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_Wired 1.3_
"The Dragon Ate My Homework".......
***********************************

-- They are online virtual worlds
--built from words...............

They are so popular that educators are alarmed......
MUDs are the latest rage on college campuses all around the world.
..............Australia has even banned them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

-- Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold investigate.


David spends twelve hours a day as Lotsu, a swashbuckling explorer in a 
subterranean world of dungeons and elves. He should be in class, but he 
has succumbed to the latest fad sweeping college campuses: total 
immersion in multi-user fantasy games. 

Multi-user fantasy games are electronic adventures run on a large 
network, usually fueled by university computers. Players commonly spend 
four or five hours a day logged onto fantasy worlds based on Star Trek, 
The Hobbit, or Ann McCaffrey's popular novels about dragon riders and 
wizards. Students like David use school computers or their own personal 
machines to log onto the great international computer highway in the sky 
known as the Internet. Colleges freely issue Internet accounts to any 
student wanting to do research; by logging on from a dorm in Boston, a 
student can "drive" to any participating computer in the world, link up 
free and stay connected for as long as he or she wants. 

So what can you do with such virtual travel, besides download papers on 
genetic algorithms? Well, if 100 other students were to show up in the 
same virtual "place," you could have a party, devise pranks, do some 
role-playing, scheme, even build a better world. All at the same time. 
The only thing you'd need is a place to meet.

In 1980, Roy Traubshaw, a British fan of the fantasy role-playing board 
game Dungeons and Dragons, wrote an electronic version of that game 
during his final undergraduate year at Essex College. The following 
year, his classmate Richard Bartle took over the game, expanding the 
number of potential players and their options for action. He called the 
game MUD (for Multi-User Dungeons), and put it onto the Internet.

MUD is very much like the classic game Zork, as well as any of the 
hundreds of text-based adventure video games that have flourished on 
personal computers. The computer screen displays a message such as: "You 
are in a cold, damp dungeon lit by a flickering torch. There is a skull 
on the stone floor. One hallway leads to the north, the other south. 
There is a grate on the grimy floor." Your job is to explore the room 
and its objects and discover treasures hidden in the labyrinth of other 
rooms connected to it. You'll probably need to find a small collection 
of treasures and clues along the way to win the mother-lode booty, a 
search that may involve breaking a spell, becoming a wizard, slaying a 
dragon, or escaping from a dungeon. 

You explore by typing something like: "Look skull." The computer 
replies: "The skull says, 'Beware of the rat.' " You type: "Look grate," 
and the computer replies: "This way lies Death." You type: "Go north," 
and you exit through the tunnel, on your way into the unknown of the 
next room.

Since the original MUD was created, about 200 similar games have cropped 
up around the world, according to Amy Bruckman, a Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology researcher who studies the sociological aspects 
of MUDs (see Amy Bruckman: A Study in MUDs, below). There may be as many 
as 200 undocumented MUDs flourishing as well, Bruckman said. 

MUD's many improved offspring (known generically as MUDs, Muses, 
TinyMUDs, and MOOs, depending on the programming language used or the 
type of game played) are very similar to adventure games on PCs, but 
more powerful. First, the newer MUDs allow as many as 100 other players 
to roam the dungeon with you. They could be playing alongside you as 
jolly partners, or against you as wicked adversaries, or even above you 
as capricious gods creating miracles and spells. Second, you and the 
other players can add or modify rooms, as well as invent new and magical 
objects. You say to yourself, "What this place needs is a tower where a 
bearded elf can enslave the unwary." So you make one, just by typing in 
its description. In short, the players invent the world as they live in 
it. The game is to create a cooler world than you had yesterday. 

Social interaction in MUDs happens in a variety of real-time "chat" 
modes, not the kind of bulletin-board-style communication you find on 
BBSes or the WELL. MUDs are very much about who is in the same place at 
the same time, and how they interact. It's more of a hangout than a 
publication, more like a game board than a bulletin board. 

MUDers use "poses" as well as words to convey meaning and action, giving 
MUDs an odd but definitely useful kind of disembodied body language. 
Posing (also known as "emoting") can be used in polite, informal 
conversation or in more structured discourse. 

If you are a character named "hivemind," for example, and you give the 
command "emote leaps onstage," everybody else in the same room sees the 
message "hivemind leaps onstage" on their computer screens. It adds a 
new dimension to your communications. Instead of replying to a 
statement, you can smirk. Instead of leaving the room, you can disappear 
in a cloud of iridescent bubbles. Emoting seems awkward and artificial 
at first, but once you get the hang of it, poses give you some added 
control over the atmosphere in which a conversation takes place - the 
all-important context that is often missing from words alone. 

In this way, MUDs have become a medium for consensual virtual reality. 
Someone tinkers up a virtual holodeck for the heck of it. Later, someone 
else adds a captain's bridge and maybe an engine room. Next thing you 
know, you've built the Starship Enterprise in text. Over the course of 
months, several hundred other players (who probably should be doing 
calculus homework) jack in and build a fleet of rooms and devices, until 
you wind up with fully staffed Klingon battleships, Vulcan planets, and 
the interconnected galaxies of a StarTrek MUD. You can log on 24 hours a 
day and greet fellow members of the crew - all in role-playing 
characters - as you collectively obey orders broadcast by the captain, 
and battle enemy ships built and managed by a different set of players.

The more time you spend exploring and hacking the MUD world (it does 
take some knowledge to build MUD objects), the greater your status with 
the rulers overseeing that world. A player who assists newcomers or who 
takes on janitorial chores in maintaining a MUD's database can earn the 
power to teleport (move to another part of the game) without penalty, or 
can be exempted from certain everyday rules of the game. 

Ultimately, every MUDer dreams of achieving local god or wizard status, 
accorded those who do the most to keep a system going. Some become 
better gods than others. Ideally, gods promote fair play. But stories of 
abusive and deranged gods are legendary on the Internet. 

Real-life events are recapitulated within MUDs. Players hold funerals 
and wakes for real players, as well as characters, who die. There have 
been "TinyWeddings" for virtual and real people. The slipperiness 
between real life and virtual life is one of the attractions, 
particularly for teenage kids who are wrestling with their own 
identities.

On a MUD, you define who you are. As you enter a room, others read your 
description: "Judi enters. She is a tall, dark-haired Vulcan woman with 
small, pointed ears and a lovely reddish tinge to her skin. She walks 
with a gymnast's bounce. Her green eyes seem to flirt." The author may 
be a petite female with a bad case of acne, or a bearded male 
masquerading as a woman. Most players live out virtual life with more 
than one character, as if trying out various facets of their persona. 
"MUDs are a workshop for the concept of identity," Bruckman said. "Many 
players notice that they are somehow different on the Net than off, and 
this leads them to reflect on who they are in real life." Flirtation, 
infatuation, romance, and even "TinySex" are now as ubiquitous in MUD 
worlds as on real college campuses. 

Pranks are also rampant. One demented player devised an invisible "spud" 
that, when accidentally picked up by another player we'll call Visitor, 
would remove Visitor's limbs. As this happened, others in the room would 
read: "Visitor rolls about on the floor, twitching excitedly." Worried 
players could summon a wizard or god to fix Visitor, but as soon as they 
"looked" at him, they too would be spudded, so that everyone would then 
read, "Wizard rolls about on the floor, twitching excitedly."

Ordinary MUD objects can be booby-trapped to do almost anything. A 
favorite pastime is to manufacture an object and get others to examine 
or use it without knowing its true powers. For example, when you 
innocently inspect a "Home Sweet Home" cross-stitch hanging on someone's 
wall, it might instantly and forcibly teleport you back "home" to the 
beginning of the game, while flashing "There is no place like home." 

MUDers get lost, find their way, then get lost in another sense and 
never want to leave. As a result, the continuous telecommunication 
traffic due to nonstop MUDing can cripple a computer center. Amherst 
College in Massachusetts recently outlawed all MUDing from its campus. 
Australia, linked to the rest of the world by a limited number of 
precious data lines, has banned all MUDs from its continent; student-
constructed virtual worlds were crowding out bank note updates and 
personal phone calls. Other institutions are sure to follow the ban on 
unlimited virtual worlds. 

Until now, most MUDs have been written by fanatical students in their 
spare time. But recently, new MUD forms involving researchers and 
scientists have appeared (see The Future of MUDs, page 72). The dawn of 
commercial MUDs, where virtual goods can be bought and sold, or 
political MUDs, where lobbyists and politicians schmooze in virtual 
hallways, can't be far away. ===

***********************************************************************

Welcome to Cyberion City
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Since most MUDers are 20-year-old males, violence often permeates these 
virtual worlds. In response to the growth of elaborate slash-and-hack 
universes, one experimental world running at MIT outlaws killing 
altogether. That world is Cyberion City. Based on the idea of a 
cylindrical space station, Cyberion City has gathered a huge following 
of elementary and high-school kids. On any random day, about 500 kids 
beam up into Cyberion City to roam or build without pause. So far, the 
kids have built more than 50,000 objects, characters, and rooms. There's 
a mall, complete with multiplex cinema (and text movies written by 
kids); a city hall; a science museum; a Wizard of Oz theme park; a CB 
radio network; acres of housing suburbs; and a tour bus. A robot real-
estate agent roams around making deals with anyone who wants to buy a 
house. 

There is no map of Cyberion City - on purpose. To explore is the thrill. 
Having no rule book is the teacher. You are expected to do what the kids 
do: Ask another kid. Barry Kort, the real-life administrator of the 
project, said, "One of the charms of entering an unfamiliar environment 
and culture such as Cyberion City is that it tends to put adults and 
children on equal footing. Some adults would say it reverses the balance 
of power." 

The main architects of Cyberion City are 15 years old or younger. The 
sheer bustle and intricacy of the land they have built is intimidating 
to the lone, overeducated immigrant trying to get somewhere or build 
anything. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll exclaimed on 
his first visit, "The psychological size of the place...makes it seem 
like [you're] being dropped into downtown Tokyo with a Tootsie Roll and 
a screwdriver."

To access Cyberion City, you need a computer, a modem, and an Internet 
account (see Getting Online, page 72). Log on, then type "telnet 
michael.ai.mit.edu." Register and connect as "guest." You can then 
follow instructions on registering a character (you'll have to read the 
charter first). Once you're in, you'll see something like this: 


===================================================

Welcome to MicroMUSE! We are hosted at chezmoto.ai.mit.edu, port 4201.

===================================================

REMINDER: Read 'NEWS' regularly to keep up on changes and additions to 
the server. New commands will be listed in 'news' with details provided 
in 'help'.For more information, new players should type: help


getting started

===================================================

Cyberion City Main Transporter Receiving Station

The bright outlines of the Cyberion City Transporter Station slowly come 
into focus. You have been beamed up here (at considerable expense) from 
one of the Earth Transporter Stations. You are among the adventurous and 
moderately wealthy few who have decided to visit (and perhaps dwell) in 
Cyberion City, the largest space city in the solar system. You are 
welcomed by the transporter attendant, who gives directions to all 
newcomers to this space city.

Contents: Attendant

Obvious exits: Out


Welcome to MicroMUSE, your name is Guest1

attendant says "Welcome, Guest, to Cyberion City."

attendant says "Feel free to contact any Official for aid."

attendant says "Be sure to use our extensive on-line help command."

attendant says "I hope you enjoy your stay."

The attendant smiles at you.

You step down off the MTRS platform.

Main Transporter Lobby

This room has high, vaulted ceilings and white walls. The thick, black 
carpet makes no sound beneath your feet. You are just inside the 
Transporter Lobby, where Visitors arrive from Earth. To one side is an 
Information Desk. A door leads to the Tours office, and another leads 
Out into Cyberion City proper. A Public Relations Dept. Intercom stands 
in the center of the floor; type 'look Intercom' for instructions.

***********************************************************************

Joichi Ito:Cyberspace Veteran.......
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Joichi Ito, at age 26, is already one of the gray-beards of the MUD 
universe, having spent more than half his life exploring the fringes of 
Net culture. Ito was born in Kyoto, one of Japan's most conservative 
cities and its capital for a thousand years until a little fishing 
village called Edo grew up to become Tokyo. Ito's mother's family had 
been part of the ruling class for eighteen generations. His father was 
>from a merchant-class family. "Both families disowned them when they 
married because of the contradiction of such a marriage," said Ito. 

Now reconciled with their families, Ito's parents moved to the US when 
he was three. Ito grew up in the suburbs of Detroit in the midst of a 
financial crisis precipitated by the success of the Japanese auto 
industry. He and his sister spent summers  in Japan with his 
grandmother, who "indoctrinated us with the values of traditional 
Japan." He moved back to Japan when he was fourteen, where he "learned 
Tokyo street language, street smarts, and computers." 

As a teenager, Joichi discovered computer networking - a "means of 
communicating with people beyond the confines of a high-school reality." 
He got so involved with people he met on the Source (an early online 
service) that he traveled to Toledo, Ohio to see friends at the wedding 
of two of the group's members. He remembers how many online friends were 
shocked by how young he was, in view of his sophistication. 

Ito was one of the few people in Japan who used his modem to explore the 
online cultures around the world before Japan deregulated 
telecommunications in 1985. He even discovered the original MUD - MUD1 - 
which started at the University of Essex in England in 1980. Ito still 
remembers the night he sat in his room in Tokyo, devastated because his 
MUD character had been killed. Later, he attended Tufts University and 
the University of Chicago, then dropped out to work part-time with 
Metasystems Design Group to start a virtual community in Tokyo and work 
nights as a disc jockey in nightclubs.

Ito now works as a negotiator between Japanese and US companies, travels 
as much as he stays put (his online sign-off always includes his 
physical location and the dates of his next trip), and develops and 
coordinates Pan-Pacific technical and cultural projects. He also 
confesses to having spent about 100 hours on MUDs in the past couple of 
months. Ito is starting a new MUD called Gothic. E-mail him at 
jito@netcom.com for more info.

-- Howard Rheingold

***********************************************************************

Amy Bruckman:  A Study in MUDs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I met Amy Bruckman, face to face, in Berkeley at a conference on 
computer communication technology. Her paper on the social aspects of 
MUDs attracted my attention, and before long we were weekly e-mail 
correspondents. When Bruckman started MediaMOO, a MUD for media 
researchers (see page 72), I became one of the early users. Amy is a 
MUDer herself, preferring TrekMuse, based on Star Trek - The Next 
Generation, but she also makes the rounds at Xerox PARC's LambdaMoo, 
Cyberion City at MIT, and other stops on the MUD circuit.

Bruckman earned her undergraduate degree, cum laude in physics, from 
Harvard in 1987. "But if you look at my transcript," she notes, "I 
actually studied more English literature and art history than physics. 
I've always tried to balance creative and technical things."

Bruckman considered studying contemporary art history in graduate 
school, but instead took a job as a medical writer for a small medical 
publishing company. Since she had a computer background from high 
school, the company put her in charge of its computer-based training 
contracts (CBT). "Since I was doing their CBT, it was natural to assign 
me to work on their interactive video contracts," she said. "That's how 
I became interested in interactive video."

In 1989, Bruckman began a graduate program at MIT's Media Lab in the 
Interactive Cinema Group, working with Professor Glorianna Davenport. 
Her thesis, The Electronic Scrapbook, Towards an Intelligent Home-Video 
Editing System, encourages people to use home video as a creative 
medium. The system includes a library of "story models," which help 
people to tell home video stories. 

Bruckman finished her master's degree and stayed on for a PhD in the 
same research group. "That fall, I registered for a class with Professor 
Sherry Turkle. She inspired me to think about the psychological nature 
of people's relationship to technology. I did a sociological analysis of 
MUD players for her class, and she hired me to finish that research," 
she says. 

Bruckman found the topic so exciting that she switched research groups 
to work with Professor Mitchel Resnick in the Epistemology and Learning 
Group at the Media Lab. "I view MediaMOO as a sort of warm-up for a 
project to use MUDs as a learning environment for kids," she says. "I 
believe that MUDs can create an authentic context for kids to read, 
write, and program. . . I also hope this will help girls become more 
comfortable with computers." For more info, e-mail Bruckman at 
asb@media-lab.mit.edu 

-- Howard Rheingold

***********************************************************************

...The Future of MUDs...There's More than Games to This MUD...MediaMOO's 
Inaugural Ball......................
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"If you take away the dragons and wizards from a MUD, what kind of 
communication medium do you have?" This question moti-vated MediaMOO 
(for Media MUD, Object Oriented) architects Amy Bruckman and Mitchel 
Resnick to experiment in MUDing as a serious form of scientific 
communication. Bruckman, a graduate researcher at MIT's Media Lab, 
realized that scientists and scholars who share a specific research 
interest are a kind of virtual community. They meet for face-to-face 
conventions once a year, read the same journals - both electronic and 
print - and correspond with one another, but there is a lack of daily 
informal continuity to these communities of interest that span 
continents. 

Why not design a MUD to continue the kind of informal conversation that 
makes conferences so important to scientific communication? The 
"professional virtual community" that Bruckman and Resnick, a professor 
at the Media Lab, had in mind was the community of people like 
themselves - media researchers.

When MediaMOO was announced early in 1992, Bruckman and Resnick 
emphasized the incompleteness of the architecture. The MOO re-created 
only the public corridors, stairwells, and a few public places within 
MIT's Media Lab. The community of users was expected to build the rest, 
as they do in any good MUD. The objective was to see whether the 
collaborative work of building a shared world could help foster 
interaction between researchers in related fields.

In MediaMOO, as in any scientific conference, you can look at other 
participants' badges and see what they have to say about their special 
interest. People can find themselves in a hallway or a room with a group 
of strangers, look at their virtual badges, and strike up conversations. 

The architects of MediaMOO decided to have an inaugural ball to 
celebrate MediaMOO's opening on the same night Clinton and Gore were 
celebrating their inauguration, January 20. Those who attended the ball 
could "see" each other's real names, salient background information, and 
an e-mail address. Costumes, worn by all, were designed by the 
participants (I contributed a green-on-orange, double-breasted paisley 
dinner jacket, a "minimicro" Velcro tuxedo, and a loincloth of many 
colors.)

Although it opened with a party and its online atmosphere is informal, 
MediaMOO's population is comprised of people who are serious about the 
study of virtual communities and other media. In that context, meeting 
somebody "socially" at an event like an inaugural ball has implications 
for everyone's intellectual and professional interests. 

MUDs aren't always games, although gamers invented the medium. Media 
that are invented for one purpose often evolve into very different 
instruments than the ones the inventors had in mind. If MediaMOO and 
Jupiter are successful, expect to see serious-minded MUDs proliferate on 
the Net. Xerox PARC has a similar and more ambitious project known as 
Jupiter, a MUD through which researchers can navigate and switch to 
direct audio or even interactive video linkup with any colleague they 
encounter. Pavel Curtis, a researcher at PARC, is already adapting the 
software behind the Jupiter project for use as "an international 
teleconferencing and image database system for astronomers."

- Howard Rheingold

***********************************************************************

Getting  Online
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There are two ways to jack into the network of networks. Prodigy and 
Compuserve are not either of them. 

The free way. Most universities offer free Internet accounts to their 
students, particularly in the sciences. We've heard of people enrolling 
for a credit or two to keep their accounts, but it may only be an urban 
myth. If you are a student, you should certainly demand an account. Many 
corporations offer full Internet access, but many also limit employees 
to a gateway for Internet e-mail. Ask and you may receive.

The paid way. About 30 small businesses offer full Internet access for a 
moderate price. They either charge per hour, or per month, or a 
combination of both. Good rates are around $2 per hour or $20 per month 
for all you can use. If it's a long distance call to reach the port, you 
pay for that. As expected, most of these outfits are located on the 
coasts, with a few scattered here and there in the rest of the country 
(and a few in other countries). The Whole Internet Guide, (reviewed in 
Street Cred), can point you to the full list. Or you can call the WELL: 
+1 (415) 332 4335 and ask for the location of the outlet closest to 
where you live.

As a head start, here are a few popular and hip services: PANIX, +1 
(212) 787 3100/modem, +1 (212) 877 4854/voice; MindVOX, +1 (212) 988 
5030/modem, +1 (212) 988 5987/voice; the WELL, +1 (415) 332 6106/modem, 
+1 (415) 332 4335/voice; Netcom, +1 (408) 554 8649/voice, local dial-ups 
in the following area codes, 310, 408, 415, 510, 619, 916/modems.

***********************************************************************

The Kline Family: Learning via MUDs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
David Kline (known as "Spark" in the Cyberion City MUSE ), is an energy 
economist for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, 
Colorado. His wife, Judy Gilligan, performs most of the couple's home-
schooling duties and is launching a business selling children's books. 
Native Californians all, they moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1991. That's 
where I met them face to face. 

"Our primary motivation for home schooling," Judy said, "is that we 
think we can offer the kids an all-around better education. A lot of the 
socialization that happens in school is counterproductive." 

Much of that home schooling happens in Cyberion City, where kids, 
educators, and cybernauts commune in a space colony of the 24th century 
(see Welcome to Cyberion City, page 70). 

"I discovered Cyberion City and thought of Zack (age eleven) right 
away," David recalled. "He and I 'went' there together. This was 
definitely the right move, because Barry Kort (known as "Moulton" in 
Cyberion City), David Albert ("Aslan") and the others treat the kids as 
honored guests. When they found out that Zack was looking over my 
shoulder, they gave him a character on the spot and started talking to 
him. He'd never seen anything like it - 'Here's this guy in 
Massachusetts, and another in Minnesota, and they're talking to me!!' "

"The next day, I left Zack a note that read: 'Here are the ten secret 
incantations you need to type to connect to the Muse. Have fun. Love, 
Dad.' "

A week later, Zack had taught himself to touch-type, just so he could 
keep up with conversations on the Muse. Then father and son both started 
to learn how to build and program. "Zack had an advantage, though; he 
could spend hours at it every day," David said. "Within a couple of 
months, he was showing me stuff that he had picked up."

A couple of other Cyberion City kids live in Boulder. With them, Zack 
built an online world in which all the characters were snakes. They 
changed their names to Slim, Slick, and Sleek, and joined a group called 
the Snake Brigade. In real life, they often kept up the role play of 
snakes. Connie Wallace ("Ibis"), who in real life is a librarian from 
North Carolina, befriended the family and created virtual "candy mice" 
to feed the snakes when they visited with her online. She later visited 
Boulder in person, bringing homemade fudge shaped like mice. 

-- Howard Rheingold


-----------------------------------
Kevin Kelly (kk@well.sf.ca.us) is executive editor at Wired. 

Howard Rheingold (hlr@well.sf.ca.us) is editor of The Whole Earth Review 
and author of The Virtual Community (Addison-Wesley), to be published 
this fall.



(c) 1993 Wired magazine


