--------------------------------------------------------- -- CULTURAL FORMATIONS IN TEXT-BASED VIRTUAL REALITIES -- --------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------- ABSTRACT -------- 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. --------------- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --------------- 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. ------- PREFACE ------- 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. -------- CONTENTS -------- Introduction: Virtual Reality--Imagined Space Background: A History of Interactive and Networked Computing and the Evolution of MUDs Interactive Computing Networked Computing Interactive Networking MUDs: Networked, Interactive Virtual Realities Chapter One: Communication and Cultural Context Making Sense of the World Making Sense of Each Other Disinhibition and Social Experience Chapter Two: Power, Social Structure and Social Cohesion Hierarchies of Power on MUDs Adventure MUDs: Survival of the Fittest Social MUDs: Cooperative Appreciation Social Cohesion on MUDs Chapter Three: Identity and the Cyborg Body Self-Made People Ungrounding Gender Cyborg Sexuality The Cyborg Self Conclusion: Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities 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 -------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION: VIRTUAL REALITY--IMAGINED SPACE -------------------------------------------- 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'. Arcade 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. ---FOOTNOTES TO INTRODUCTION--- [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," _Intertek_ Vol. 3.3 (Winter, 1992) 26. [6] Curtis, 26. [7] Curtis, 26. ------------------------------------------------------------ Background: A History of Interactive and Networked Computing ------------------------------------------------------------ and the Evolution of MUDs ------------------------- ---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. ---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 would 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. ---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. ---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 game 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 gaining points, 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. ---FOOTNOTES TO BACKGROUND--- [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" 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