92 22:01:55
GMT.
[11] The operating system
under which DUNGEN ran only allowed filenames to be a maximum of six letters
long, thus the particular spelling of the name.
[12] Some would insist that
MUD has come to stand for Multi Undergraduate Destroyer, in recognition of the
number of students who may have failed their classes due to too much time spent
MUDding.
[13] PMCMOO is an off-shoot
of the electronic journal “Postmodern Culture”.
[14] The titles given to
those who run and administrate the MUD vary from system to system. Since they
are by far the most commonly used of all titles, I have chosen to use the term 'God'
to refer to the person running the MUD program, and 'Wizard' to refer to those
players who have been given administrative powers by the God.
[15] These MUDs may be
connected to from any computer on the Internet by using the 'telnet' command or
program. The Internet address for
LambdaMOO is lambda.parc.xerox.com (or 192.216.54.2) and the port number is
8888. The address for FurryMUCK is
sncils.snc.edu (138.74.0.10), port number 8888. Revenge of the End of the Line can be found at mud.stanford.edu
(36.21.0.99), port 2010. JennyMUSH's administrator has asked me to withhold
information on how to connect to that MUD.
Chapter
One: Communication and Cultural Context
For words to have a shared
meaning they must be given a context. Stripped of the historical, environmental
and social contexts in which they have evolved and in which they are used,
words have little meaning. It is
context that creates meaning and allows us to act. The information on which we
decide which aspects of our systems of social conduct are appropriate to our
circumstances lie in cultural contexts rather than in the shape and sound of
words alone. In interacting with other
people, we rely on non-verbal information to delineate a context for our own
contributions. "Being
cultured," says Greg Dening, "we are experts in our semiotics... we
read sign and symbol [and] codify a thousand words in a gesture".[1] We do not need to be told that we are at a
wedding, and should be quiet during the ceremony, in order to enact the code of
etiquette that our culture reserves for such an occasion. Words alone do not express or define the full extent of our cultural and
interpersonal play. The greater part of
our interaction is expressed through signs and symbols--in tone and nuance, in
styles of dress and handwriting, in postures and facial expressions, in appeals
to rules and traditions. The words
themselves tell only half the story--it is their presentation that completes
the picture.
Human communication is never
merely a matter of words, much less so is human culture. This is something that we all take for
granted—yet the virtual environments that are the subject of this study are a
product of words, of pure text. Because
of this, these virtual places subvert many of our assumptions about the
practice of interactive communication.
MUD players are unable to rely on conventions of gesture and nuances of
tone to make sense of one another. Nevertheless, despite the absence of these
familiar channels of interpersonal meaning, players do not fail to make sense
of each other. On the contrary, MUD
environments are extremely culturally rich, and communication between MUD
players is often highly emotionally charged.
Although they cannot see, hear or touch one another, MUD players have
developed ways to convey shades of expression that would usually be transmitted
through these senses. Their means of expression are severely limited by the
technology on which MUDs are based, but instead of allowing that to restrict
the
content of their
communication they have devised methods of incorporating socio-emotional
context cues into pure text. They use text, seemingly such a restrictive
medium, to make up for what they lack in physical presence. On MUDs, social presence is divorced from
physical presence, a phenomenon that refutes many of the assumptions that have
in the past been made about the ideal richness of face-to-face
interaction. On MUDs, text replaces
gesture, and even becomes gestural itself.
MUDs show none of the four
distinctive features Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire have described
computer-mediated communication as having: an absence of regulating feedback,
dramaturgical weakness, few social status cues and social anonymity.[2] Despite being textually based, MUDs are
sites for social interaction and cultural meaning. The virtual worlds created with MUD software are dramaturgically
and socially rich, and MUD players have been able to devise means of
communicating social context cues through the textual medium. The subject of this first chapter is the
methods which MUD systems and MUD players use to provide themselves with a
social context and a social presence.
1)
Making Sense of the World
Each MUD system begins as a
blank space. It is nothing more than a
set of commands and possibilities. A MUD
program is, in essence, a set of tools that can be used to create a
socio-cultural environment. It is this that sets MUDs apart from other
textually based computer-mediated communication tools. The latter merely provide an interface that
separates what one person types from that of another, and so allows a form of
written conversation. MUDs, by contrast, allow the depiction of a physical
environment which can be laden with cultural and communicative meaning. They allow imagination and creativity to furnish
the void of cyberspace with socially significant indicators. It is this that
makes a MUD system a form of virtual reality.
The first step in the use of a MUD program is the creation of a MUD
world and the peopling of it. Those
setting up the program must act as their titles suggest, as Gods and
Wizards. They must create the
universe--they must, to invoke a MUD command, '@create light.'
The basic MUD program,
whether MUSH or LPMUD or any other variety, consists of a number of tools and
commands to be used to create a database of textually described 'objects', as
they are called. The objects created
are symbolically linked--in both the technical and the cultural sense--to
create the textual illusion of a world.
Database entries representing spaces are linked together such that one
can be accessed from the other by using a command such as 'out' or
'north'. Entries representing things
such as chairs or swords or spaceships are placed within these virtual spaces,
and given properties that allow them to be manipulated by players. Lastly, entries representing the players
themselves are set free to roam and interact with these spaces and things, and
often to create more of them.
Together, these three types
of objects--places, things and people-- make up the context that the MUD
community operates within. As Kiesler,
Siegel, and McGuire have suggested, the chief problem faced by electronic
interlocutors is the "dramaturgical weakness of electronic media".[3] To compensate for this lack in the medium, players
must become actors and must provide their own scenery. Imagination must take
the place of physical reality, and must be manifested in forms accessible to
players on the system. Each object in
the MUD universe--each person, each place, each thing--an be given a
description by its creator. This
description can be as simple or as complex as the creator wishes, and can be
viewed by every other player by use of the 'look' command. When a player connects to a MUD through the
computer network, he or she is immediately provided with a textual
manifestation of the MUD's virtual environment. On LambdaMOO, the player will seem to enter the coat closet in
the sprawling house which is at the core of the LambdaMOO world:
The Coat Closet
The closet is a dark, cramped space. It appears to be very crowded in here; you
keep bumping into what feels like coats, boots, and other people (apparently
sleeping). One useful thing that you've
discovered in your bumbling about is a metal doorknob set at waist level into what
might be a door. Don't forget to take a look at the newspaper. Type 'news' to see it. Type '@tutorial' for
an introduction to basic MOOing. Please
read and understand 'help manners'
before leaving The Coat Closet.
This coat closet is a
remarkable place. It may be small and
cramped, but it provides an initial point of reference in the LambdaMOO world
and it furnishes the newcomer with a host of information about the cultural
nature of the world he or she has entered.
Most if not all MUDs are provided with such an anteroom. It is often a cramped, dark place, and
rarely an open space containing a great many objects to distract or disorient
the newcomer. Closets, cracks under
bandstands, teleportation rooms and hotel hallways--to suggest just a few of
the anterooms on a few of the MUDs I have visited--might not seem especially
inviting places in the actual world, but on textually represented virtual
worlds they provide a space in which players may become accustomed to the
virtual environment. These spaces are
sparsely furnished; they do not overload the newcomer with information. At the same time they provide the
reassurance of
others' virtual presence,
most often in the form of sleeping bodies, and they allow the player to take a
virtual breath before stepping out into the main area of the virtual
landscape. Most importantly, many MUD
anterooms contain pointers to helpful information and rules. LambdaMOO novices
are directed to a newspaper, which will tell them
about recent events on the
MUD, a tutorial, which will tell them how to interact with the virtual universe
on a technical level, and some advice on etiquette, which will tell them how
they should interact socially on LambdaMOO.
Once ready, LambdaMOO
newcomers may decide to open the closet door and venture into the greater part
of the virtual world. They will then
find themselves in the living room:
The Living Room
It is very bright, open, and airy here, with large
plate-glass windows looking southward over the pool to the gardens beyond. On
the north wall, there is a rough stonework fireplace. The east and west walls are almost completely covered with large, well-stocked bookcases. An exit in the northwest corner leads to the
kitchen and, in a more northerly direction, to the entrance hall. The door into
the coat closet is at the north end of the east wall, and at the south end is a
sliding glass door leading out onto a wooden deck. There are two sets of couches, one clustered around the fireplace
and one with a view out the windows. You see Cockatoo, README for New MOOers, a
fireplace, a newspaper, Welcome Poster, LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction, The
Daily Whale, a map of LambdaHouse, The Carpet, The Birthday Machine, lag meter,
and Helpful Person Finder here. Guinevere, jane, MadHatter, Fred, Obvious,
Alex, jean-luc, tureshta, Bullet_the_Blue, Daneel, KingSolomon, lena, Laurel,
petrify, Ginger, and Groo are here.[4]
The importance of anterooms
on MUDs becomes clearer in the light of the quantity of information which
entrance into more dynamic areas elicits.
The LambdaMOO living room is a social and virtually physical nexus. From this point players of the system may
enter an ever increasing number of virtual places. The main body of the living room's description details the places
that can be visited from that room.
Having come this far, most novice players are provided with a strong sense of physical context, which provides
a sense of the conceptual limitations and possibilities of the virtual world.
Physical context is a dimension of social context; place and time are as much
loaded with cultural meaning as are dress and gesture. LambdaMOO provides the
place, and makes it non-threatening and comfortable. With fireplaces and couches, books, sunlight, fresh air and
pool-side views, the LambdaMOO house is definitely a desirable residence. It
is a place to relax and chat, and that is exactly what people do in it.
Along with virtually
physical centrality, the living room provides social centrality. It is the main meeting place for LambdaMOO
inhabitants. It is quite likely the
first port of call for newcomers seeking to find a social niche in the virtual
setting. From LambdaMOO's beginning,
the living room was presented in such a way as to offer a sense of social
orientation to newcomers. Fixtures in
the room included a simple map of the main areas of the ever-growing
LambdaHouse, a welcome
poster and a device enabling the newcomer to get in touch with players
designated as 'Helpful People' willing to answer questions and provide aid to
the confused. As LambdaMOO has evolved,
its denizens have added to this list of fixtures. The more popular additions have included a device for registering
one's
birthdate and finding out
the birthdates of other players, as well as the LambdaMOO newspapers, which are
commonly filled with social notes, gossip, announcements and opinions. All of these objects, and the functions they
perform, create LambdaMOO as a space held together by interpersonal sociality. Birthdays are remembered and commemorated. Help is easy to find, and
clearly advertised. All newcomers are
offered a welcome, and the day-to-day social lives of LambdaMOO denizens are
reported and commented upon.
I have been unable to find a
MUD that does not provide the player with both an anteroom and a central social
nexus point, each room containing information about the physical and social
context of the MUD. The nature of that
context differs widely between MUDs.
Some, such as LambdaMOO, give an impression of warmth and friendliness.
Others might be competitive and dangerous, or might offer and adventure and
challenge. The information transmitted
differs, but not the method of transmission.
MUDs create their own context out of words. The cues normally associated with sight and sound and touch are
provided through description. The
information with which newcomers are met allows them imaginatively to place
themselves within the virtual world, and encourages them to treat these textual
cues as
if they were real. This information provides a common basis for
interaction between players.
2)
Making Sense of Each Other
The MUD system provides
players with a stage, but it does not provide them with a script. Players choose their own actions within the
context created by the MUD universe.
They are not technically dictated to by the MUD, but are instead given
tools which enable them to act and speak virtually. Interaction on social-style MUDs such as LambdaMOO is carried out
through the use of five commands known as 'say', 'pose', 'whisper', 'page' and
'page-pose'.[5] Each of these commands
allows communicative information to be channelled in different ways. The 'say', 'pose' and 'whisper' commands are
used between players in the same virtual space. If a player in the living room, who might be called Fred, types
'say Hi there!' then all the players in the living room will see that:
Fred says, "Hi
there!"
If Fred then types, 'pose
grins amiably' then all those in the room will see:
Fred grins amiably.
The pose command can also be
used to mix actions and utterances together.[6] If Fred were to type, 'pose hugs Ginger warmly and says,
"It's great to see you again!" ' those in the living room, including
a character named Ginger, would see:
Fred hugs
Ginger warmly and says, "It's great to see you again!"
If, however, Fred wished to
communicate only with Ginger, he might choose to use the whisper command. Typing 'whisper Hi there! to Ginger' will
cause Ginger, and only Ginger, to receive the following:
Fred
whispers, "Hi there!" to you.
Even if Ginger were not in
the same virtual room as Fred, he could still communicate with her. The page and page-pose commands allow the
same function as do say and pose but allow messages or virtual actions to be sent
to players in other virtual rooms. The
results of these commands appear this way:
Fred
pages, "Hi there!" to you.
and
In a
page-pose to you, Fred grins amiably.
Described baldly, this suite
of commands seems simplistic. They are,
however, the tools with which social presence is formed on MUDs and through
which social interaction is made possible.
They may be simple, but they are immensely flexible. Players can say, whisper or page whatever
they choose to, and may pose or page-pose any action they wish to take. There is no technical limit to what can be
expressed, although as I shall describe later, conventions have arisen on MUDs
which delimit the acceptability of various kinds and subjects of communication.
By contrast, players of
adventure style MUDs, while having access to commands such as whisper and page,
are able to emote only in tightly controlled circumstances. The actions taken by players on adventure
MUDs form part of a never-ending narrative, a story in which enemies are
killed, and treasure and power are won.
Actions are taken not only within a social context but within the
context of the MUD's narrative. To
allow players to pose such lines as 'Ginger wields a sword of Ultimate
Destruction,' or, 'Fred gives you 1000 gold coins,' would destroy the integrity
of that narrative. It is only in
special places in the MUD world, commonly known as 'emote rooms', that players
of adventure systems are able to use emote commands; elsewhere they are given
access to a suite of commands that enable specific actions. Thus, for instance, on Revenge of the End of
the Line, if Fred were to type 'french Ginger', Ginger would see:
Fred
gives you a deep and passionate kiss...
It seems
to take forever...
Adventure MUD systems
commonly provide players with several hundreds of these commands, typically
divided into verb and adverb categories. By combining words from each category
players are able to express actions and feelings, an exercise that demands
skill and memory. Though less versatile than the free poses allowed players of
social MUDs, verb and adverb commands are heavily used. Thomas Gerstner, who is associated with an
adventure-style MUD named 'Nemesis',
recently circulated the results of a tally showing how many times each command
was used. Over a period of 250 days,
and with an average of twenty players connected at all times, players on
Nemesis invoked a 'feeling' command every thirty seconds. The most popular commands were:
Verbs:
|
smile |
89089 |
bow |
50138 |
shake |
46312 |
|
greet |
46152 |
grin |
46046 |
nod |
42385 |
|
laugh |
34063 |
wave |
30875 |
giggle |
20145 |
|
sigh |
19222 |
hug |
19220 |
wait |
13550 |
|
kiss |
12212 |
shrug |
10849 |
kick |
9504 |
|
poke |
9307 |
chuckle |
7401 |
french |
6773 |
Adverbs:
|
happily |
5057 |
demonically |
3763 |
evilly |
3662 |
|
sadly |
2027 |
smilingly |
1864 |
deeply |
1458 |
|
passionately |
1143 |
knowingly |
1119 |
insanely |
1096 |
|
erotically |
950 |
inanely |
926 |
warmly |
905 |
|
loudly |
891 |
friendly |
834 |
lovingly |
797 |
[7]
As can be seen, the vast
majority of the virtual actions taken are those which might be expected to
invoke and sustain social meaning between players. The average Nemesis player smiles at his or her fellows eighteen
times a day, and hugs them four times a day.
These commands steer players toward the creation of social contexts and
the formation of social networks. The
actions which players may take, and the emotions they may express, are
delimited by the commands available to
them; yet at the same time these commands suggest to players the emotional and
social possibilities open to them.
It is tempting to draw
parallels between MUDs and novels or plays. The results of the pose, say and
feeling commands cause interaction between players to resemble these literary
forms superficially, and the social dimension of MUDs can be viewed as a
multi-authored interactive text.
However, despite this possibility, MUD sessions do not truly resemble
scripts or books. The language is
simply not the same. It is more dynamic
and less carefully constructed.
Interaction
on a MUD is, after all,
interactive, synchronous and ephemeral. Although sessions may be recorded using
computer programs designed for the purpose, MUD interaction is not designed for
an audience uninvolved in it. This
interaction is not enacted to be read as an artefact, but to be experienced
subjectively. It is not a text but a
context. Virtual interaction loses
emotional and social meaning when transposed to a computer file and
re-read. The pauses, breaks,
disjunctions, speed and
timing of virtual conversations are lost in such transposition, and such
factors are a crucial signifier of meaning and context on MUDs.
Language on MUDs is not
merely a hybrid between written and spoken language, though it contains
elements of both. The language used by
MUD players contains of its own conventions and textual gestures. It rarely allows any tense but the present,
with all actions and feelings crammed into that one highly charged tense. The present tense allows presence and
dynamism. Each moment on a MUD is a
matter of existent experience, not recollection. It is immediate, and in it have evolved grammatical forms that
stress this immediacy. The most common
of these forms is known as 'verbverbing'.
This practice is widespread, and is used on all MUDs in which it is possible
to do so.[8] It simply involves the
double repetition of actions:
Fred hughugs Ginger.
Ginger nodnods to Laurence.
Laurence gringrins at Vivien.
In this instance, the
linguistic practices found on MUD metaphorically mimic social practices. The tense repetitive action is analogous to
the twitching of muscle tissue. In actuality,
one does not merely grin or hug or nod in one single fluid motion. Each action is a compound of many
contractions and relaxations of muscles, and movements of limbs. 'Nodnod' is a textual form that comes far
closer to the actual act of nodding than does the simple word 'nod'. It is an
immediate form of the participle 'nodding'.
It is a continuing verb, a representation of an action which overlaps
more
than one point in time.
MUD language does not employ
the same degrees of respect for textual conventions as do other forms of
written language. MUD players have at
their command a keyboard that allows them to employ a finite set of
characters--the alphabet, numbers, punctuation signs, and symbols such as % and
&. Written language ascribes various
rules to the use of these characters, and assigns each character a certain
place and meaning. Ampersands,
percentage signs and exclamation marks all have their assigned tasks in written
texts. Capitalised and lower case
letters are called into action in various well-known circumstances. Few written
texts break with these conventions.
Most writers begin sentences with capital letters, end questions with
question marks and use percentage and hash signs only when referring to
numbers. MUD players, in common with
users of other computer-mediated communication systems, do not hold with these
conventions. For them, the standard
symbols and signs available on a computer keyboard are tools to be called into
uses far removed from those known to traditional grammarians. Commonly known as 'smileys' or 'emoticons',
MUD players employ alphanumeric characters and punctuation symbols to create
strings of highly emotively charged keyboard art:[9]
:-)
or :) a smiling face
;-)
or ;) a winking, smiling face
:-(
or :( unhappy face, or
'unsmiley'
:-(*) someone about to throw up
8-) someone wearing glasses
:-P someone sticking out their
tongue
>:-O someone screaming in fright,
their hair standing on end
:-& someone whose lips are
sealed
*!#*!^*&:-) a schizophrenic!
'Smileys', or 'emoticons'
are pictographs made up of keyboard symbols.
They are at once extremely simple and highly complex. They provide a form of shorthand for the
depiction of physical condition. In a few keystrokes, MUD players can provide
their fellows with a far more graphic and dynamic--though perhaps not as finely
shaded-- depiction of their feelings and actions than a textual description
could have furnished. Emoticons are
legion on MUDs. Although the most
commonly used is the plain smiling face--used to denote pleasure or amusement,
or to soften a sarcastic comment--MUD players continually develop their own
emoticons, adapting the symbols available on the standard keyboard to create
minute and essentially ephemeral pieces of textual art to represent their own
virtual actions and responses. This
method of presenting textual characters as representations of physical action
can be confusing to the
uninitiated. Interpreting them demands not only
familiarity but skill and imagination.
Many emoticons are easy to interpret with a little practice. Others are more obscure, but at the same
time all the more evocative and affective once their obscurity has been
explained. The 'schizophrenic' smiley,
while seeming a jumbled mess to the uninitiated, offers both humour and meaning
to those in the know.
On MUDs non-verbal cues are
not apparent. Words are all that are
available to players, and they must compress the richness of meaning that we
rely on to supplement and make a context for words into words themselves. Language on MUDs serves not only as a
vehicle for communication but as the context for that communication. There are no external referents in the game
world--nothing to be seen or heard or touched.
All there is are words, which serve both to define and represent the
simulated environment. Language use on
MUDs is used and developed so that words can become their own referents and
form their own context without immediate external support. MUD culture is one
which relies on the
languages used by the wider community, but is not restricted to those
languages--players on MUD systems have developed their own ways of using words
to express what we normally do not demand that language express.
"Culture," suggest
Van Maanen and Barley, "can be understood as a set of solutions devised by
a group of people to meet specific problems posed by situations they face in
common."[10] In this sense culture
consists of a set of behaviours and rules which give a shared significance to
common experiences and problems.
Players of MUD systems are commonly faced by the problems inherent in
the medium's reduction to pure text, and its annihilation of conventional models of social interaction
based on physical proximity. The
measures which players of MUD systems have devised to meet their common
problems are the markers of their common culture. They have devised systems of symbolism and textual significance
which enable them to achieve understanding despite the absence of conventional
social context cues. With these tools MUD players are able to
read between the lines of text which make up their virtual world, a skill that is all the more challenging and all
the more crucial in such an environment.
This shared ability allows me to think of the players of a MUD as
sharing a common culture, and this common culture allows MUD
players to engage in
activities that serve to bind them together as a community.
Just as building and
describing commands allow players to create a physical context to act within,
commands for communication allow players to create a social context. The pose and feeling commands in particular
offer players a medium through which to substitute for the non-verbal cues that
we take for granted in everyday life.
By using them players may shrug, laugh, smile demonically, frown in
anger, and offer hugs and kisses. By
using each of these commands MUD players are able to string a web of
communication which ties each player to a social and virtually physical context,
a shared web of verbal and textual significances that are substitutes for, and
yet distinct from, the shared networks of meaning of the wider community. This unique method of communicating is the
set of solutions devised by MUD players to meet the specific problems that they
face, and which bind them into a common culture.
3)
Disinhibition and Social Experience
If all computer-mediated
communication systems can be said to have one single unifying effect upon human
behaviour it is that usage tends to cause the user to become less inhibited. Although they often disagree on the effects
of such lack of inhibition, researchers of human behaviour on these systems
have often noted that players tend to behave more freely than they would in
face-to-face encounters. Sproull and Kiesler describe computer-mediated
behaviour as "relatively uninhibited and nonconforming."[11] Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire have observed
that "people in computer-mediated groups were more uninhibited than they
were in face-to-face groups."[12] The forms that this disinhibition takes
differ from one researcher's experience to that of the next. Some have seen an increase in examples of
aggressive and disrespectful behaviour; others have noted increases in
friendliness and intimacy. Behaviour on
MUDs conforms to these observations. Players do seem to be less inhibited by
conventions seen in everyday life. They
can be seen to be both more intimate and more hostile with each other than
would be socially acceptable in everyday life, particularly when considering
that hostility or intimacy may be shown among players who are strangers to one
another.
However, being disinhibited
is not the same as being uninhibited.
MUD players experience a lowering of social inhibitions; they do not
experience the annihilation of them. The
social environments found on MUDs are not chaotic, or even anarchic. There is indeed no moment on a MUD in which
players are not enmeshed within a web of social rules and expectations.
Descriptions, communicative commands and specialised language and
textual forms enable the social understandings which link people together and
allow the evolution and transmission of social norms. Such norms have arisen on MUDs, and as I will show in Chapter
Two, so have social structures and methods of social control. However, these webs of meaning and control
are not as immediately apparent on MUDs as they might be in actual life.
Substitutes for the contexts and atmospheres that we rely on to regulate and
define our behaviour may have been developed on MUDs, but it takes time for
players to learn to recognise and to adopt these substitutes. Consequently, in the initial stages of play,
the virtual environment may seem to be a place where etiquette has been
replaced by chaos, and some players do seem to assume that within the confines
of the MUD anything goes. This initial
tendency toward uninhibited behaviour has influenced the conventions that have
developed on MUDs. It has resulted in behaviours which although not chaotic, do
differ from the conventions we live with in actual life, and they may be
described as disinhibited. Out of this
have arisen a set of social behaviours in which it may be acceptable to talk to
strangers, but not one in which the patterns of that talk are not subject to
linguistic and cultural influences.
The nature of the MUD
program itself encourages disinhibition.
The behavioural influence of the virtual environment is not simply
permissive; it encourages. Crucial to
the fostering of disinhibition is the fact that MUD players are essentially
anonymous. They need not be known to
others by their real, legal names. They
may instead choose to be known by any variety of name or nickname. Many choose to use conventional first names;
many others adopt far more evocative and inventive pseudonyms. Let's return to the description of the
LambdaMOO living room which was quoted earlier. At the end of the description, a list of players situated in that
room was given:
Guinevere, jane,
MadHatter, Fred, Obvious, Alex, jean-luc, tureshta, Bullet_the_Blue, Daneel,
KingSolomon, lena, Laurel, petrify, Ginger, and Groo are here.
The information which one
player can gain about others on a MUD consists of the names by which they
choose to be known and the ways in which they choose to describe
themselves. All that can be known about
a player is what he or she chooses to disclose, and every item of information
is subject to change.[13]
The immediate effect of this
pseudonymity is to provide players with a feeling of safety. Protected by computer terminals and separated
by distances of often thousands of kilometres, players are aware that the
likelihood of any of their fellows being able to affect their 'real lives' is
minimal. There is little chance of a
virtual action being met with an actual response. No one can be embarrassed or exposed or laughed at or hurt in
their day-to-day lives. There are no
sticks or stones to contend with, and although words may hurt, players can
always resort to the off-switch on their computer. This feeling of safety holds true for players of many Internet
services. The mere fact of distance
offers protection; pseudonymity strengthens this to make MUDs seem one of the
safest possible social environments. This
sense of safety enables MUD
players to express greater intimacy toward each other than might be acceptable
in everyday life.
Curtis has described
increased intimacy on MUDs as a variety of 'shipboard syndrome,' the result of
apparent proximity and the feeling that interlocutors may never meet in
everyday life.[14] Since they have
little opportunity to interfere with each other's everyday lives the demands of
social self-preservation need not inhibit them. MUDs are a world unto
themselves, and virtual ships that pass in the virtual night feel little need
to anchor themselves in emotional responsibility--at least initially. Moreover, the MUD community depends on a
richness of communication and the creation of social context. The system itself encourages MUD players to
become intimate- -or at least to play at intimacy. MUD systems, like any other, abhor a vacuum, and a vacuum on a
MUD is seen in a lack of textual
exchanges. The MUD universe functions only while
players are willing to elicit text from the program and from each other, and
are willing to volunteer their own contributions. Communication is necessary to the existence of the MUD and
successful MUDs are likely to see a great deal of communication between
players, which can then form a basis for
familiarity and
intimacy. Players on MUDs are likely to
be disposed to feel that intimacy with fellow players is a harmless activity,
and so be willing to take advantage of those aspects of MUDs that encourage
intimacy.
The tendency toward
increased intimacy which can be seen on MUDs facilitates the formation of
strong personal attachments. Hiltz and
Turoff have noted that some participants in computer-mediated communication
systems "come to feel that their very best and closest friends are members
of their electronic group, whom they seldom or never see."[15] That this can become so depends on the
degree to which players are willing to suspend the usual rules of social self-
preservation, and open up to each other.
By assuming that the dangers associated with intimacy--the possibility of
hurt and embarrassment-- can be avoided on MUDs, players can allow themselves
to become very close to one another.
The safety of MUD friendships increases their worth, and players can,
ironically, become extremely dependant upon such relationships. The lack of factors inhibiting intimacy, and
the presence of factors encouraging it, can induce deep feelings of attachment
in players toward their virtual friends:
I don't care how much people say they are, muds are
not just games, they are *real*!!! My mud friends are my best friends, their
the people who like me most in the entire world. Maybe the only people who
do...
They are my family, they are not just some dumb
game..... [16]
Some of these virtual
friendships go beyond the platonic. MUD
romances are a well established institution, held together by a number of tools
and rituals. MUD lovers use the
commands with which the MUD system provides them to transform the virtual stage
into a set designed to express and uphold their feelings for one another. On social MUDs, the most common action taken
by such partners is to set up virtual house together. They quite literally create a home, using the MUD program to
arrange textual information in a way that simulates a physical structure which
they can then share and invite others to share. Tokens are often exchanged, virtual representations of flowers
and rings being attached to a player's virtual manifestation through the
manipulation of the textual description of the character. More
technically gifted players
may create objects, which other players can interact with, that textually mimic
the behaviour of pets and children.
These relationships may even be virtually consummated through 'tinysex',
a form of co-written interactive erotica.[17]
Such relationships can be
taken quite seriously by those who engage in them. The prevalence of the virtual wedding attests both to the extent
to which players attempt to recreate the trappings of actual romances in their
virtual interactions, and to the ways in which the entire community of players
on a MUD serve to act as witness for such
attachments. MUD weddings are simple in conception. The virtual bride and groom are usually
married by another player who virtually reads, and actually types, the wedding
ceremony. Textual descriptions of
rings, or other tokens, are exchanged along with the vows. The wedding is usually attended by a number
of fellow players, whose
participation in the event
strengthens its imaginative reality in the shared minds of the MUD
community. The forthcoming nuptials are
often publicised in the communications media, such as newspapers, which are
internal to the MUD. Some MUD systems,
such as the Revenge of the End of the Line, have added technical support for
their players'
emotional attachments:
For those loving couples who wish to discover the
joys of matrimony, the command to get married is "marry
<person>". BOTH parties must
do the command. We don't believe in
shotgun weddings or polygamy here (tho same-gender marriages are fine with us).
To get a list of all the lucky couples who got married on EotL, simply type
"mlist"; or, if you prefer to view only a certain range within the
list, type "mlist <number> <number>". If you wish to find
out the marital status of a particular player, use "mquery
<name>". For married persons who have lost their rings (in combat or
any other way), they can get a new ring with the "replace" command.
These relationships should
not be thought of as emotionally impoverished.
It may be only virtual actions that are being played out, but real emotions
can be involved. In some cases the MUD
romance may develop into a real life relationship, and actual marriages have
been formed out of those on MUDs:
I met Mark, who I'm
now married to, on a MUD. When I first met him I was living on the West coast [of
the United States] and he was on the East Coast. I was really new to MUDs, really clueless, and he gave me a lot
of help. He was teaching me how to
build stuff, and he let me start building off of this castle he'd built. We
spent a lot of time chatting and we got closer and closer. It was really good--I could tell him
anything and he was really supportive.
We ended up building this castle together and everyone on the MUD treated
us like a couple. I could tell that he
was interested in me, and at first I was reluctant to get involved but he was
so nice and he said that he really loved me and in the end we had this MUD
marriage. It was so beautiful--i ]
burst into tears in real life half way through it! After a few months I had the
chance to visit the East coast, and we met while I was there. He was different from what I'd expected,
mostly in the way he looked, but we really got along well, and I decided that I
really did love him. He ended up
getting a transfer to near where I lived and we got married last year. [18]
Whether or not an individual
romance is carried over into everyday life, it is important to appreciate that
many MUD lovers do not feel that their relationships are shallow or
inconsequential. They can be very important
to those involved in them, and much effort can be expended in creating an
environment that reflects the feelings of the players. The castle built by the two players
described above acted as a virtually physical affirmation of their
emotions. Far from being unsatisfactory
for "'more interpersonally involving communication tasks, such as getting
to know someone", as Hiemstra describes some researchers of
computer-mediated communication as having characterised the medium, MUD systems
are the stage for strong emotional bonds, both romantic and platonic.[19]
Romances and deep
friendships display MUD relationships at their most idyllic, but the lowering
of inhibition seen on MUDs has another side. The disinhibiting effects of
relative anonymity and physical safety in the virtual environment can encourage
the enactment of aggressive and abusive behaviours, and, as I will describe in
the following chapter,
it is at this point that
overt forms of social control which have developed on MUDs come into play. The seeming safety of MUDs can lead some
players to use them as a forum for the expression of hostility. MUD systems can
"reduce self-consciousness and promote intimacy" but they can also
lead players to feel free to express anger and hatred.[20] This can take the form of 'flaming', a
phenomenon of computer-mediated communication which has been characterised as
the gratuitous and uninhibited expression of "remarks containing swearing,
insults, name calling, and hostile comments."[21] The anonymity of the player behind the pseudonymous
character makes the possibility of everyday punishments appear to be
limited. The safety of the medium
causes the sanction of physical violence to appear
irrelevant to virtual
actions, although, as I shall discuss further on, social sanctions are present
and often in a textual form that apes physical violence. Nevertheless, the safety of anonymous
expression of hostilities and obscenities that would otherwise incur social
sanctions encourages some people to use MUDs as a forum for airing their resentment
of individuals or groups in a blatantly uninhibited manner.
In some cases harassment of
individual players occurs. A harassed
individual may face repeated messages from the harasser, and be the object of
derogatory descriptions written into objects created purely for that
purpose--the virtually physical context can be made to reflect an individual's
feelings of hostility as easily as those of intimacy and affection. These electronic monuments to hate can be as
upsetting and hurtful to players as the more positive relationships can be
sources of support and happiness.
Although insults relayed over MUDs may be brushed off just as they may
be in actual life, MUDs also provide unique opportunities for personal attacks.
The most striking example of
virtual violence that I have come across took place on JennyMUSH. JennyMUSH is a virtual help centre for
people who have experienced sexual assault or abuse. Users of this MUSH share a strong bond in their common trauma,
and for many of them the MUSH provides their only source of community
support. At its
happiest, JennyMUSH offers a
tremendous example of how MUD programs can be used as valuable social
tools. The system was designed with
this aim in mind. The chief administrator,
or God, of the MUSH is a psychology student whose field of interest is the
treatment of survivors of assault and abuse, and the university that she
attends fully supports the JennyMUSH project.
This official support ensures some degree of security for users of the
system, who can be sure that the MUSH will remain in stable existence.
Nevertheless, official
support cannot ensure safety from the less positive aspects of the virtual
environment. A single user of JennyMUSH
was able to subvert the delicate social balance of the system by using both
technical and social means to enact anonymously what amounted to virtual
rape. Two weeks after being assigned a
character, a user of the system used the MUD's commands to transform him or
herself into a virtual manifestation of every other user's fears. This user changed 'her' initial virtual
gender to male, 'his' virtual name to 'Daddy', and then used the special
'shout'
command to send messages to
every other user connected to the MUD.[22] He described virtual assaults in
graphic and violent terms. At the time
at which this began, none of the MUD's administrators, or Wizards, were
connected to the system, a fact that may well have been taken into account by
the user. For almost half an hour, the
user continued to send obscene messages to others. During that time, some of his victims logged out of the system,
taking the simplest course to nullify the attack. Those who remained transported their virtual personas to the same
locale as that of their attacker. Many
pleaded with him to stop, many threatened him, but they were powerless to
prevent his attacks.
At the end of that half
hour, one of the Wizards connected to the system. He found twelve users connected to the system, all congregated in
one place. On transporting himself to that
place, he found eleven of those users being obscenely taunted by the twelfth.
Quickly realising what was going on, the Wizard took a kind of vengeance upon
the erring player that is only possible in virtual reality. He took control of the player's virtual
manifestation, took away from him the ability to communicate, changed his name
to 'Vermin' and changed his description to the following:
This is the lowest
scum, the most pathetic dismal object which a human being can become.
What had preceded had been
painful and ugly--what ensued has been described to me as "virtual
carnage". The eleven users who had
been victimised by this now impotent one turned upon him and took dreadful
virtual revenge. They described all the
most violent punishments they would like to enact on this and all other
attackers, emoting--in both senses of the word--all the hatred and rage which
JennyMUSH had been established to help people deal with.
Since this incident, if such
a mild word can be used to describe it, many things have changed on
JennyMUSH. The system has become far
more security conscious. The 'shout'
command, which enabled 'Daddy' to send messages to all players connected to the
system, is no longer available to users.
The information displayed to all users on connecting to the system now
includes directions on how to avoid unwanted messages by preventing the MUSH
system from relaying messages from a particular user, a facility known as
'gagging'. New users must now be vouched
for by at least two established users before they will be given a character,
and all users must provide the administrator of the MUSH with a valid
electronic mail address as well as their actual legal name.
What happened on JennyMUSH
could happen on any MUD system, and probably has happened on many.[23] The particular purpose for which JennyMUSH
was constructed may have meant that the incident was all the more traumatic for
its users, but the same degree of hurt resulting from virtual actions could be
brought about on any system. JennyMUSH's experience starkly demonstrates the
degree to which users can feel as though they are free to act on feelings and
to act in ways which mainstream society hopes to suppress. The cruelty and callousness shown by this
abusive user were expressed in a unique form in this virtual environment--he
was able to project onto both the
virtual environment and the
virtual manifestations of other players a kind of violence that may have been
all the more distressing for its lack of physicality, and attendant impossibility
of fighting back. He was able to shape
reality into the forms he wished, and transform it into a reflection of his own
cruel intentions.[24]
The kinds of action taken by
the other users, and by the Wizards and God of JennyMUSH, use this same ability
to reshape reality, this time into forms that create and reinforce social rules
and structures. The final lesson to be
learnt from this episode, one which will be pursued in the next chapter, was
described by JennyMUSH's administrator as
this:
We spent so much time trying to make JennyMUSH a
place where people could feel free to speak out-- we provided anonymity and
very few restrictions. Sadly, we didn't foresee the negative aspects such
encouragement could have. In the end we
discovered that we could not base our little virtual society on "freedom
to"--we had to balance it with "freedom from" and that meant the
formation and enforcement of rules and a strict hierarchy of privileges. [25]
[1] Greg Dening, “The Bounty: An Ethnographic
History” (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988) 102.
[2] Sara Kiesler, Jane Siegel, and Timothy W.
Mcguire, "Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated
communication," In: American Psychologist, Vol. 39 No. 10 (October 1984):
1125.
[3] Kiesler et al, 1125.
[4] This list of player names was generated by
asking a group of people who happened to be logged on to LambdaMOO on 5th
November 1993 to volunteer some names which they had used on a MUD.
[5] Some systems offer further commands on top
of those I have listed, and the results of those which I have described may
differ from system to system. I have
chosen to describe the five most common commands in their most common formats.
[6] The pose command, also known as the emote or
act command, seem to have been invented independently by the players and
developers of several different MUD programs. SHADE, an early variation on
Bartle and Trubshaw's MUD, was probably the first game to include this command.
Jim Finnis wrote a pose command for AberMUD in 1987, and Jim Aspnes implemented
for TinyMUD a variety of pose that his players had thought up in 1989. That several groups of MUD players and
developers each invented a pose-style command says a great deal for the
importance of such a means of expression in these virtual worlds. More details can be found in Appendix 4.
[7] From: gerstnet@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE;
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc; Subject: Verbs and adverbs top list; Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1993 13:42:55 GMT. The full text
of this article can be found in the Appendix 5.
[8] That is, on social MUDs where the pose
command is available, or in the 'emote rooms' on adventure MUDs.
[9] If the pictures these emoticons make are not
immediately apparent, try tilting your head to the left. In the case of the
first smiley, the colon represents eyes, the dash a nose and the bracket a
smiling mouth. “Smileys”, compiled by
David Sanderson (New York: O'Reilly and Associates, 1993) contains an extensive
collection of emoticons.
[10] John Van Maanen, and
Stephen Barley, "Cultural Organization: Fragments of a Theory." “Organizational Culture”. Eds. P.J. Frost et. al. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985) 33
[11] Sara Kiesler and Lee
Sproull, "Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational
Communication."
“Management Science” Vol.32
No.11 (November 1986): 1498.
[12] Kiesler et al, 1129.
[13] One of the most
interesting facets of this is the impossibility of knowing another's true
gender, and of a player being of a different gender to that of his or her
character. This will be discussed in Chapter Three.
[14] Curtis, 29.
[15] Starr Roxanne Hiltz and
Murray Turoff, “The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer” (Reading,
Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1978) 101.
[16] From: anonymous; To:
emr@ee.mu.oz.au; Subject: MUDs are NOT just games!; Date: 12 Apr 1992 11:16:32
EST
[17] MUD players often refer
to social phenomena on MUDs in the form 'tiny(noun)'--examples include
'tinysex', 'tinywife' and 'tinymarriage.' This stems from the name of the first
social-style MUD, TinyMUD, written by Jim Aspnes. This will be discussed further in Chapter Three.
[18] From: anonymous; To:
emr@ee.mu.oz.au; Subject: MUD romances?; Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 22:02:04 GMT
[19] Glen Hiemstra,
"Teleconferencing, Concern for Face, and Organizational
Culture," In: Communication
Yearbook 6 . Ed. M. Burgoon. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982) 880.
[20] Kiesler et al, 1127.
[21] Kiesler et al, 1129.
[22] The shout command,
while not unique to JennyMUSH, is not available on all MUDs. On those which do offer it, usage is often
restricted to privileged users such as Wizards and Gods.
[23] An account of a similar
episode on LambdaMOO can be found in a fascinating article by Julian Dibbell,
published in the December 21 1993 edition (Vol. 38 No. 51) of “Village Voice”
and entitled "Rape in Cyberspace
or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of
Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society."
[24] Although I have
referred to this player as 'he', that being the sex of the character 'Daddy',
there is no technical reason why the person behind the character could not have
been female.
[25] From: anonymous; To:
emr@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au; Subject: The mudrape fiasco; Date: Wed, 9 Dec 92
10:45:23 EST.
The failure of the ideal of
complete freedom in cyberspace was an early phenomenon. The CommuniTree computerised bulletin board
of the mid 1970s suffered just such a fate as JennyMUSH.[1] Initially a forum for intellectual and
spiritual discussion amongst adults, in an environment where privacy was
guaranteed and censorship censured, CommuniTree collapsed under the onslaught
of messages, often obscene, posted by the first generation of adolescent school
children with personal computers and modems.
In the wake of what one participant called the "consequences of
free expression" technical means were introduced to enable the system's
administrators to monitor users' activities and censor 'inappropriate' messages.[2] It was here, in what had been a project as
socially concerned and politically idealistic as JennyMUSH, that, as Stone puts
it, "the age of surveillance and social control had arrived for the electronic
virtual community."[3] In
practice, as Stone further comments, such controls have proved to be necessary
adjuncts to maintaining order in virtual communities.[4]
Players of MUD systems love
and hate in their virtual environments as strongly as anyone does in actual
life, and the manifestation of such emotions is made possible by tools that
give virtual realism to the imaginings of players. The exercise of imagination is necessary for the creation of a
social context within which to act. By
utilising the dramaturgical tools provided by MUD programs, players create the
basis for shared social understandings.
Out of such usage have come linguistic forms which allow the expression
of emotions and conditions usually beyond the scope of pure language. It is the actualisation of imagined reality
that makes this possible--nevertheless, it is clear that players' imaginings
cease to be acceptable when they threaten the integrity of these shared
understandings. For imagination to be
permitted actualisation by other players, it must allow others to maintain the
integrity of their imaginings.
Violation of that integrity is perhaps the greatest crime on a MUD. What happened on JennyMUSH offers a graphic
example of how anonymity and disinhibition may allow players to crush that
sense of integrity, and how much anger can be caused by such attempts. The measures taken by the users, Wizards and
God of JennyMUSH, both immediately and in the long term, show how order is
maintained on MUDs through social and technical conventions. Surrounding these measures have arisen
social structures that rely both on such measures and on an encouragement of
integrity and verisimilitude in players and administrators' creativity.
The socio-emotional plots
played out on MUDs are only ad-libbed in the immediate instance. Players may play their cultural game
according to personal whim, but they play it out on systems that are as subject
to the enactment of power and privilege as are systems in the 'real
world'. The "theory of technological
politics," says Langdon Winner, "suggests that we pay attention to
the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those
characteristics."[5] MUDs may on the one hand be characterised by their
encouragement of disinhibition; on the other they are characterised by a facility for allowing the creation and
support of internal devices that uphold social structure as well as social
activity. The technical nature of MUDs
can be used to create the basis for a hierarchy amongst those who play them. The methods used to create social and physical
contexts on MUD systems are also used to create political structures which form
meta-contexts.
1)
Hierarchies of Power on MUDs
Social structures on MUD
systems rely on the control of players' abilities to manipulate the elements of
the virtual environment. The haves are
those who can control the form of the virtual world depicted by the system; the
have-nots are those who can't. Power on
a MUD is quite literally the power to change the world. Although all players on the MUDs I have
examined have access to tools that allow them to shape the MUD world to some
extent, if only by the use of personal descriptions and the taking of virtual
actions, no system allows all players access to all commands. Player privileges vary between the absolute
and the minimal. The persons running
the actual MUD program, commonly referred to as Gods, have total control. They have direct access to the computer
files which comprise the system, enabling them to modify the MUD database in
any way they please. They can design
any virtual setting into the system, and so create a MUD universe of any
flavour they wish. Within the game
world, they have access to a range of commands which allow them to edit the
world while interacting with it. They
can edit and destroy any object on the MUD system-- including the objects that
represent players' characters.
The average player does not
have such powers. On adventure-style
MUDs players may only alter the game universe by interacting with it. Such players have no direct control over the
game elements, and may not create new elements. By contrast, players of social-style MUDs are able to extend the
virtual universe to some extent. They
have access to a small library of commands that allow them to create and
describe objects and areas, and make them behave in certain ways in response to
input from other players. They may only
change or destroy objects that they have created themselves, and are not able
to tinker with objects created by other players. On some systems players may be subject to a quota limiting the
number of objects they may build. Players on both social and adventure MUDs
interact with the MUD database purely through the virtual world itself, and are
not able to step outside that world and view and alter it in the form of raw
data. There are many good reasons for these limitations. On a large international computer network it
would be a security risk to allow any person access to the raw files stored on
a computer. A limited amount of hard
disk space may make it foolish to allow players to enlarge the MUD database to
an unlimited extent. Pragmatic though
these reasons may be, they
are the basis for a social hierarchy in which greater status corresponds to
greater control over the virtual world of the MUD system and greater ability to
enrich that system.
Most MUD systems offer, as
JennyMUSH began to in the wake of the 'Daddy' incident, facilities that can be
used to silence or banish disruptive players.
Some of these facilities are available to all players. They have the option of ignoring, or
'gagging,' another player. Such a
measure does not actually affect the offending player, but prevents the
offended one from receiving any messages from that player. By editing his or her personal virtual
reality a MUD player can attempt to prevent harassment by severing the links of
communication between him or herself and the harasser. Such attempts are not, however, always
successful or satisfactory. A
determined harasser, realising that a victim is employing these commands, may
simply resume harassment through a new MUD character. Even when
nominally successful, these
measures are not always felt to be sufficient by victims of harassment. After all, 'gagging' does not prevent the
harasser from speaking or being heard by others. The effects of this command are more akin to 'ear-plugging' and
do not negate the adverse social effects of another's hate-speech. Moreover, as
Dibbell comments, the "gag-and-get-over-it school of virtual-rape
counselling, with its fine line between empowering victims and holding them
responsible for their own suffering" does not satisfy the needs of all who
are advised to employ such measures.[6]
Such measures are, however,
the least of those which can be employed against an erring player. Those who persist with unwelcome behaviour
may be dealt with by the God of the MUD, who has at his or her disposal powers
which act to exclude and shame their object. Offenders may be safe from actual
physical violence at the hands of those they have victimised, but ostracism is
common and social admonition has taken the form of ridiculing and subverting
the efforts
of disruptive players to
actualise their imagined selves in the virtual world. Players who are a continual problem can be not only ignored by their
victims, but punished and even banished by the God of the MUD. If called upon to do so a God can call down
virtual fire from heaven--destroying the offending player's character, and
disallowing future connections from the particular computer that the offender
had been connecting from.
In most cases these
technical measures are sufficient to discourage offenders. Those who persist in their disruptive
behaviour, or who counter it by other technical means, can be subjected to
public rituals intended to humiliate and punish them, often in the form of a
public shaming that utilises the God's special ability to redesign any aspect
of the virtual reality of the MUD. An
offending player can be 'toaded', a practice that traditionally involves the
MUD's Gods
or Wizards using their
special powers to change the name and description of the player to present an
unpleasant appearance (traditionally
that of a warty toad) and moving the player to some very public area of the MUD
where other players can taunt and chastise him or her. JennyMUSH's treatment of 'Daddy' was a
classic example of this form of social punishment. This public humiliation is usually sufficient to discourage the
player from visiting that particular MUD world again, even if earlier attempts at
ostracism had been unsuccessful. In
these kinds of punishments, power is at its most absolute. Foucault has described an effective form of
power as one that enables the powerful to "gain access to the bodies of
individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of everyday
behaviour."[7] On a MUD, where the
physical body is not present, but the virtual body is at the absolute mercy of
the Gods, such power exists quite literally.
The Gods of a MUD can manipulate a player's virtual manifestation in any
way they please. They can reshape it,
remake it, remould it, destroy it. From
the perspective of the game universe, such acts of power are absolute.
Punishment on MUDs shows a
return to the medieval. While penal
systems in the Western nations that form the
backbone of the Internet - the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom
and Australia - have ceased to concentrate upon the body of the condemned as
the site for punishment, and have instead turned to 'humane' incarceration and
social rehabilitation, the
exercise of authority on MUDs has revived the old practices of public shaming
and torture. The theatre of authority
in virtual reality is one which demands and facilitates a strongly
dramaturgical element. All actions on
MUDs must be overt, every nuance of experience must be manifestly represented
for it to become part of the play, and so punishment must be flamboyant. The virtual world of a MUD exists in its
dramatic strength only in the
minds of its players, but
the play enacted in the virtual world emulates the physical rather than the
mental. The public spectacle of
punishment, which Foucault describes as disappearing from the Western political
scene between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is alive and well on
MUDs.[8]
Because of their special
powers and their special role within a MUD community, Gods and Wizards are
frequently the object of special treatment.
Many players approach them with, as Curtis puts it, "exaggerated
deference and respect."[9] An
example of such treatment was forwarded to me by a Wizard on FurryMUCK:
Fred pages you with,
"Excuse me sir, I hope I'm not bothering you, but could you possibly help
me? I'm really new to MUDS, and I've got some pretty dumb questions. If you haven't got time to answer them
please don't worry about it, but if you do I would really appreciate it."
Many Wizards and Gods do not
spend much time travelling through their virtual domain. Instead, they often retreat to the sanctity
of one virtual room. It is to this
space--this virtual throne room—that mortal players are called when they wish
to speak with the God or Wizard. The
protocol for gaining admission to such rooms varies from system to system, but
is never non-existent. Most of these
rooms cannot be entered without the permission of their owner; entry to some requires the direct intervention of
the deity to 'teleport' the supplicant to the holy presence. The sign on the door of a Wizard on EOTL
reads as follows:
That door leads to Moe's Sanctum Sanctorum. If you
knock on it, and he's around, he might invite you in or come talk to you. Lately, though he's been pretty busy, so
don't bug him unless you need something.
THINK VERY HARD BEFORE KNOCKING.
Moe has been known to turn people into barnyard animals if they pester
him frivolously.
In some cases the motivation
for the creation of such social barriers may simply be to screen out trivial
requests from players. Nevertheless, whatever the intention, the power to
define what is trivial and to impose punishment for transgressions of that
definition lie with the Wizards and Gods.
Many preserve a kind of magical or divine distance between themselves
and the mortal players of their world.
Curtis may be bemused by the deference paid him as the God of LambdaMOO,
but such deference is paid and is motivated by the technical and social symbols
of power by which Gods and Wizards are surrounded. The basis of authority on MUDs is as medieval as its
theatre. Hierarchies are maintained
through careful attention to the trappings of power, power which, as did
medieval kingship, owes its
legitimacy to the favour of
the Gods. Distance between the rulers
and the ruled is carefully maintained.
Special spaces are created by virtual rulers to cater for and augment
the signs of their power. Virtual analogues of sceptres and crowns abound--most
Gods and Wizards carry signs of their rank upon them. Divine authority on MUDs is made manifest in technical miracles
and virtual symbols of power.
Nevertheless, such power
does not always go unquestioned. The
legitimacy of power and the enaction of it can be questioned by players,
especially when notions of favouritism are introduced. Wizards are created by
Gods, and in theory promotion to such a privileged rank is linked to talent. The more a player is able to translate their
imagination into the MUD database--the more ingenuity they show in their
manipulation of the MUD program--the more likely
they are to be promoted to
the level of Wizard. A talent for
making the MUD more virtually real should be rewarded by being granted greater
powers to do so. In practice, however,
this may not always be the case.
Accusations of Godly and Wizardly prejudice and injustice regularly
surface on the USENET newsgroups devoted to the discussion of MUD playing:
This mud is TOTALLY
LAME! One of the wizzes can't program for shit and only got to wiz coz he rooms
with the chief wiz, and another wiz just got the job by having tinysex with the
chief wiz. I spent DAYS building lots
of really cool stuff, really cool descs and everything, and when I showed it to
the cheif wiz and asked to get a higher quota he just said "I don't even
know you" and refused!!! ARGH!! So I complained and told everbody on the
mud what happened and he dests my character and deletes everything I
built. I am so sick of wizzes who
expect you to brown-nose to get anything. [10]
Gods and Wizards may be the
ultimate power within each MUD universe, and may often be the subject of
respect and even fawning as players attempt to curry favour and gain
privileges, but the atmosphere of respect which often surrounds them can lead
to the favouring of players who are prepared to offer adulation, and passing
over those who are not. The canny
wielding of power often means that privileges are bestowed upon those who will
uphold the Gods' hegemony; the clumsy handling of this process can threaten
that hegemony. The potential for the
abuse of power and for unfair treatment of players can create resentment,
particularly when there is a conflict between individuals who feel that Gods
and Wizards have a duty to behave fairly and those who feel that the
administrator of a MUD system has the right to do with it as he or she
likes. The number of MUD systems in
existence to some extent mitigates the potential for problems, since, as one
player replied to the complainant above:
Look, it's his MUD, he can do what he wants. But if
you don't like the MUD, don't play it! If the wiz is an asshole... no one will play and the MUD will close.
Simple! Sheesh... [11]
The common wisdom is that
simple economics will make it unrewarding for a Wizard or God to treat players
badly, and so most successful holders of those positions will by necessity
treat their players reasonably well.
Power on MUD systems depends
on the individual's ability to manipulate the components of the system;
privileges consist of increased access to such world-manipulating tools. The degree to which this power is successful
is dependant upon players' belief in the value of the MUD world, and the degree
to which they have invested meaning and emotion in the objects within it. That the objects and characters stored in
the computer files are ascribed value leads to
the special treatment of
those who can alter those files. Gods' and Wizards' powers depend upon their
success in building a system which players view as a virtual world, a system to
be interacted with in such a way as to invest emotion in the continued
existence of the world and its components.
Systems which are so viewed will be more
likely to attract players
willing to apply their talents and invest their effort in building new areas
and objects. The richness of each
virtual world leads to its being further enriched.
2)
Adventure MUDs: Survival of the Fittest
Players of adventure-style
MUDs must contend with the internal reality of the game world. The characters played are subject to
'realistic' forces. On some systems,
they grow hungry, thirsty and sleepy, and must find safe places to sleep and
rest. They must protect themselves from
the ravages of an often hostile climate.
They must establish, and often pay for, a safe place to continue their
existence while their controlling player is unable to attend to them. Such MUD
players are driven by the
'biological' needs of their characters and by the social and climatic
circumstances of the game world. On
some systems, players are often confronted with messages from the game program,
letting them know that 'they'--or rather, their characters- -are hungry,
thirsty or tired. If players do not act
quickly to satisfy their characters' hunger or thirst, those characters will
die. If players do not find a safe
place for their characters to sleep in, those characters will likely be
murdered in their sleep by the mythical monsters that commonly inhabit these
MUD worlds-- or by another character, provided that the particular game world
is one that allows direct combat between players. Before logging out of the game, players must first rent their
characters a room in one of the hotels that form a central and basic part of
the game world. Renting a room ensures
that the character and his or her possessions are kept safe
until the player returns to
the game. A character left without a
rented room may forfeit his or her possessions to unnamed thieves generated by
the MUD program, and is vulnerable to the attacks of monsters and other
players.
As a consequence of all
this, players spend a large amount of time merely making sure that their
characters survive. They must
continually load themselves with supplies of food and drink before venturing on
quests. They must make periodic trips
back to the central town of the MUD world to replenish these supplies. They must continually amass treasure--by
killing monsters--with which to buy supplies and pay the rent on hotel rooms. It is impossible to play an
adventure-style MUD
casually. Players who log into the game
once a week, and play for only an hour or so at a time, will be continually
forced to restart the game. They will never
be able to find enough treasure to enable them to pay for the safety of the
belongings they buy or win, and so will always lose them to the relentless
economics of the game. The least
devoted players must, therefore, play often enough and for long enough to
maintain their characters' existence.
They must, as Alice found in
“Through the Looking Glass” keep running just in order to remain in the same
place. Adventure-oriented MUDs, such as
LPMUDs and DikuMUDs, demand a basic level of dedication from players. Unlike social style MUDs, such as MUCKs and
MOOs, the game itself demands attention.
It seems to have a life of its own.
A MUCK character remains in stasis when not being controlled by a
player, whereas a DikuMUD character can die of starvation, be the victim of
robbery or murder, or become part of a marauding Giant Bear's dinner, should
the player relax his or her vigilance or fail to log into the game before the
character's money, and therefore rented safety, runs out.
At the heart of all social
structures amongst players of adventure MUDs lies the hard fact that adventure
MUD universes are dangerous. Foucault has said that "the phenomenon of the
social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power
operating on the very bodies of
individuals."[12]
Translated into the particular terms of the imagined worlds of
adventure-style MUDs this insight has special meaning. There, it is the virtuality of the power
of the virtual world
operating upon the imagined bodies of individual players that creates the
social body of which they are a part. Cooperation is an important element of
survival on adventure MUDs. In many
cases, players need each other to survive.
Particularly strong monsters are more easily defeated by the concerted
efforts of a group of players than by one alone. The necessity for cooperative effort has been built into the
fabric of the game on many systems.
Quests, specific tasks formulated by the Gods and Wizards to test the
strength of their players, often demand the application of more skills than one
character can have, and so must be undertaken by a group. The economics of the game support group
effort. Special commands enable players
to form groups, make concerted attacks on monsters and share the experience
points gained in shared victories. This
technical support and dramatic demand for cooperation between players
translates into a social system in which players are expected to aid each
other. Many players will guard the possessions which had belonged to a fallen
character, and will wait for them to return from the church to which their
spirit has gone to pray for reincarnation so that on return they may regain
their possessions. This kind of honour
system based on favours and debts of gratitude can be especially kind to novice
players. The help files on EOTL
explicitly encourage players to help the less experienced among them:
When a newbie begs
for some money or help, it is usually expected that you will give what you can.
Everyone was a newbie once, and probably got their start through the generosity
of other more established players. The
least you can do is show the same consideration to future newbies (known as the
golden rule). And above all, remember
it's just a game...but with real people on the other end side...
Such cooperation is not, however,
based purely on comradeship. The fact
is that players can, if they so choose, cause each other considerable
hardship. It is not altruism that
causes players to aid each other, but the idea of investing in other players'
goodwill. Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you--that is the rule that prevents many players from taking
advantage of the misfortunes of others.
Players are at their most
vulnerable when in combat. When
fighting a system generated opponent--a monster or 'mobile'--many players will
be forced to retreat and use healing potions and spells, or simply rest, before
being able to rejoin the fight and eventually kill the monster. It can take several bouts of fighting and
healing before the monster can be killed.
In the times when a player has retreated, it is possible for another
player to come along and kill the now weakened monster while its original
opponent is resting. The information on
etiquette available on EOTL has this to say about the practice of
'kill-stealing':
Believe it or not, there are certain unspoken rules
of behavior on MUDs. [...] It's really
bad form to steal someone else's kill.
Someone has been working on the Cosmicly Invulnerable Utterly
Unstoppable Massively Powerful Space Demon for ages, leaves to get healed, and
in the interim, some dweeb comes along and whacks the Demon and gets all it's
stuff and tons of xps. This really
sucks as the other person has spent lots of time and money in expectations of
the benefits from killing the monster.
The graceful thing to do is to give em all the stuff from the corpse and
compensation for the money spent on healing. This is still a profit to you as
you got all the xps and spent practically no time killing it.
Players who break this rule
are not popular. Some may be subject to
the kinds of punishment and displays of power that Gods and Wizards may call
up. Others may be subject to the
vengeful attacks of their victims and fellow players.
On some adventure MUDs
players' characters are able to kill one another. As far as a character is concerned, another character is as
easily a target of the 'kill' command as is an orc or dragon. For some players, the possibility of
'playerkilling' adds depth and spice to the virtual world. The addition of greater threat and greater
danger to the virtual universe enables players to identify more strongly with
their virtual persona. The thrill which
players describe as a part of such battles, the sheer excitement of adding an
uncontrolled element to the game universe, makes that universe all the more
real. Death and danger make the
imagined life all the more worth living, and lift the game beyond the confines
of the predictable. It is the loss of
control inherent in a game style that overtly relies on a fight for greater control
that adds meaning to the game. Victory
in such battles is all the more sweet for the test of a player's skill
which it entails.
Nevertheless, not all
players need to have the fruits of their imagination challenged to feel that
their animation is valid. On the
contrary, the intrusion of others' conflicting versions of the world can
disturb the imaginative balance of the player.
Such conflicting world views are the basis of many power struggles
between players. For some playerkilling destroys the mental illusion in which
they wish to immerse themselves by connecting to a MUD system. The forceful
intrusion of another's
imagined reality, an intrusion that can shatter the carefully constructed
projections of the victim, inspires great resentment and anger. The practice of playerkilling is looked upon
by some players with anger and contempt:
Playerkilling is a
pointless exercise allowed by some muds, whereby lab geeks with testosterone
poisoning kill each other instead of mobs and pretend that they are better
mudders as a result. This collective delusion makes pkers overbearing,
obnoxious, and generally no fun at cocktail hour. [13]
In response to this article,
another player replied that:
Playerkilling is the
ultimate chessmatch, where you are depending on your knowledge of your
capabilities and your mud to match those others who might play. While it is sometimes abused by losers who
feel manly by killing newbies, it also seperates the real mudders from the
yellow- striped regen waiters who would just as soon wait around to kill a
monster that just stands there waiting to die.
PKers are neither overbearing nor obnoxious, but they are occasionally
arrogant, but then again, being better players, they have a right to be.
They never attend cocktail parties because they think those little
sandwiches are for wusses. [14]
Playerkilling, then, is an
issue surrounded by controversy. On
many MUDs, playerkilling is heavily controlled, either by technical or social
measures. Some adventure style MUDs prevent player killing by removing the
possibility of it from the MUD computer program. Others simply regulate
it. There are two main ways of
technically controlling the circumstances under which players may attack each
other. The first is to require that players
set a 'player killer flag' on their character.
Only those with such a flag set may be attacked--the program will simply
not allow a player to attack another whose killer flag is unset. The second measure is to allow players to
attack only those who are close to their own level of competence. On MUDs where a level system is in place,
this is commonly implemented. Players who have attained Level 5, for instance,
may be able to attack players on Levels 5 and above, but not those on lower
levels. At the same time, they cannot
be attacked by players on a higher level, unless they initiate the combat--only
characters at an equal or lower level may choose to attack them. This prevents victimisation, though not foolhardiness. Some systems, however, do not put any
technical controls on player killing.
The Revenge of the End of the Line is one such system. The help files on EOTL say, with regard to
playerkillers, that:
This is a label given to those players who hunt down
and kill other players. These notorious
psychopaths usually go on killing sprees, killing lots of players in a short
amount of time. Player killers have no qualms and no remorse. EOTL's official
policy toward player killing is one of tolerance. Wizards can't help you if someone kills you. The best thing to do is to form a lynch mob
and massacre the killer to itty bitty bits....
Player killers usually know Muds like the back of their hands and are
extremely dangerous.
Despite this laissez-faire
ruling on the part of the Wizards and Gods of EOTL, playerkilling is remarkably
rare, and the reasons for this lie in the social structure developed amongst
players. Most EOTL players live by an
unstated agreement that they should live and let live. Most players are not 'psychopathic'
playerkillers, and will not initiate battles with those who are not known to
enjoy this style of play. Those who do
not choose to play this way, however, are often hunted down by those who wish
to preserve this unspoken rule. The
ethics of this kind of justice are incorporated into the game elements. Wanted posters are common in the towns and
cities which form the core of EOTL:
MoeTown's Most
Wanted. Neighborhood Watch
Bulletin. The following people are
wanted for malicious mayhem. To collect
the reward on one of these people,
simply blow a police whistle while in the room with the person. If your call results in the death or capture
of the criminal, a representative will pay you at the police station. Police whistles may be bought for 10 coins
from the police chief:
Perpetrator's name: Current reward:
1
: Voltron (player killer) 39850 coins
2
: Assasin (player killer) 35870 coins
3
: Shadowstrike 25730 coins
4
: Hermes 25090 coins
5
: Shapeless (player killer) 24210 coins
6
: Whittle (player killer) 18690 coins
7
: Bowman (player killer) 14430 coins
8
: Rizzen (player killer) 13420 coins
9
: Time 12640 coins
10 : Bluey (player killer) 5820 coins
As this poster implies,
technical measures have been introduced to enable justice to be meted out to
player killers. Policemen's whistles
are an element of the game which has been hard-coded into its fabric. The social contract that encourages and
allows the invention and use of such whistles, is, however, not a technical
measure.
Playerkillers are often
summarily dealt with by their victims. Adopting the techniques of the enemy's
play, irate players can form bands dedicated to hunting down and killing
playerkillers. Such a solution seems to
be satisfactory to all parties in such conflicts. The appropriation of the
playerkiller's style of play by his or her opponents allows all concerned to
feel their style of play validated. Dedicated playerkillers do not appear to
resent being the victim of playerkilling--in two years of MUDding and
monitoring the rec.games.mud newsgroups, I have found only a few cases of a
playerkiller complaining of injustice at the hands of a virtual lynch- mob,
though I have found many instances of playerkillers describing with zest the
chase they led their pursuers and the enjoyment they experienced in making
their quest as difficult as possible.[15]
Some have commented on the pleasure they feel at having caused the
opponents of playerkilling to join their ranks. The playerkiller's pursuers feel similarly fulfilled. In their eyes, they have not adopted
playerkilling as a form of play, but have appropriated such play to serve their
own preferred style. Such conflicts
have a happy ending--each party feeling their imagined virtual world validated
by the outcome.
Social cohesion on adventure
MUDs is the result of the Darwinian rule of the survival of the fittest. On the most superficial level, only the
strongest and most talented players will survive and flourish on adventure
MUDs. It takes time, effort and skill
not only to become powerful on such MUDs, but simply to survive on them. At a deeper level, however, it is the most
socially fit--the most willing to cooperate--who survive. The social body formed on adventure MUDs is
the result of a common consensus to cooperate in fighting against the
(im)materiality of the power of the virtual universe operating on the virtual
bodies of each individual player.
3)
Social MUDs: Cooperative Appreciation
On social MUDs, players are
not faced with the threats that players of adventure MUDs must contend
with. Characters on MUCKs and TinyMUDs
are never hungry or thirsty or tired.
Instead they provide a tireless mechanism for the exercise of the
players' creativity, and for interaction between players. It is this ease of use, rather than the need
to protect and maintain their characters, which is the basis of social MUD
players' cohesion. On adventure MUDs,
social interaction often comes about through expediency, as when characters
form gangs the better to slaughter some hapless dragon or infamous
playerkiller. By contrast, social interaction on MUCKs and MUSHes is one of the
three activities central to the game.[16]
The others are creating, or building, and exploring the creations of
others. These three activities complement
and reinforce each other. Social
interaction serves to create a network of players who constitute an audience
for each other's creativity; acts of creation provide the stage for
interaction.
In designing TinyMUD, the
original social MUD, Jim Aspnes deliberately sought to escape from the
competitive confines of adventure-style play.
He explains that:
Most adventure-style games and earlier MUDs had some
sort of scoring system which translated into rank and special privileges; I
didn't want such a system not because of any strong egalitarian ideals... 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 equal and drove away people who
didn't like a game where you didn't score points and beat out other players. I think that this effect created a kind of
natural selection which eventually led to the current egalitarian ideals. [17]
The 'egalitarianism' that
Aspnes claims as the basic ideal of social MUDs is often just that--an
ideal. In practice, most social MUDs
have a hierarchy of players as well developed as those seen on adventure MUDs,
complete with Gods, Wizards and variously privileged levels of players. However, these hierarchies are not based on
competition and strength, but on interaction and contribution. Players do not rise to greater degrees of
privilege by killing monsters, amassing points and gaining skills, but by
inserting themselves into the social and imaginative matrix and becoming
indispensable.
If players of adventure MUDs
must be in regular attendance on their characters in order for those characters
to survive and gain greater powers, players of social MUDs are free to enjoy
unlimited access to their characters precisely because of those characters'
independence of their players. Almost
without exception, players of social MUDs exercise their ability to create new
aspects of the game world. Each MUD
encourages players to create their own 'home', a small section of the game
universe with which the player's character is associated, and which is the
portion of the game world in which the character appears to be when the player
connects to the system. Most players
make at least some token attempt to decorate their home with descriptions and
objects. Many players extend their home
beyond the confines of one virtual building, and go on to create intricate
mini-worlds within the greater MUD world.
In consequence of this
encouragement to build, most
social MUDs consist of a hodge-podge of differing environments. Some MUDs have come to insist upon adherence
to a particular theme as a prerequisite of a player's promotion to one of the
higher levels of game power. Before
being allowed to build a greater number of objects, and before being given
access to more
complex commands and tools
with which to build, players must demonstrate an ability to create environments
that mesh with the existing game universe.
In essence this system of meritocracy involves the relinquishment of one
sort of power--the power to do whatever you like--in order to gain different
and more extensive powers.
Many MUDs allow a number of
intermediate levels between player and God.
The God is able, at his or her own discretion, to increase a player's
building quota, or even confer Wizard status upon a player. Some systems allow
different levels of building tools to be available to different players, with
more complex and powerful commands being
available to those the Gods
choose to give them to. That privileges
are bestowed by the Gods of the system is a vital part of the hierarchy, and
the means of its control. Only those
who are approved of by the Gods and Wizards can gain greater power within the
MUD system--being out of favour means being out of power. Most MUD systems indicate that gaining
privileges is a matter of proving that you are worthy of them. The rule on the MUD 'MicroMUSE', for
instance, is that:
The quota system for keeping the database at a
reasonable size is intended to promote constructive building and efficient use
of available resources. Builders
engaging on large-scale projects should ask a [Wizard] to inspect their
work-to-date,and can then ask for quota increases as needed.
A similar policy exists on
LambdaMOO, where the 'Architecture Review Board', an association of players
originally appointed by the Wizards and now elected by the LambdaMOO community,
is empowered to decide whom the Wizards shall bestow greater building
privileges upon:
To get a larger
quota, you need to talk to some member of the Architecture Review Board. They will take a look at what you've done
with the objects you've built so far
and decide whether or not they think it would be a net gain for the LambdaMOO
community if you were to build some more things.
All players on social-style
MUDs have a rudimentary ability to add items to the game universe. All players can create, though the
hierarchical system in force on some social MUDs might limit the number of
items that novice players can create.
But limited powers are powers nonetheless, and this relative
egalitarianism is the reason which many players give for their preference for
social MUDs. This attitude differs from
that taken by many players of adventure MUDs,
for whom the elitism of the
upper echelons is the source of the desirability of entering those ranks. Compare these two articles from players of the
two MUD genres:
What I like about MUCKs is that I can just go off and
build what I like. I can exercise my
imagination without sucking up to any Gods or bashing any orcs. I can just do whatever I like straight away.[18]
and:
The whole point of LPMUds is that once you've made
Wizard you know you've earned it. Your privileges are earned, every bit of
them. Not like on tinymuds, where ever
luser can build his little home and create his little toys. When I meet someone who has made Wiz on an
LP... I *know* they've done something
to earn it, and if I [make Wizard] other people *know* I've earned it. [19]
In each case, it is access
to and legitimacy of power that is the concern of the player. What differs is the perspective taken. In the one case it is the free availability
of game powers, irrespective of the player's social position or level of
external influence, which is attractive.
In the other case it is the difficultly of gaining power, and the
respect due to those who have persevered, which makes it so desirable. Each system serves to attract and form
different types of players, yet each system is based on the exploitation of a
common wish for power and influence.
However, many players on
social MUDs do not make any attempt to win higher building privileges for
themselves. On adventure MUDs, each
player is by definition part of a system in which their efforts are geared
toward the acquisition of greater wealth and power. On social MUDs the mechanics of the game do not demand that
players spend time chasing after material--or virtual--gains. The pressure to be upwardly mobile is far
less intense on social MUDs, and so fewer social than adventure MUD players
make deliberate efforts of gain entry to the privileged higher echelons. Instead, players on social MUDs tend to form
alternate hierarchies, functionally independent of the Wizards and Gods of the
world. These hierarchies are social
rather than economic in base--they depend on interaction rather than on the
scarcity of the power commodity.
These alternate hierarchies
depend on an audience of appreciative and creative fellow-players rather than
on competition with other players. Indeed the expressions 'fellow player' and
'other player' neatly describe the difference between the player hierarchies
most common on the two genres of MUD.
Social MUD players often seem to see each
other as mirrors of
themselves who will reflect the pride and achievement felt by each player
toward what he or she has created. Adventure players seem more likely to view
each other as inimical, as having the potential to shatter that mirror. Alliances between adventurous players are
carefully negotiated. Allied players
will often devise methods of ensuring each other's loyalty by using spells or
holding hostage valued items of treasure or equipment. Betrayal is not unheard of. A player's ally may turn on him or her after
the dragon has been killed, and may make off with the dragon's hoard before the victim has time to react. Adventure MUD players tend to view each
other with some suspicion. Each player
is that mythical anthropological monster--the Other, who may expose and exploit
the player, and shatter that player's dreams of power and safety.
Social MUD players are not
pressed into these oppositions. They
cannot harm each other within the game world.
Ordinary personal conflicts may of course arise--just as ordinary
personal amity may arise on adventure MUDs--but these conflicts are not made
more likely by the special properties of the virtual environment that the
individuals interact within. Rather,
players are encouraged by the nature of social MUDs to interact positively with
each other. Hierarchies on social MUDs tend to be socially rather than
technically enforced. Cooperation is
inspired by a wish to extend the virtual world, not by the necessities of
survival in it. Players become well-
known through socialising, and through displaying the fruits of their
imagination. Well-known adventure MUD
players become so by virtue of attaining high levels of proficiency in the game
universe. Well-known social MUD players
become so by engaging in social activities on the MUD. Popular players commonly create interesting
environments which many players visit and recommend that others visit. They
spend a lot of time chatting with others, and many offer advice and aid to new
players. These people form the backbone
of social MUDs, and may indeed be better known to the majority of players than
are the Wizards and Gods who spend most of their time engaged in the more
complex work of administering the MUD program.
On some MUDs, this social
hierarchy has been written into the game as an alternative track toward
officially recognised status. On FurryMUCK, as on LambdaMOO, highly socially
involved players can be rewarded with official recognition of their social
importance. Deserving FurryMUCK players may be given an 'Official Helper's
Badge', a simple MUD object that the character carries around and which
identifies him or her as someone to whom players can turn to for help on
everything from MUD etiquette to the complexities of building. Special commands
have been written into the FurryMUCK program that allow players to view a list
of all those who have won such a badge, get information on their areas of
expertise, check to see which helpers are currently logged into the MUD, and
leave messages for them. Every player who spends some few minutes
reading part of the extensive help files available on FurryMUCK will be likely
to find these commands and so become aware of who the Official Helpers are.
These people are known even by those who have never met them. They are also more likely to become
personally well-known to a great number of players as they are paged with
questions and pleas for help—one character, known as BoingDragon, has achieved
almost legendary status through her tireless efforts to help and advise novice
players.
Players of social MUDs who
enter into the social and creative acts of the MUD will be likely to become
popular and well-known on that MUD. To achieve that status, considerable time
must be invested in learning how to use the particular MUD program on which the
game universe is based, and in getting to know fellow players. Anyone who does so invest their time will in
consequence be likely to continue to become more involved with MUD. Admiration and respect are addictive. The power of popularity is as great as the
power to manipulate worlds. People who feel liked and valued in a particular
environment will tend to frequent that environment--that holds true as well for
MUDs as for
any field of human
activity. Involvement leads to
popularity, and popularity leads to involvement--players who have established
themselves as clever builders and resourceful advisers will find that the
popularity they have gained in doing so will keep them coming back to the MUD.
As Foucault says,
"every point in the exercise of power is at the same time a site where
knowledge is formed. And conversely every established piece of knowledge
permits and assures the exercise of power.
Put otherwise, there is no opposition between what is done and what is
said."[20] On MUDs, and especially
social MUDs, where every player can create new game elements, what is said and
what is done are one and the same thing.
Speaking and writing - transmitting knowledge - encompass all virtual
actions. In the beginning of all MUD
systems there is only the Word, and the progression of the system from its
initial existence as a computer program into a virtual environment habituated
by players is the progression of a series of linguistic acts. It is the production of knowledge about the
virtual environment which produces the
environment itself. This production of
knowledge and virtuality powers the socially cohesive body found on social
MUDs.
4)
Social Cohesion on MUDs
At the heart of human
activity in capitalist, industrialised culture, lies the wish for influence and
power. Power can come in many forms,
and different forms are attractive to different people. A desire for sheer physical control can lead
people into body building and military coups.
A desire for respect and fame can inspire actors and politicians. The forms of power that can be exercised on
MUDs vary on each system, and most widely between the two genres of MUD.
This differentiation is to some extent artificial, and based on averages
and general cases. Some Wizards on
social MUDs have become so through a wish to have ultimate control over a
universe of their own. Some players of
adventure-style MUDs are well-known and liked for their willingness to help
novice players and to chat and listen to others. But the terms 'social' and
'adventure' have come to be used because there are, overall, two kinds of
MUD. One kind stresses player
advancement through the attainment of levels or skills through interaction with
the game elements and competition with other players. The other stresses player
interaction and creativity. The former
lends itself to the expression of power through a character's prowess, and the
player's resultant powers to affect the game world. Ultimately, players on
adventure MUDs strive to help their character achieve a high enough level of
expertise to merit their promotion to a position of power over the MUD
world. Social MUDs lend themselves more
easily to the expression of power through exhibitions of creativity, charm, and
knowledge. Almost all social MUD
characters have the same powers over the game world--what differentiates them
are the ways in which players act through the character to transform the world
and to engage other players in supportive relationships.
Each of these different
paths to power involve the player in the game. Each takes an initial degree of
dedication on which to form a basis for
status. Adventure MUD players must play
the game a minimum of several hours each week just to stay in the game. To advance within the game the player must
play more often than that, and to achieve high levels of expertise he or she
must play very often indeed. Once that
level has been achieved the player must play often enough to maintain that
position, and if he or she aspires to Wizardship it is necessary to demonstrate
the skills and dedication for which that promotion is deserved. At each level of play on adventure MUDs,
time and involvement are demanded, with the level of demand increasing as does
the level of expertise. The higher the
level, the greater the rewards. As
players advance they gain greater powers over the MUD universe. They become better able to complete
dangerous quests within the game world, and are eventually granted the power to
manipulate the world itself. For
players of social MUDs the rewards are less overtly powerful, although they too
can follow a track toward greater, and
eventually total, power to
manipulate the virtual universe. For
most players of social-style MUDs, however, power over the game universe is not
an end in itself. That power is freely
available, and provides novice players with an immediate reward for playing the
game, and so a reason to continue playing.
This free expression of creativity becomes the means to power through
social influence. Recognition and
popularity amongst the players of the MUD are won through the creation of novel
additions to the virtual world, and through friendly and helpful interaction
with other players. Once gained, this
renown keeps a player involved.
On adventure MUDs,
dedication to the game, and prolonged interaction with the game universe, is
rewarded by the power to become God over that universe. On social MUDs, the power to control the
universe is the tool through which to win influence--to create a world in which
the player is admired. On social style
MUDs cooperation is based on a hierarchy of popularity; on adventure MUDs on a
hierarchy of strength. Each form of MUD attracts its own set of players, and
evokes in those players a willingness to dedicate themselves to the game. While the ultimate reward on all MUDs is the
same, the paths taken to reach it differ between the two main styles of MUD
game, the social and the adventurous.
Players of each of these two genres of game must contend with widely
different paths to deification. Each
path contains its own cohesive elements which centre on control and the
manipulation of game elements.
[1] See Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Will the
Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures," In:
Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael
Benedikt. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991) 88-92 for a discussion of the
CommuniTree project.
[2] Stone, 91.
[3] Stone, 91.
[4] Stone, 91.
[5] Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" In: The Whale and the Reactor, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986) 22.
[6] Dibbell, electronic manuscript.
[7] Michel Foucault, “Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing
1972-1977”, Ed. Colin Gordon, Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham,
Kate Soper, (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1980) 125.
[8] Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison”, Trans. Alan Sheridan, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,
1986) 8.
[9] Curtis, 30.
[10] From: anonymous:
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.diku; Subject: Complaint about [name of MUD deleted];
Date: Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 19:54:29 -0500
[11] From: ksomme@cmcvx1.claremont.edu;
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.diku; Subject: Complaint about [name of MUD deleted];
Date: Date: Sun, 16 May 1993 21:03:42 GMT [12] Foucault, _Power/Knowledge_, 55.
[13] From: doc@marble.bu.edu
(Doc); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.diku; Subject: Re: what is??; Date: 9 Dec 1993
18:03:33 GMT. 'Mobs' is a contraction
of the term 'mobile monsters'.
[14] From:
heretic@huey.cc.utexas.edu (Fulk Nerra); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.diku;
Subject: Re: what is??; Date: 9 Dec 1993 14:26:21 -0600. The phrase 'regen waiters' refers to the
time which many players must spend healing (regenerating) before heading back
for another bout with a computer-generated monster.
[15] Most complaints from
playerkillers concern accusations of unfair behaviour on the part of Gods or Wizards--that,
for instance, they have been unjustly punished for breaking the rules relating
to playerkilling.
[16] In a survey of 583
players on LambdaMOO, players were asked to nominate the activity that took up
most of their time on the MUD. The results showed that socialising took up
57.26% of players' time, exploring took up 14.63%, building 14.14%, competitive
gaming and puzzle solving 6.99%, and
other activities 6.98%. See Appendix 6 for some preliminary results from
this survey.
[17] Quoted by Howard
Rheingold in “The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier”,
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993) 162-163.
[18] From: anonymous, Date:
Wed, 14 Oct 1992 19:17:47 GMT, Newsgroups: rec.games.mud, Subject: To build or
not to build?
[19] From: anonymous, Date:
Fri, 16 Oct 1992 08:16:06 GMT, Newsgroups: rec.games.mud, Subject: To build or
not to build?
[20] Michel Foucault, “Power, Truth, Strategy”, Eds. Meaghan
Morris and Paul Patton, (Sydney: Feral, 1979) 62.
MUD systems, with all the
factors of anonymity, distance and flexibility brought into play, allow people
to say what they want. That freedom is not always exercised to the approval of
other players, and social systems which maintain cohesion amongst members of a
MUD community have arisen. But the
nature of what people do on MUDs does not provide a complete explanation of
such systems--the nature of the people is just as important. A player of a MUD system is not a
transparent medium, providing nothing but a link between external and internal
cultural patterns, between actual and virtual realities. The player is the most problematic of all
virtual entities, for his or her virtual manifestation has no constant
identity. MUD characters need not be of
any fixed gender or appearance, but may evolve, mutate, morph, over time and at
the whim of their creator. All of these
phenomena place gender, sexuality, identity and corporeality beyond the plane of
certainty. They become not merely problematic
but unresolvable. If anonymity on MUDs
allows people to do and say whatever they wish, it also allows them to be
whatever they wish. It
is not only the MUD
environment that is a virtual variable - the virtual manifestation of each
player is similarly alterable, open to change and re-interpretation. The player does not constitute a fixed
reference point in the MUD universe.
Players do not enter into the system and remain unchanged by it. Players do not, in essence, 'enter' the
virtual landscape--they are manifested within it by their own imaginative
effort.
In everyday life, our
efforts at self-presentation usually assume that we cannot change the basics of
our appearance. Physical
characteristics, although open to cosmetic or fashionable manipulation, are
basically unalterable. What we look
like, we have to live with, and this fixity underpins our social institutions.
Social structures based on bias toward or prejudice against differing portions
of humanity depend on the ease with which we can assess each other's bodies,
and ascribe identities to physical form.
Male, female, white, black, young, old, poor and affluent are all terms
that
resonate through our
culture, and each depends in part on the fixity of physical form, and our
ability to affix meaning to that form. These kinds of assumptions go beyond the
level of non-verbal communication--they make up not the outward form of our
culture but the substructure of it.
Just as we notice--if such an almost subconscious perception can be
called 'noticing'--the gender of our interlocutors before we notice their
facial expressions, the symbolism of the body underpins and shapes our
culture. On MUDs, however, the body is
not an immutable property. How one MUD
player 'looks' to another player is entirely dependant upon information that
they choose to give. The boundaries
delineated by cultural constructions of the body are both subverted and given
free rein in virtual environments. With the body freed from the physical, it
completely enters the realm of symbol.
It becomes an entity of pure meaning, but is simultaneously meaningless,
stripped of any fixed referent.
The MUD system does not
dictate to players the form of their virtual persona. The process of character creation is at all times in the hands,
or imaginations, of the player, although different systems may make the process
less or more complex.[1] Players may
manifest themselves in any way they please, unbounded by the physical measures
that limit our self-presentation in actual life. MUD characters are much more than a few bytes of computer
data--they are cyborgs, a manifestation
of the self beyond the realms of the physical, existing in a space where
identity is self-defined rather than pre-ordained. The consequences of this for
the sub-cultures that form on MUDs are enormous. They begin with a challenge to the ties between body and self,
and lead to subversions of the categories of gender and sexuality which are so
dominant in the actual world.
1)
Self-Made People
MUD players create their own
virtual personas, their own characters. They create, initially, a name. Their first contact with the MUD program is
to direct it to create a database entry which will serve as their window into
the virtual universe, the informational node to which they will connect in
order to experience the virtual reality contained in a MUD system. Players rarely choose to give their real
name to their virtual persona. Most
choose to manifest themselves under a
name that forms the central focus of what becomes a virtual disguise. These names can be almost anything that the
player chooses to make them. They can
be conventional names such as Chris, Jane or Smith. In many cases, the names have clearly been borrowed from
characters from books, films or television shows--Gandalf, AgentCooper and
PrincessLeia. Other names, such as
Love, funky, Moonlight and blip, reflect ideas, symbols and emotions, while
many more, such as FurryMUCK's felinoid Veronicat and LambdaMOO's yudJ, involve
plays upon language and conventional naming systems.[2] The name a player chooses is the beginning
point of his or her virtual self. On
top of that name, the player builds a virtual body, endowing the new-born and
newly-christened database entry with characteristics that mimic actuality. Players attach textual descriptions to those
entries, clothing and defining the would-be physical form of their character,
giving them possessions, and attaching to them symbols of those aspects of
identity to which we give great importance in actual life-- characters are
gendered, sexed, identified.
The subversion of the body
begins in small ways on MUDs. At the
least end of the virtual surgery that players may perform upon themselves lies
the cosmetic. It is possible to by-pass
the boundaries delineated by cultural constructs of beauty, ugliness and
fashion. Players can appear to be as they would wish. Such changes that a player might make to his or her perceived
identity can be small, a matter of realising in others' minds a desire to be
attractive, impressive and popular:
Lirra is a short young woman with long blonde hair,
an impish grin and a curvaceous figure.
Her clear blue eyes sparkle as she looks back at you. She is wearing a short red skirt, a white
t-shirt, black fishnet stockings, and black leather boots and jacket.
Lirra whispers, "my desc is pretty real, but I'm
a bit plumper than that" to you.
Lirra whispers, "and maybe i don't always wear
such sexy clothes ;)" to you. [3]
Such manifestations remain
within the realm of the bodily constructs with which we are familiar in actual
life. They may enable the player to
side-step the normal requirements of entry into glamour, but they do not
subvert the concept. Rather, such
descriptions call upon our pre-conceived notions about the human appearance to
sustain their power. They do not free
players from the shackles of the beauty myth, but they allow them to redefine
themselves in accordance with that myth.
Beyond the bounds of beauty,
other players shape their virtual selves to emulate the signs of influence and
affluence which we pay heed to in our actual lives. Such characters are usually beautiful, but their beauty is at
most a setting, the background for social status rather than the reason for it:
Darklighter.
A lean Man standing a metre 73, weighing about 70 kilos. His hair is golden brown with hints of red,
the frame his angelic face. Deep set are two emerald eyes that peer back at
you. His vestiage is all in black with a cloak concealing him. You see on his
right hand an emerald colored ring of peculiar origin. You realize that it is
that of a Green Lantern. You can tell he is the sort of man who can see the
strings that bind the universe together and mend them when they break. [4]
At the core of such
characters is their possession of influential and even superhuman
attributes. Curtis describes this
phenomenon in player description as simply being a case of
wish-fulfilment--"I cannot count," he says, "the number of 'mysterious
but unmistakably powerful' figures I have seen wandering LambdaMOO."[5] In
many cases this may be true--certainly the majority of people in everyday life
are neither as extraordinary nor as powerful as many MUD characters present
themselves to be. However, it must be
remembered that their personal description is the only method open to players
to substitute for what, in everyday life, would be a complex mixture of
non-verbal social context cues such as accent, dress and race. If many descriptions show exaggerated, even
fantastical, attempts to
indicate social
acceptability, it is at least in part a reflection of the degree to which
players feel it necessary to compensate
for the lack of non-textual communication channels. Without reference to the senses on which we normally rely to
provide information, such socio-emotional cues must be made explicit in textual
descriptions. The
social information usually
spread out over several different sensual channels is concentrated into one
channel and therefore exaggerated.
Whatever the reasons for
such cases of virtual cosmetic surgery, be they dramaturgical or egoistical,
their effect upon the MUD universe is to free it from conventions of power that
rely on physical manifestation. When
everyone can be beautiful, there can be no hierarchy of beauty. This freedom, however, is not necessarily
one that undermines the power of such conventions. Indeed, such freedom to be beautiful tends to support these
conventions by making beauty
not unimportant but a
pre-requisite. The convention becomes
conventional--MUD worlds are free from the stigma of ugliness not because
appearance ceases to matter but because no one need be seen to be ugly. The cosmetic nature of virtual worlds is,
however, the least of their ability to operate upon our physically-centred
prejudices. In the realms of gender and sexuality, MUD systems go beyond the
escapist and become creative.
2) Ungrounding Gender
Of the cultural factors that
are most important in encounters in Western society--typified by the big three
of gender, race and class-- all may be 'hard-coded' into MUD programs. Race and class are generally the least
problematised of these three, and their representations offer a link between
the cosmetic and the radical ends of cultural surgery. Race and class on MUDs are generally the
concern of systems that are adventure-oriented, and the choices available are
likely to be within the realms of fantasy.
Choices of race are more likely to be between Dwarvish, Elvish and
Klingon than between Asian, Black and Caucasian; choices of class are more
likely to be between Warrior, Magician and Thief than between white or
blue-collar. This essential racial and
class blindness is very likely the effect of the pre-selection criteria which
the actual world places on those who would have access to the Internet. MUD players are necessarily people who have
access to the Internet computer network.
They are most likely to live in the industrialised and largely English-speaking
countries that form the greater part of the Internet. They are also most likely to be either employed by an
organisation with an interest in computing, or be attending an educational
institution. People who fit these
requirements are overwhelmingly likely to be affluent and white.[6] Uniformity decreases visibility, and thus
for a large percentage of players, race and class are taken as a given and so
seem to be invisible.
Gender, however, is brought
very much to the fore on MUDs. All MUDs
allow--and some insist--that players set their 'gender flag', a technical
property of MUD characters that controls which set of pronouns are used by the
MUD program in referring to the character. Most MUDs allow only three
choices--male, female and neuter - which decide between the families of
pronouns containing him, her or it. A
few MUDs demand that a player select either male or female as their gender, and
do not allow a player with an unset gender flag to enter the MUD. Other MUDs allow many genders--male, female,
plural, neuter, hermaphrodite, and several unearthly genders lifted from the
pages of
science fiction novels. It is obviously easy for players to choose
to play a character with a gender different from their own. At least, it is technically easy, but not
necessarily socially easy since there is a lively controversy surrounding the
issue of cross-gendered playing. The subject is one that regularly recurs on
the Usenet newsgroups relating to MUDs.
Indeed, the times when the topic is not being debated are far
outnumbered by the times when it is--it is a subject that evokes strong
feelings from a very large number of MUD players.
Almost without exception
such debates begin with the instance, either actual or hypothetical, of a male
player controlling a female character.
It is very rare for the reverse situation, that of a woman playing a
man, to be brought up, at least in the first instance. This one-sidedness runs in parallel to a
common claim that male-to-female cross-gendering is far more common than the
reverse, a claim that rests in part on the notion, common lore amongst MUD
players, that most of their number are in fact male. This may well be so. The
cultural pre-selection process which ensures that most MUD players are white
and affluent is also in operation in defining the sex of the average
player. Although the gap is slowly
closing, most people employed as computer programmers and computer engineers
are male, and most of the students likely to have access to the Internet (those
studying Computer Science, or Software Engineering) are also male. It is therefore quite likely that the
folklore on the subject is correct, and that the majority of MUD players are
male.[7] Since female and male
presenting characters are about equally common, it follows that
some of those female
characters are controlled by male players.
Whether or not most players
are male, the one-sidedness in the cross-gender debate is strongly related to
players' perception of women as being the minority of their number, and to
notions of gender-specific behaviour found in the external culture. Female-presenting players are treated very
differently to male-presenting players.
They are often subjected to virtual forms of those two hoary sides of a
male-dominated society--harassment and chivalry. The latter can give female characters an advantage in the game
world. Players newly connecting to a
MUD system will inevitably require help
in navigating the virtual terrain, and in learning the commands particular to
that system. Players who present
themselves as female are more likely than their male counterparts to find help
easily, or to be offered it
spontaneously. On adventure-oriented systems, in which the
goodwill of other players can mean the life or death of a character,
female-presenting characters are likely to be offered help in the form of money
and other objects helpful for survival.
This special treatment is not always, however, meted out in a spirit of
pure altruism. Players offering help, expensive swords and amulets of
protection generally want something in return.
At the least, they might expect to be offered friendship; sometimes they
may expect less platonic favours to be showered upon them.
Sex is, of course, at the
root of this special treatment. As well
as being white and male, the average MUD player might be likely to be young,
since the Internet primarily serves educational institutions and thus students
who are generally in their late teens or early twenties.[8] Such young people might well be expected to
engage in romantic and sexual exploration, and the anonymous virtual
environment allows this kind of exploration a safety that could only make it
all
the more attractive a site
for it. It is hardly unusual for young
people to utilise social situations to form relationships with members of the
appropriate sex; since MUD systems provide a social environment it is not
surprising that they are sometimes used in such ways, and successful liaisons
can be intensely felt and emotionally fulfilling. Romantic attentions are not,
however, always welcome or appropriate. In cases where they are not, the
attention paid to female-presenting characters can fall into the realms of
sexual harassment. As I have described,
aggression can as easily be played out on MUDs as can affection. The sexual harassment of female characters
is not uncommon, and is often closely tied to what may begin as a chivalrous
offer of help, as this adventure MUD player describes:
I played a couple of muds as a female, one making up
to wizard level. Other players start showering you with money to help you get
started, and I had never once gotten a handout when playing a male player. And then they feel they should be allowed to
tag along forever, and feel hurt when you leave them to go off and explore by
yourself. Then when you give them the
knee after they grope you, they wonder what your problem is, reciting that
famous saying "What's your problem? It's only a game".[9]
For others the cry of
"it's only a game" is itself justification for permitting
cross-gendered playing:
I just paged through about 15 articles on this
cross-gender topic. GEEZ guys get a life. Who cares if someone playes a female
or male character and who cares what sex they are in real life! This is a game, and if someone enjoys
playing the opposite sex, so what.[10]
However, and despite claims
such as this one, for most players gender is of great moment, far more so than
the imagined race or profession of the player.
The simple fact is that no player presenting him or herself as a
Dwarvish warrior-mage is likely to be one in actual life, but a female or
male-presenting character could be controlled by a player of that sex. There is no cause for branding role-playing
a Dwarf as deception when a reasonable person could not truly be deceived; it
is only where virtual existence holds close parallels to actual life that the
possibility and accusations of deception enter the equation. The ethics of this kind of 'deception' are
subject to debate amongst MUD players.
Opinion is sharply divided. Some
players feel that cross-gendering, particularly in the case of male players
controlling female characters, is a despicable and even perverted practice:
Well, I think it *is* sick for guys to play female
characters. Most only do it to fool
some poor guy into thinking he's found the lady of his dreams, and then turn
around and say "Ha! Ha! I'm really male!" Real mature. I think if you get off on pretending to be
female you should go and dress up and go to some club in San Fran where they
like perverts--just don't go around deceiving people on muds.[11]
There are three issues which
those who oppose cross-gendering are concerned about. Firstly, they feel that it is 'cheating' for a male player to
take advantage of the favouritism and chivalry that is commonly showered upon
female-presenting players in order to get special privileges in the game. Secondly, many feel that such impersonations
are, by virtue of being 'lies', unethical.
Lastly, many players obviously feel very uncomfortable and at a
disadvantage in interacting with others whose gender is unclear, and feel even
more discomforted on discovering that they have been interacting under false
assumptions.
For some, this is where
cyberspace ceases to be a comfortable place. We are so used to being provided
with information about each other's sex that the lack of it can leave many
players feeling set adrift. Gender roles are so ingrained in our culture that
for many people they are a necessity, and acting without reference to them
seems impossible. Many people are
simply unable to negotiate social encounters without needing to fix, at least
in assumption, the genders of their interlocutors. It is indeed a truly disorienting experience the first time one
finds oneself being treated as a member of the opposite sex. My own forays into the realm of virtual
masculinity were at first frightening experiences. Much as some of us may deplore what we see as the negative sides
of our culture's sexual politics, we are brought up to align ourselves with
gender-specific social navigation mechanisms.
Once deprived of the social tools which I, as female, was used to
deploying and relying on, I felt rudderless, unable to negotiate the most
simple of social interactions. I did
not know how to speak, whether to women or to 'other' men, and I was thrown off
balance by the ways in which other people spoke to me. It took much practice to learn to navigate
these unfamiliar channels, an experience that gave me a greater understanding
of the mechanics of sexual politics than any other I have ever had.
For some players it is
precisely this chance to swim unfamiliar seas that attracts them to
cross-gendered playing. If it had not
been for my intellectual interest I would probably not have persevered with my
attempts as male self-presentation since it was often stressful and
bewildering. Others, perhaps more
adventurous and less self-conscious than I, claim this as the most rewarding
aspect of virtual existence. The chance to see how the other half lives is
enjoyed by many as liberating and enlightening, as is the opportunity to take a
holiday from the confines of one's actual gender. The demands of masculinity, or femininity, can be daunting to
those not brought up to them, and even those who are can appreciate the chance
to side-step them:
Melina says, "What I really liked about having a
female character was that I didn't have to do all the masculine bullshit--all
the penis-waving." Melina giggles.
"Penis-waving... I love that phrase..." Melina says, "I could just chat with
people! It was great! No having to compete, no *pressures*, no feeling like I'd
be made fun of for talking about my feelings." [12]
The ability to adopt and
adapt to the erosion of gender requires a great deal of cultural and
psychological flexibility. At its best
it might help those who can play this game to understand the problems
experienced by actual members of the opposite sex. Men who have experienced first hand the kinds of sexual
harassment that for women has often been, as Gloria Steinem described it on a
televised interview, "just part of life", may be less likely to
perpetuate the social structures that enable such harassment. At the same time, such virtual fluidity acts
to erode the places from which many of us speak. What, for instance, will it mean for feminist politics that in
cyberspace men can not only claim to speak for women, but can speak as women, with no one able to tell the
difference? The subversion of gender is not always a happy or enlightening
experience. The problematising of
identity, and of the speaking positions which are so
crucial to our politics
aside, many cross-gendered players experience the opposite of liberation--they
are caught in a backlash against it:
There are also those who think it is an abomination to be playing a character of a
different gender... and if it becomes
known that a female character is actually being played by a guy, some of these
guys will hunt down and kill the female character repeatedly for the
"crime" of being a genderbender. [13]
The tools utilised by MUD
players to enforce and maintain social structures and social coherence can be
used to support any number of different ethical and moral systems. If methods of enforcing such systems can be
called into effect in an effort to shore up the virtual holes in players'
perceptions of traditional gender roles, they can also be used to enforce a
different kind of 'political correctness':
I am female.
I choose to play female chars on muds.
And people do harrass you. Its
not just casual convo or compliment. I
stopped playing muds where playerkilling is not legal. People tend to value
there characters. If they really start harrassing you, you, or some other high
level, killing them a few times tends to stop it short. On the muds i play im
happy to kill people for harrassement [...] But i went on a few no pk muds
recently and it was costant harrassment.
I was getting tells like "How big are your tits" or "You
want to mudfuck" which is reallly annoying. So to the females who have problems, head to the player killing
muds where you can avenge yourself...
[14]
The structure of MUD
programs destroys the usually all but insurmountable confines of sex. Gender is self-selected. This freedom opens up a wealth of
possibilities, for gender is one of the more 'sacred' institutions in our
society, a quality whose fixity is so assumed that enacted or surgical
reassignment has and does involve complex rituals, taboos, procedures and
stigmas. This fixity, and the common
equation of gender with sex, becomes problematic when gender
reassignment can be effected
by a few touches at a keyboard. MUDs
become the arena for experimentation with gender specific social roles, and
debate over the ethics of such experimentation. The flexibility of self-presentation provided by MUDs makes it
possible for players to experiment with aspects of behaviour and identity that
it would not normally be possible to play with. Players are able to create a virtual self outside the normally
assumed boundaries of
gender, race, class and
age. The possibility of such
experimentation governs the expectations of all players of MUDs. Some find the lack of fixity intimidating;
others show a willingness to accept this phenomenon, and to join in the games
that can be played within it. Whether an individual player enjoys the
situations that come of this potential, or is resentful and wary of them,
exploitation of it is an accepted part of the MUD environment. Most players seem to be aware, and some have learnt through bitter
experience, that not all characters reflect the identity of the player. MUDs challenge and obscure the boundaries
between some of our most deeply felt cultural significances, and force the
creation of new cultural expectations to accommodate this.
MUDs both erode gender and
bring it to the fore. In the instant that
a player assigns a sex to his or her character, that split has been
recognised. The need for conscious
assignment makes gender meaningless as a reference point in some claimed
reality, but it also marks it as a vital cultural referent. On MUDs sex and gender are subverted by the
whims of imagination. The attributes
and social options society allocates each gender offer both negative and
positive experiences. The chance to
experience life on the other side of what is usually an all but insurmountable
divide can make the MUD world into a stage for inventive and subversive
cultural games. At their most liberal,
systems where this playful subversion is an accepted by-product of virtual
existence can be dynamic and challenging places.
Nevertheless, as Stone has
also noted, the gender-specific roles that our culture prescribes have not been
changed by this virtual freedom from the shackles of gender, but the rules
delineating who may use which social mode have been clouded. The appropriation of the other is an
accepted, though not always liked, feature of the virtual terrain. The virtual colonisation of the body of the
other in the often culturally uncharted waters of the cyberspatial frontier, to
offer a mix of landscapes and similes only possible in virtual reality, is
commonplace. Gender is divorced from
the body, and given a purely social
significance. The man who can behave as
a woman, and the woman who can behave as a man, are virtually accepted as
legitimately owning such presented identities.
The cyborg entity, to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, walks wary though the
virtual landscape, sceptical of the 'real world' significance of what is
culturally signposted, yet politic, amenable to the games played within that
space. The gendered subject is separated
from the sexed body, if not finally divorced from it. MUDs do not grant a decreen
nisi to the gender roles that permeate our social existence, but they do
offer equal opportunity casting.
2)
Cyborg Sexuality
Stone tells us that, in
describing the act of computer-mediated communication, people she had
interviewed would "move their hands expressively as though typing,
emphasising the gestural quality and essential tactility of the virtual
mode."[15] Communication through
the fingertips rather than through sound, a necessarily tactile connection, a
social touch, albeit one distanced by computer cable, is the breed of sociality
expressed on MUDs. The pose command and
the feelings commands are the most richly used of all those communicative tools
available on MUD systems. This
obsession with the physical in a non-physical environment is hardly
contradictory--a consensual hallucination is, after all, in part a sensual
hallucination. Spanning the senses as well as the imaginations of the
participants, MUDs are as grimily sensual as their name suggests, and can be a
stage for sexual expression.
FurryMUCK is one of the most
popular social MUDs on the Internet, and one that has a reputation for being
rampant with sexual activity. I cannot
say whether this is deserved or not--MUDsex seems to happen on all systems, and
it is impossible for me to say whether it is more or less common on
FurryMUCK. However, questions of social
and sexual identity, and of the unfixed and unfixable nature of the cyborg
body, are prominent on FurryMUCK. The
very theme of the MUD draws these questions to the fore, for every character on
Furry is inhuman, and most are anthropomorphised animals clad only in virtual
fur. Cats and bears are legion, most of
them sleek-furred and svelte or broad and brawny. The nature and culture of the body is the primary theme of
FurryMUCK, and the ideal is animalistic allure. Sexuality is a vital aspect of this kind of cyborg body, and most
character descriptions reflect this.
There are few 'mysterious but powerful' mage-warriors on FurryMUCK, but
many flashes of velvet-pelted thighs, glints of slitted pupils and touches of
sharp-taloned paws.
'Touches' is indeed the
operative word. FurryMUCK is by far the
most 'physical' of the MUDs I have encountered. There is much back-scratching, fur-patting, hugging and kissing
between Furries, that being the name by which they are both called and
self-identified. This virtual touching is rarely overtly sexual when performed
in the more public areas of the FurryMUCK world. It is always affectionate, and indeed FurryMUCK is one of the
most friendly MUDs I have used. Nevertheless, beneath the affectionate snugging
and purring is a strong undercurrent of revelry in the decidedly beautiful and
sensual nature of Furry bodies. If one
looks for them, areas where semi-public sexual play is common are not hard to
find. The FurryMUCK hot-tubs are both
popular and well sign-posted with warnings about the
nature of the behaviour both
allowed and to be expected inside them. The Truth or Dare games played in their
own specially designed and, again, signposted, areas are a deliberate
invitation for sexual expression. Just
as the games of Truth or Dare played by actual humans, as many adolescent
memories will attest, nearly always concern themselves with questions about
desires and dares to act on them, so do the games played by Furries.
The mechanics of sexual
activity on MUDs are very simple. It is
a form of co-authored interactive erotica.
The players involved in a particular virtual sexual act type out their
actions and utterances:
Arista continues to nip little kisses back down your
neck. Pete mmmms, his hands stroking a
little at your sides. Arista presses her body to yours, rubbing herself like a
cat over you. Pete groans softly, laying back on the long seat, writhing softly
under you. Arista moves her mouth down over your chest slowly. Arista plants
open mouth kisses over your left nipple as she flicks her tongue over it
gently. Pete's body arches up towards your mouth, softly.[16]
>From all accounts MUDsex
can be a lot of fun for the participants, and many a crude reference has been
made in the MUD-related newsgroups as to the manner in which it improves a
player's ability to type one-handed.
Beyond its mechanics MUDsex--or tinysex as it is often called, in
erroneous implication that most of it occurs on social-style MUDs--is not at
all simple. MUDsex falls into a realm
between the actual and the virtual.
Players can become emotionally involved in the virtual actions of their
characters, and the line between virtual actions and actual desires can become
blurred.
Virtual sex is the least and
the most expressive of virtual interactions.
In its descriptions of purely would-be physical
interaction, it is the least
overtly cultural of interactions. It draws most heavily on external cultural
factors in its dramaturgical nature, and it is without doubt among the most
dramatically affective of virtual happenings.
Real desire and arousal are evoked between participants, a reaction
hugely dependant upon each person's external cultural experience. As Stone describes the relationship between
phone sex workers and clients, the speaker--or typist-- textually codes for
gesture, appearance, or proclivity, and expresses these as tokens, sometimes in
no more than a smiley, and the listener, or reader, uncompresses the tokens and
constructs a dense, complex interactive image.[17] In these interactions, Stone continues, "desire appears as a
product of the interaction between embodied reality and the
emptiness of the
token."[18] That emptiness is
filled with the cultural and personal expectations of the virtual lovers—good
cybersex consists of the empathetic understanding of and response to the
cultural symbols represented by a partner's symbolic tokens. Such descriptors
are loaded with assumptions and meanings; that they can be transmitted along
with the text is a tribute not only to the linguistic skill of the
interlocutors but to the facility of the virtual medium for such dramatic and
intimate play. The human body is
represented through narrow bandwidth communication in all its culturally laden
fleshiness through the coding of cultural expectations as linguistic tokens of
meaning. Desire is no longer grounded
in physicality in cyberspace, in triumphant confirmation of the thesis that the
most important human erogenous zone is the mind. MUD sex may never replace
actual sex, but it does provide some erotic satisfaction to those who
participate in it.
"Textuality as
striptease" is no longer just a jibe directed by the script writers of the
BBC production "Small World" at a particular breed of American
postmodern cultural critics.[19] The
textual nature of MUDs strips the confines of a particular body from players,
and allows them the freedom to play with, in and through any body they
desire. Cyborg bodies are not, as Stone
claims, "preorgasmic".[20]
The "erotic ontology of cyberspace" lies most clearly in its
concentration of the erogenous into the imaginative.[21] Cyborg bodies are, in many ways, superior to
their actual counterparts. They cannot
tire, stumble, or subject their inhabitants to any of the embarrassments or
failures that flesh is prone to. Thus
cyborg sex is a concentration of the erotic, a purifying of prurient
imagination, a romantic idealisation of sexual encounters worthy of the most
airbrushed Hollywood art.
4) The Cyborg Self
Cyborgs are born out of
virtual sex. At the moment of virtual
orgasm the line between player and character is the most clouded and the most
transparent. Who it is that is
communicating becomes unclear, and whether passion is being simulated on or
transmitted through the MUD becomes truly problematic. Born from primeval MUD, these cyborgs
redefine gender, identity
and the body. In this part of
cyberspace, a place as far divorced from the natural world and the animal, as
far from the flesh as human inventiveness can get, the lines between the animal
and the conscious are erased.
FurryMUCK seems almost too
good for cultural analysis to be true - an imaginary world populated by
conscious animals consciously sensualised, all represented by pure linguistic
symbolism and represented within the confines of electricity, silicon and
magnetism. At the margins of physicality, these Furry cyborgs play with the
margins of sexuality. They have none of
the boundaries of the actual to confine them.
They may take on any physiology that passion and imagined convenience invites. Any configuration of human and animal
components may be mixed to create as many sexual possibilities as can be
imagined. Bisexual, multisexual,
polysexual--they can be all, but
always consensual. For the players there is always the
off-button; for the cyborg characters, implements of sensual overload are as
controlled or as uncontrolled, as gentle or as cruel, as the simulation
demands. Perversion is as common on
MUDs as in the 'real world', but in cyberspace perversion can be perverted into
any form. In the dim recesses of Internet cyberspace, there are MUDs, known
only by word of mouth--or touch of keyboard--with themes as controversial as
that of any specialist brothel. Kinks
of any kind can be found if looked for, all bent to the demands of the cyborg
entities who portray them for the amusement of the humans shadowed behind their
technologies. FurryMUCK is the lightest
side of this twisting of cyborg gender and sex--the fluffiest and the
snuggliest. Darker
cyberspaces can be found,
painted not in cartoon colours and textured with fur, but depicted in the dark
techno-organicism of H. R. Giger and texted with all the danger and poetry of
Pauline Reage.
The cyborgs on MUDs do not,
as Donna Haraway suggests in her "Cyborg Manifesto", have "no
truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis... or other seductions to organic
wholeness".[22] Although, in partial confirmation of Haraway's comments,
they are literally the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal
capitalism--of the US Department of Defence and the bastions of higher
education--MUD cyborgs do not reject the labels of the father culture. There is
no escape from labelling for these cyborgs--they are constructed entirely from
the most evident of labels. Their
commitment to "particularity, irony, intimacy and perversity" is
expressed through the flaunting of cultural symbols and the literal inscription
upon their virtual bodies of the signs of who they want to be.[23] Transsexual, transvestite, bisexual,
superhuman and anthropomorphic--MUD bodies can embrace and be embraced by each
of these richly coded definitions.
At the heart of this play
with identity is always the question of how dichotomous cyborg and actual
identities are. Where are the lines
drawn between representation, simulation and actualisation? How far do genuine feelings draw virtual
actions into the realm of the actual? These are questions for the legislators
and philosophers of our new computerised world, and not questions that will be
answered easily, for the one constant of cyberspatial existence is that it is
different for everyone. Current
political and legal trends, with talk of 'hostile environments' and 'hate
speech', may lead to the notion that biotechnological politics move beyond the
regulation of actions upon the body and into actions upon the spirit. The ultimate reduction of the physical--the
microelectronic--may become the realm of the disembodied spirit. If criminality, or even immorality, can be
discovered in cyberspace it will entail a greater recognition of amorphic harm.
The most intimate of MUD interactions already involve that
recognition. Negotiation, and
behind-the-scenes direction, almost always ride in tandem with expression. In the mechanics of the act, cyborg lovers
whisper messages between their players, directing what is acceptable and what
is not, defining and creating the virtual experience with determination and
consent. The most highly practised
inhabitants of MUD spaces make their intentions and desires clear. Flirtation
is more highly specified than it is in the pubs and parties of the 'real
world'. Raised eyebrows and tilted
cigarettes are replaced by direct requests.
This is cyberspatial intimacy at its best.
These cyborgs do not exist
in a "post-gender world."[24]
They are only quasi-disembodied.
They do not attempt to posit their identities as amorphous, but instead
revel in the possibilities of body-hopping. Play is not with escape from the
claims of the flesh, but with the cultural meanings attached to different
bodies. The adoption of masculinity, femininity,
androgyny, animality or the more fantastical meanings attributed to fictional
races or genders, is as easily
accomplished as might be the
donning of a new set of clothes. Thus
clothed in the borrowed trappings of other's cultural expectations and
imaginings, cyborg selves interact in fashions that are based both on
superficial appearances and on an acceptance of whatever the individual wants
to be. They do not reject gender, or
any other signs of identity, but play a game with them, freeing symbols from
their organic referents and grafting the meanings of those symbols onto their virtual descriptors.
[1] See the Appendix 7 for examples of simple
and complex character creation systems.
[2] These names have been selected from the
character lists of the four MUDs which I have concentrated on in this thesis.
[3] From a log taken of a session on LambdaMOO
on July 10th, 1992. The name of the player concerned has been changed at her
request.
[4] From a log taken of a session on LambdaMOO
on January 17th, 1992.
[5] Curtis, 29.
[6] Many Asian countries (including Japan,
Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand) are represented on the Internet. However the different computer platforms
needed to transmit and receive Asian and Roman character sets often mean that
users from Asian and Western countries are, unless they are able to arrange
special access to the appropriate platforms, unlikely to meet on any common
virtual ground.
[7] In the survey carried out on LambdaMOO,
76.6% of respondents claimed to be male in real life and 23.4% claimed to be
female.
[8] The results of the LambdaMOO survey
indicated that the mean age of players was 23.6, the median age was 21, and the
greatest number of players (90) claimed to be 19. 50% of players claimed to be aged between 19 and 23. The youngest age given was 12 and the oldest
54.
[9] From: djohnson@elvis.ucsd.edu (Darin
Johnson); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud; Subject: Re: MUD practical jokes?; Date:
27 Jan 92 20:27:50 GMT
[10] From: anonymous;
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud; Subject: Cross-gender thing!; Date: 4 Mar 92
00:16:30 GMT
[11] From: anonymous;
Subject: Re: Gender Issues: "Real World" Warning; Newsgroups: rec.games.mud; Date: 4 Jun 92 08:27:53 GMT
[12] From a log taken of a
session on FurryMUCK on June 21st, 1993.
The name of the player has been changed at 'her' request.
[13] From:
dst@hardy.u.washington.edu (Trif); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin; Subject:
Re: sex roles; Date: 21 Nov 1993
22:59:27 GMT
[14] From:
valkyrie@shell.portal.com (Kristen--Taylor); Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc;
Subject: Re: Muding Girlfriends?; Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 03:09:47 GMT
[15] Stone, 90.
[16] From:
jadawin@world.std.com; To: emr@ee.mu.oz.au; Subject: 141 lines...pick a few;
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 94 8:05:03 EST.
[17] Stone, 103.
[18] Stone, 103.
[19] For those who have not
seen this hilarious series, it followed the adventures of a naive young Irish
poet as he accompanied three seasoned academics on the literary conference
circuit. These three academics each gave exactly the same paper at each conference:
the American Postmodernist speaking on "Textuality as Striptease",
the English Traditionalist speaking on "The Love of Books", and the
European Marxist giving a "Criticisme of Capitalisme."
[20] Stone, 104.
[21] This phrase has been
taken from Michael Heim, "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace," Cyberspace: “First Steps”, Ed. Michael Benedikt, (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1991).
[22] "A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century" is contained in Chapter Eight of Donna Haraway, “Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature”, (London: Free Association
Books, 1991). This quotation is taken
from page 150.
[23] Haraway, 151.
[24] Haraway, 150.
Traditional forms of human
interaction have their codes of etiquette. We are all brought up to behave
according to the demands of social context.
We know, as if instinctively, when it is appropriate to flirt, to be
respectful, to be angry, or silent.
Words do not express the full extent of our cultural and interpersonal
play. The greater part of our
interaction is expressed through signs and symbols—in tone and nuance, in
styles of dress, in postures and facial expressions, in rules and
traditions. Smiles, frowns, tones of
voice, posture and dress--Geertz's "significant symbols"--tell us
more
about the social contexts we
are placed in than do the statements of the people we socialise with.[1] Physical context is a part of social context--place
and time are as much loaded with cultural meaning as are dress and
gesture. Words, as we use them in
everyday life, are insufficient to create a context for our existence. It is the scenery, props and action that
complete the social stage. On MUD
systems, however, these structures for communication are dismantled. The
conventions that we are accustomed to rely on are not present in these virtual
realities. The environmental cues that
feed us our cultural lines become ambivalent and problematic. Communication and cultural context must be
expressed through new channels, and new systems of meaning must be forged by
virtual denizens who wish to make sense of and to one another.
The medium itself blocks
some of the social constraints that players would, under other circumstances,
be operating within. Cultural
indicators--of social position, of age and authority, of personal
appearance--are relatively weak in a computer-mediated context. They might be inferred, but they are not
evident. MUD systems leave it open to
users to create virtual replacements for these social cues. Interaction on MUDs
involves the creation of replacements and
substitutes for physical
cues, and the construction of social hierarchies and signifiers of
authority. The results of this creation
are self-regulating communities that include systems of hierarchy and power
that allow for the punishment of disruptive members. The textual replacements for context cues utilised on MUDs are
the tools of interpretation that enable players both to overcome the cultural
problems created by their environment, and to create unique environments that
house their own specialised cultural understandings. These tools, these
symbols, constitute cultural knowledge.
It takes specialised knowledge and dramatic skill to create a social
presence on a MUD. With practice and
with these skills MUD players form communities which enable members to form
close attachments, and to regulate and punish disruptive members. The objects in this virtual environment
serve as the stage on which these cultural plays are
enacted--houses and toads
facilitate the marriages and public trials which are the virtually physical
manifestations of players' common cultural understandings. MUD systems contain communities that are
"created through symbolic strategies and collective beliefs."[2]
MUD players share not only a
common virtual environment, but also a common language and a common
textuality. Within the context of the
former, the latter two allow MUD players to make sense of one another despite
the limitations of the medium in which MUDs exist. MUD players share a stage, and share an understanding of the
rules and ways of breaking rules that allow them to speak meaningful lines.
They are able to read each other in far more than a textual fashion. With
inventiveness and lateral thinking has come a set of understandings and symbols
that allow MUDs to become a social environment. Within this environment, MUD players experience human dramas as
strongly as they might in actuality.
These communities are by no
means idyllic. Free expression may be
encouraged by the disinhibiting nature of the medium, at least in the early
stages of play, but that is not always as socially constructive that many
liberal ideologies would claim it to be.
Free expression allows not only the voicing of views that might be
'politically correct', but also of 'hate speech'. All sides of any social or political debate can find a voice on
MUDs, and so the social characteristics of MUD systems vary widely. Some, like FurryMUCK, provide an environment
that some would call liberated and others
perverse. Other systems provide environments that
uphold that breed of 'family values' generally promoted by the more
conservative elements of the political spectrum. This diversity is the key to characterising virtual
environments. In themselves, they are
amoral-- virtual reality is a promiscuous tool, capable of reflecting any
environment imagined. In compensation
for the sometimes anti-social effects of disinhibition there exist methods of
preventing and punishing behaviour which could pose a threat to the delicate
balance of understanding on which MUD communities exist. Technical measures have been built into the
MUD program to deal with disruptive players, and social conventions that act to
exclude and punish have been developed.
Both technical and social sanctions rely on a social hierarchy that is
based on relative degrees of control over the virtual universe.
Within this ambivalent
virtual space, notions of human identity and existence are problematised. MUD characters have no actuality, only
virtuality. They are never
immutable. MUD characters are not fixed
and they are always in the process of redefinition. They are cyborgs- -entities made up of ones and zeroes and
imagination, without bodies and without physical restrictions in the virtuality
they inhabit. Erik Erikson writes that "the playing adult steps sideward
into another reality."[3] On MUD
systems the games that are played involve not just a stepping into but the
creation of another reality, the creation of virtually physical contexts, and
the emergence of new forms of being.
The virtual environments designed on MUDs exist not in the databases and
computer networks that make up these systems, but in the ways in which players
can use those technologies to realise what they have imagined, and to explore
the results of other players' imaginings.
The program mediates between the players' imaginings and their
realisation in a form that can be experienced by others. MUDs
allow each player to design and interact with computer-generated objects
that are imbued with cultural meaning by the players who have created
them. The objects in MUD universes are
treated as if they had the properties of the everyday counterparts. Houses are lived in, roses are smelt, food
can be eaten and other players can be kissed.
MUD systems problematise the
selfhood of their players. In MUDs, the
player is in two places at once. The
body is on the actual world, but, as Stone describes, the social delegate, the
'I' that belongs to the body, is in an imagined social space enabled and
constructed with the assistance of the particular technology of the MUD
program.[4] Such technology is a device
which mediates between the physical and the imagined. It is an interface between the imagined
world and the world of the
body. In social terms, as Stone
continues, virtual reality is an interface that mediates between the human body and an associated
'I'.[5] It is in the spaces between the
body and the self that cyborgs exist.
Such entities are a simulation, an approximation, of the physical,
untrammelled by the confines of the flesh.
In the virtual universe, biological sex is separated from imagined
gender and physical sex is separated from the erotic imagination.
The designers of an early
military simulation system, SIMNET, a product of the (now thought to be)
low-tech early '80s, believed that it was the technical simplicity of their
creation that made it so compulsively addictive to those military personnel who
had the opportunity to play wargames in its virtual spaces. SIMNET's designers believed that the low
resolution of the graphical data that made up the virtual manifestation made it
all the more engaging, since it required that "the participants actively
engage their own imaginations to fill in the holes of the
illusion."[6] This
'suspension of disbelief',
this immersion of disbelief in the imagined and imaginal, is what enables a MUD
program to become a social and cultural environment. The MUD program allows what is imagined by players to be
controlled and channelled into meaningful cues upon which other players can
base their actions. The imagination of
each player creates the context in which all other players can act. The virtual
scenery provides the dramaturgical cues which tell each player what actions are
possible within the MUD world. The more
willing each player is to invest his or her imagination in creating objects and
descriptions, the richer and more successfully dramaturgical the environment
and the player's experience will be. The MUD program serves to actualise what
is imagined by one player in ways that become 'real' to others. The process through which players take the
MUD program is one of transforming the "thin
abstracted space of the
machine into a culturally thick" and emotionally concrete world.[7]
The virtual environments
created on MUDs are both cultural products and cultural entities. The systems of meaning and context that are created
on MUDs are the result of a need amongst players for a set of cultural
understandings in which to define both themselves and their actions. Those meanings and contexts serve to create
a cultural system which substitutes for, and is distinct from, the shared
networks of meaning of the wider community.
These cultural systems become the means to perpetuate and regulate the
integrity of the MUD environment. The
virtual nature of the MUD world lies in its culturally symbolic identity; the
unique cultural understandings found on MUDs lie in the specialised meanings
that allow the communication of imagined realities. Interaction and experience in this virtually
real corner of cyberspace
produces a cultural space that is deeply textured in its textuality and richly
imagined in its manifestation.
[1] Clifford Geertz, “The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays” (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 45.
[2] Gordon Meyer and Jim Thomas, "The Baudy
World of the Byte Bandit: A Postmodernist Interpretation of the Computer
Underground," electronic manuscript.
Originally published in F. Schmalleger ed., “Computers in Criminal Justice”, (Bristol, Indiana: Wyndham Hall,
1990).
[3] Erik Erikson, “Childhood and Society”. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985)
222.
[4] Stone, 87.
[5] Stone, 87.
[6] Stone, 93.
[7] Vivian Sobchack, “Screening Space: The
American Science Fiction Film” (New York: Unger, 1987), quoted in Stone, 106.
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This section contains a
number of Usenet articles, items of electronic mail and extracts from MUD
session log files which, while too long to quote in the body of my thesis,
offer valuable (and often amusing) insight into MUDs.
>From rec.games.mud Sun
Jan 26 18:40:02 1992
From:
djohnson@elvis.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud
Subject: Re: MUD practical
jokes?
> Has anyone ever pulled
some neato practical jokes on Muds, whether
> it be tricking people
into paging other people through spoofed
> pages, giving newbies
fake rules on how to play, etc?
Well, I had a bit of an
elaborate one a couple of us pulled on our number one wiz Horvendile (I'm
number two, so I can get away with it sometimes).
Anyway, we were talking
about putting a casino in somewhere, however, I was not too fond of this idea
right off, since every other mud has some dorky place to gamble (esp lpmuds
with a laissez faire management). So
while brainstorming into ways to make this other than the typical casino joint,
we hit upon the a new twist, and made Horvendile the victim.
So we set up our casino
which was hidden behind a secret door in a fireplace. The actual lpc files were carefully hidden away, giving them
innocuous names in other wizards directories.
These files would then be copied somewhere else, the room loaded, and
then the copies deleted. This way,
source code couldn't be examined to find out what was going on. (I was planning on changing mudlib code so a
dummy file would show up if you listed the file, but decided against it).
So finally, things were
finished, and we loaded it up. I sat
around snooping Horvendile, relaying the events to the other cohorts. Odd sounds were heard behind the fireplace,
and some players were going in and out from there. So Horvendile pokes around, finds the entrance and goes in. What he sees is the Ladies Auxiliary Bingo
Game, with
numbers being called out at
random. He takes a peek at the file,
and discovers it isn't on the system.
Oh well, no biggie, just destruct the room, probably Darin forgot to do
this after a test.
Next day, he notices the
silly bingo game is back. And again no
source file. He finds the invisible
object near the fireplace that causes all the noise, but its file doesn't seem
to be around either. And why have those two players been sticking around a
bingo game for the last 15 minutes?
Well, maybe things have changed, but no, after popping in, it's the same
old bingo game. Well Horvendile is
pretty sure Darin has really flipped this time. All this concern about
quality areas and keeping
things in theme, and here he's working on a bingo game!
So, anyway a few days later,
he pops into my workroom laughing and falling out of his chair (literally, he
tells me). Congratulations all around,
good job, keep up the good work, that sort of thing. He's very glad to know
that I wasn't really going loony after all. Of course, he threatens, next time
this happens I'm history... So what
happened you ask? What's the
scoop? Here's a short transcript from a
players point of view:
[ at a side room of the pub ]
> look at fireplace
This is a large L-shaped stone fireplace with a fire
blazing in it. The hearth and the
mantle look as if they have been recently cleaned. There is a couch here, a
painting above the mantle, and a sign on the wall. You seem to catch sight of
something behind the fire.
> enter fireplace
You slip though a secret passageway behind the
fireplace and enter a hidden room...
The cigar smoke fills the air in here, making it a
bit hard to see very far, but you can tell there is a lot of activity going
on. The patrons here are sitting at
tables scattered about, engaged in games of chance..., er skill. Prominently
displayed upon the far wall is a large sign, and along the west wall are some
odd looking machines. A slightly out of
tune piano is being played near the east wall. The only obvious exit is south.
Harnlen, the host of this establishment.
Musician sings: Help! I need some wizard.
Musician sings: Help! Not just any wizard!
Harnlen says: Anyone can win! Why even Harry turned in a profit!
> look at sign
The sign proudly exclaims: The Back Room. Welcome one
and all. If you're happy, we're happy.
House rules:
--No
credit.
--Take your empties with you.
--Don't kill the hired help.
--Don't tell Horvendile where we are.
--Have fun.
[ a
bit later... ]
Harnlen shouts:
RAID! Instantly, the staff springs into
action... The west wall rotates around quickly, hiding the slot machines and on
the back side are some paintings of pretty flowers. Large fans descend from the
ceiling, quickly blowing away all the cigar smoke in the air. The staff remove their vests, turn them
inside out, and put them back on. All
of the cards, dice, and bets on the table are scooped up and hidden away.
Finally, a small group of old ladies emerge from a
hidden door and take some seats (and just in time).
Horvendile arrives.
The room appears entirely different now, a complete
change of scenery. Someone next to you
whispers "Shh, don't let on to Horvendile. He'd surely disapprove."
> look
This is the local chapter of the Ladies
Auxiliary. Right now they are holding
their annual charity drive, and many of the more well-to-do are here in
support. This year there is a bingo
game going, and although the ladies strongly disapprove of gambling (gasp) it
is all for a good cause. The only obvious exit is south. Horvendile. An
announcer.
Announcer calls out: I-11
Announcer calls out: B-9
Horvendile says: This is silly.
Horvendile leaves south.
Harnlen says: *whew* That was close. Now that the big H is gone, let's get back
to some serious adventuring!
The west wall swings around, revealing some ancient
slot machines, and the old ladies file out the back. The dealers sit back down at their tables and they each light up
a cigar, ready for the fun to start again.
A patron sobs: Please, just a little more credit. I
can win it back.
Of course, we kept things as
they are, giving files a permanent location.
When the mood strikes him, Horvendile pops in now and then to suprise
the unsuspecting patrons.
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu
--Luxury! In MY day, we
had to make do with 5 bytes of swap...
From: anonymous
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 92
11:32:16 GMT
To: emr@ee.mu.oz.au
Subject: MUD romances.
Hi... you asked for stories
about romances on MUDs, well I've got a terrific one! I met my husband on a MUD, but when we met he first became my
girlfriend!
It started when I joined up
on PernMUSH. I thought it would be fun
to try playing a male character, just to see what would happen. In case you're
interested, which I guess you probably are, there were some differences between
being male and female on the MUSH. For one thing, I got to be in on all these
conversations about women... most of them
were just kind of, like,
just guys talking about how they could get dates and stuff, but sometimes it
was pretty graphic, which I thought was offensive sometimes. But then again I guess I tell my best
girlfriend some pretty intimate details. I don't know, it just seemed weird
sometimes. And of course no one tried
to come onto me, which is pretty common if you're a female on a mud! Anyway, so I was playing this male
character, and one day I started talking to this female on
the mush. We got along *really* well, *really*
*really* well. We just had all these
things in common, just dumb little things, favorite foods and tv shows and
music and stuff. We started spending a
lot of time together on the mush, chatting and stuff. After a while our
characters kind of got involved. I should say that most of this was
role-playing, we didn't swap real names or anything--we did have a few OOC
conversations, but mostly we were getting along as our
characters. Anyway, (I don't
know if you've read the Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, but they are all about
people having these telepathic relationships with dragons) this woman was a
green dragon rider, and I was a brown rider, and one day her dragon flew to
mate and my dragon flew hers. After that our characters were weyrmates--a
couple, if you
haven't read the Pern books.
At first I was pretty happy with that. It was really interesting, but as we got
to know each other better, and since our characters were a couple, and we did
all the netsex thing, I really began to feel strongly about the player. I was pretty confused by it all, cause I'd
never been anything but straight, but I eventually I decided I was going to
tell my friend that I loved her IN REAL LIFE!!
So I log into the mush, and
I basically say to my weyrmate that I've been thinking about her a lot RL and
I'd really like it if we could get to know each other RL more because I thought
I was falling in love with her. At this point, before I can go any further, AND
BEFORE I CAN BRING UP THE SUBJECT OF MY REAL GENDER, she logs out! No warning, she just disconnects. Well, I
was devestated. At first I thought that maybe it was just a technical problem,
but she didn't log back on for nearly a week (usually we'd log on together
every day) and when she finally did she almost totally ignored me. I kept on
trying to talk to her, and I was pretty distraught by this stage. Eventually,
this would be about two weeks after our conversation, she says that she needs
to tell me something. She just says that she's really sorry, she hadn't
imagined that things would end up this way, and she really did like me as a
friend, but that she was really a MALE in real life. Well!! I just sat there
stunned for a minute. Then I told her--HIM--that *I* was really *female*. At first he didn't believe me, but after a
while I convinced him to telephone me in real life, so I could prove
what I was saying. He did
and we had this really weird, tense conversation... I guess we were both pretty
confused. It took us a while to become friends again, but after a while we did.
We both started new characters on the MUSH, with the *right* gender this time,
and after a few weeks we were close again. Closer, in fact, because there was
now a real life element. We had a lot more phone calls, and eventually we
decided that we should meet... and it was a complete
success! We got along as
well in real life as we had on the MUSH, and we ended up going out together.
Luckily we lived in neighbouring states, so we were able to visit each other a
lot, and in the end I transfered to college in his town so we could be
together.
This was about 18 months
ago. We got married in May this year.
From: Richard Bartle
<richard@spuddy.uucp>
Subject: Re: MUD romances?
To: emr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 93
19:48:42 GMT
You wanted an anecdote...
This story concerns two
people, Mik and Sue [...]
Mik was an archetypal
hacker. He lived and breathed computers, wrote a best-selling computer game
when aged about 16, and eventually set up his own computer company. He was also
extremely competent at MUD1, and eventually was promoted to the rank of
arch-wiz. In MUD1 there were three levels of control: mortals; wizzes;
arch-wizzes. We had literally hundreds of mortals, dozens of wizzes, and a
handful of arch-wizzes (the rank was invitation only). These days, you'd maybe
call him a god, although in those days you wouldn't, especially as his family
was a very strict orthodox Jewish sect with rather set ideas on words like
"god"..!
Sue was an archetypal MUD
addict. Although the game was only available between midnight and 6am, Sue
would play the entire time, every night. She had telephone bills of over a
thousand pounds a month, as she had to call long-distance to play. She was,
however, a dazzlingly brilliant player, and when she was eventually promoted to
arch-wiz she brought an atmosphere of respected authority to the rank which was
the defining example for generations of later arch-wizzes.
She wrote an article on MUD
for "Personal Computer World", then and now the premier UK computer
magazine, and we had hundreds of people write as a result; it was what really
got the MUD1 ball rolling.
In real life, though, Sue
was painfully shy. Whenever we phoned her, she was lost for words, she hated
using the phone for conversation, and would tell us she'd join us in MUD1.
There, she was freed from the shackles of her real life self, and could talk
freely and authoratively. MUD1 was great therapy! Being one of the few females in the game, one would have expected
her to get chatted up by every male around. This wasn't the case, however.
Firstly, as an arch-wiz, she had more status than most males. She also knew
more about MUD1 than anyone except perhaps me. Also, most of the males around
weren't the kind that chat people up anyway- -in those days, only really
dedicated computer enthusiasts had
modems, and that meant they were, in the main, what might be called
"computer nerds". Mik even looked the part--his enormous glasses made
his eyes seem the size of tennis balls, and his teenage complexion was what
you'd expect of someone who rarely saw daylight and ate nothing but bars of
chocolate.
Sue WAS chatted up once, but
it was but a female persona, Paula. Sue was suitably horrified, and as a result
Paula admitted that actually she was actually run by a soon-to-be-married
couple, and the male half had been playing her that night.
Sue's shyness was a problem.
Whereas we'd all get together for MUDmeets at the computer shows, Sue (although
present at the show) would never make herself known to us. She sent us
photographs, but in them her appearance varied dramatically--hair length and
colour would change, she'd wear different organisations of make-up, and so on.
Only in MUD1 did she feel
confident in herself.
Mik took to writing letters
to her, as she didn't mind replying by post. It turned out she had a pretty
awful life story—parents divorced when she was young, she'd had to live with
her grandparents, she'd attempted suicide a couple of times. She was sharing a
flat (er, that's an appartment to you) with a girl friend of hers, and was
having difficulties because her flatmate was a lesbian and Sue was worried
about her own sexuality. Oh, and she'd occasionally get very,
very drunk--heaven help you
if you were on MUD when it happened!
Sue's letters back to Mik
got longer and longer--he showed me an average one once that was 109 pages in
length! All handwritten in this really flowery handwriting. The most she ever
wrote to me was 15 pages. It was clear that she was getting more and more fond
of Mik. In return, Mik was getting infatuated with her. He was around 17, and
because of his strict upbringing this was the first experience with a woman
he'd ever had.
Well, things got more and
more involved, and eventually Mik and Sue announced that they were in love. Mik
proposed marriage, despite never having met Sue in the flesh. Sue said she'd
have to think about it, and arrange a meeting.
Then, all of a sudden, Sue
announced that she'd got a job as an au paire in Norway and would be leaving
immediately. That was it: she disappeared from MUD and wasn't seen again.
Mik was aghast at this, as
we all were--everyone liked Sue, and her disappearance seemed so
uncharacteristic, it was like she must have been in trouble. She hadn't even
replied to Mik's offer of marriage (or at least I think she hadn't--there was a
rumour that she'd turned him down but I can't verify that). After many agonised
phone calls to places she'd mentioned in her letters, none to any avail, Mik
decided he had to go to her house to find the answer. So he and a whole bunch
of fellow MUDders piled into a minibus and drove to South Wales to Sue's house.
They knocked at the door. A
woman answered. "Sue?" It looked sort of like her. "I think
you'd better come inside...".
Sue was a man who had just
been jailed for defrauding the Department of Transport of 60,000 pounds. This
was his wife. Over there were his two small children.
I need hardly say what a
devastating affect this had on Mik. I know I was shocked, because it had
occurred to me several times that Sue might have been male, but every
"test" I set was passed with flying colours. We'd even get little
unsolicited details, like when she didn't reply to a message immediately
because she'd just snagged a nail. I remember once I printed some MUD
sweatshirts which had the opening description printed on them, "You are
standing on a narrow road between the Land and whence you came. To the north
and south are the foothills of a pair of majestic mountains, ... "; Sue
told me she liked hers (size small), but people kept looking at her funny as
the words "pair of majestic mountains" were emblazoned right across
her, well, her majestic mountains! It was little details like this which made
her so convincing. When we found out she never existed, and that everything had
been a fraud from start to finish, it was really awful.
Mik recovered in time, and
still runs his company to great success. Sue (who was really Steve) was released
from prison after a while and actually phoned me as himself a couple of times,
but obviously couldn't ever set foot back in MUD again. He told me he hadn't
been deceitful deliberately, it's just that when the game asked him what sex he
wanted to be, he wondered what would happen if he said he was female. It all
just grew from there. I didn't ask him
how he felt about what he
did to Mik, because he was clearly very embarrassed about it all, as was I!
The only thing I don't
understand in all this is how his wife could tolerate it all.
Well, that's the story of
the first MUD gender transfer debacle. If you want to use it, I'd appreciate it
if you didn't identify Mik by his real
or MUD name--I wouldn't want to cause him further agonies by resurrecting the
issue in public. As far as I'm concerned, whether you mention Sue by name or
not is up to you--I've no qualms about it!
I hope this has been of
help, anyway!
Richard
[NB: In accordance with Mr.
Bartle's request I have changed the name of the gentleman in this case to
'Mik'. I have also deleted a paragraph
from this item of mail which contained identifying information about
'Mik'. Sue is, however, the name by
which Mr. Bartle referred to this character. Since 'her' name has been
mentioned in Rheingold 1993 (p. 164) I felt there would be little point in
giving her (yet another) pseudonym.]
---...AMONGST PLAYERS:---
To: Elizabeth Reid
<emr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: A History of
MUDs.
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 93
10:02:45 -0600
From: Jennifer Smith
<jds@hardy.math.okstate.edu>
[Jim Aspnes didn't invent
the pose command], but he did program it (and I believe was the first one to do
so--I'm pretty sure AberMUD didn't have one at the time). The invention of it took place roughly like
this:
On TinyMUD, there is a 'rob
<player>' command, that allowed you to attempt to steal 1 penny from said
player. However, said player could
prevent this by @locking themselves, and then they could set a @fail and an
@ofail message on themself. The @fail message is displayed to the person doing
the robbing, the @ofail is displayed to everyone else in the room with the
robber's name prefixed.
Example:
@fail me=Moira slaps your hands.
@ofail me=gets his hands slapped by Moira.
Bozo types> rob moira
Bozo sees> Moira slaps your hands.
Everyone else sees> Bozo gets his hands slapped by
Moira.
As it happens, if you're not
@locked, the @success and @osuccess messages get displayed in the same manner
if you are robbed. In not a whole lot of time at all, people started MANUALLY
setting their @osuccess to a 'posed' command and robbing themselves--they
usually were @locked to themselves, which is a TRUE lock, so only they could
set off that message. Example:
@osucc me=falls over laughing.
rob me
I see> Moira
stole a penny from you!
You stole a penny from Moira!
Everyone sees> Moira falls over laughing.
Ta-da, a pose!
This is, as you can imagine,
a horribly blunt way of doing poses, as each time you have to reset your
@osucc. After about a week of this,
Wizard (Jim Aspnes) gave up and added the pose (aka ':') command.
I should point out that the
'rob' command (as well as the 'kill' command) were never really used in a
combat sense--they weren't THAT useful.
'rob' died completely fairly soon, and 'kill' became a sort of
exclamation point to discussions. Many
Tiny* servers today either don't have the 'kill' command at all or have ways to
turn it off completely.
[...]
'whisper' wasn't added until
TinyHELL, the second TinyMUD server. Even then it was added only after quite a
bit of debate, and the first version (for about three days) was 'noisy'--if you
weren't the person being whispered to, you saw 'Bozo whispers to Moira.' messages all the time. You also forgot
page--another oddly evolving command. Originally if you did 'page Moira', you
sent a message to Moira of the form:
You sense that Moira is looking for you in Front Lawn.
Obviously, as the pose
command became more popular, this command was also mutated. All you had to do was rename your room,
and...
You
sense that Moira is looking for you in Hi, How are you?
Someone realized that
everyone was keeping small 'paging' rooms squirreled away, and there was no
point in trying to keep people from having conversations when not in the same
room, so the ability to add a message to the page command was added. 'page
user[=message]'.A bit later, posing was added to both whispers and pages.
[...]
--
Jennifer Smith
jds@math.okstate.edu On MUDs: Moira, Jasra, etc.
[It's the terror of knowing
what this world is about. Here, have a clue. Take two, they're small.]
---...AND WIZARDS:---
To: Elizabeth Reid
<emr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: A History of
MUDs.
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1993
10:40:53 +0000
From: Jim Finnis
<clef@aber.ac.uk>
I'm glad to have my 15
minutes of fame at last! :-)
[...]
Right, the emote command.
First came the 'atmosphere'
commands. Talking to people and shouting at people and hitting people with
pointy things was all very well, but you couldn't interact in other ways; so we
wrote commands like "cry", "smile", "laugh" so
users could express emotion. They were pretty easy to write, literally an entry
in the verb table and one like of code, something like
case
CRY:
you("cry");break;
The "you" function
(or whatever the hell it was really called) was already there for doing stuff
like
you("opens
the door");
which (if I were logged in
under my customary handle) would print
"White
opens the door".
A little later, the AberMUD
'pose' command got added, for Wizards only. This would use a list of 7 or so
emote strings stored in the program, such as "White calls down a bolt of
lightning from the sky", and show a random one. There was one 'booby-prize' in there, something along the lines
of "White turns casually into a wombat before resuming normal
form". The point of this was, of
course, to impress mortals :-)
Because they were so easy to
write, these atmosphere commands just kept being added to the system until we
had something like 30 of them. I felt this was beginning to get out of hand--we
needed something that would allow us to express *any* emotion. In addition, we Archwizards always liked to
be able to do things no-one else could, so an obvious extension was to write a
command like this:
case
EMOTE: you(first_argument);break;
so the user could decide
what he/she was emoting. It was an obvious extension really, although I was
absurdly proud of it at the time...
It was only after about 6
months that we let normal mortals use the 'emote' command. Before that, we
needed to make sure that the users couldn't send commands that looked like
AberMUD system messages--e.g. we had to change the message "quit"
gave to everyone else in the room.
In the interest of
oneupmanship, the Wizards then got a new command, "raw", which
behaved like "emote" but didn't prefix the user's name to the output
string.
That's all there is to it
really--it was just obvious at the time, from looking at the code. If the code
hadn't been written like that, I doubt I would have thought of it.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Jim
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Finnis, | Unit 6A, Science Park, Aberystwyth, Dyfed
Clef Digital Systems | SY23 3AH Wales.
clef@aber.ac.uk | Tel.: 0970 626601 Overseas: +44 970 626601
| Fax.: 0970 626458 +44 970 626458
"When the going gets
weird, the weird turn pro..."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From:
gerstnet@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE
Newsgroups:
rec.games.mud.misc
Subject: Verbs and adverbs top
list
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1993
13:42:55 GMT
This is the result of a verb
and adverb count in Nemesis LPMud. The figures give the number of uses for each
verb and adverb for the last year. The exact meaning of all verbs (if not
straightforward) can be tested in Nemesis (address and number is prominent in
every good mudlist).
It is a bit difficult to
find out about the exact time period for the list, but 250 days with an average
of 20 players should be a close approximation,
which results in a feeling every 30 seconds, which also sounds like a
reason-able figure for me.
Players and wizards were not
informed about this list, so it is improbable that the figures have been
cheated. The list was originally made to throw out unused verbs and adverbs,
but I was quite surprised that only a few of them were almost never used.
Most verbs in Nemesis have
no default adverb, so 'smile' will result in '<name> smiles.' and 'smile
happ' will result in '<name> smiles happily.' Adverbs could be
abbreviated to (at least 3) unique characters and they were only counted if
they were explicitly given.
There are four cathegories
for verbs: without object (like bounce), with another player as object (like
kick) with special objects (like poke) and with any object (like curse). Most
verbs fall in more than one of these cathegories.
We at Nemesis did some
analysation already, but I think that it might be more interesting for some
(wannabe) sociologists and psychologists.
This list if free for
distribution as long the name of the author is mentioned.
Verbs:
|
smile |
89089 |
bow |
50138 |
shake |
46312 |
greet |
46152 |
grin |
46046 |
|
nod |
42385 |
laugh |
34063 |
wave |
30875 |
giggle |
20145 |
sigh |
19222 |
|
hug |
19220 |
wait |
13550 |
kiss |
12212 |
shrug |
10849 |
kick |
9504 |
|
poke |
9307 |
chuckle |
7401 |
french |
6773 |
smirk |
5994 |
wonder |
5701 |
|
dance |
5625 |
bounce |
5150 |
comfort |
4916 |
pat |
4356 |
cry |
4244 |
|
fart |
4158 |
blush |
3981 |
cheer |
3631 |
punch |
3592 |
scream |
3250 |
|
ponder |
3193 |
lick |
2964 |
puke |
2915 |
thank |
2914 |
think |
2765 |
|
raise |
2704 |
tickle |
2662 |
curse |
2590 |
cackle |
2498 |
sniff |
2476 |
|
knee |
2474 |
slap |
2412 |
gasp |
2404 |
hold |
2268 |
burp |
2250 |
|
point |
2220 |
view |
2206 |
jump |
2141 |
wink |
2130 |
sing |
2016 |
|
meow |
2008 |
whistle |
1852 |
rub |
1817 |
twiddle |
1803 |
agree |
1766 |
|
love |
1745 |
curtsey |
1686 |
pout |
1682 |
snicker |
1634 |
frown |
1612 |
|
stare |
1579 |
cuddle |
1566 |
growl |
1480 |
fondle |
1480 |
puzzle |
1447 |
|
ruffle |
1403 |
strangle |
1363 |
flip |
1343 |
bang |
1341 |
yawn |
1318 |
|
listen |
1303 |
worship |
1286 |
mosh |
1286 |
spit |
1232 |
scratch |
1228 |
|
sob |
1124 |
pose |
1089 |
clap |
1055 |
sulk |
1045 |
pinch |
1038 |
|
applaud |
1032 |
bite |
966 |
beg |
841 |
stroke |
826 |
five |
804 |
|
tap |
785 |
kneel |
774 |
stomp |
746 |
wiggle |
716 |
roll |
715 |
|
snuggle |
712 |
snore |
702 |
shriek |
671 |
moonwalk |
664 |
faint |
649 |
|
groan |
623 |
shiver |
610 |
peer |
609 |
moan |
589 |
strut |
587 |
|
nibble |
555 |
grope |
517 |
congrat |
512 |
smack |
479 |
grumble |
470 |
|
snap |
461 |
squeeze |
438 |
wander |
434 |
sneeze |
421 |
hiccup |
415 |
|
purr |
404 |
cough |
403 |
hum |
378 |
mumble |
373 |
lean |
364 |
|
glare |
356 |
meditate |
354 |
wish |
352 |