Almost nightly, for the last two years, I've been spending much of my time at a place called LambdaMOO. You might almost say that I live there; I even have a room of my own. I have a lover there, lots of friends, and a few enemies. I go there to unwind, to hang out, to hear the latest news and exchange gossip, to meet people, to play games, to have sex. On any given day, I might stay in my room, or visit friends, or cruise a crowd of strangers, or jump into a heated political discussion, or explore spaces I've never seen before. LambdaMOO has woven itself into the fabric of my life. It's as real to me as the apartment I live in, or the place where I work, or the cafe where I have lattes every afternoon. But LambdaMOO isn't any of these things. In fact, it isn't a physical place at all. For LambdaMOO exists only in cyberspace.
LambdaMOO is a kind of MUD: a text-based, multi-user virtual environment. MUD stands for "Multi-User Dungeon." The reference is to the game "Dungeons and Dragons." In the late 1970s, hackers ported this game online. It was one of the first examples of computer networking. Simply by following text on your terminal screen, you could explore dark caves, fight dragons, and accumulate treasure. At key moments, you could choose between alternative actions. (Do I want to pick a fight with that dwarf, or should I ignore him and just cross the river?). Moreover, people at other terminals would be reading the same text as you were, at exactly the same time. They could respond to your actions with actions of their own. This allowed the game to be uncertain and open-ended. There didn't have to be a single goal, or one right way to get through a maze. The players became fictional characters, endowed with free will, and interacting with one another in a richly detailed fantasy world.
The first MUDs were tiny; they involved only small groups of people, and didn't use up very much computing power. But now they have proliferated, with the growth of the Internet. Nobody knows for sure how many MUDs exist today, but they certainly number in the hundreds, and maybe even in the thousands. Some of them remain small, but others are quite populous. LambdaMOO is like a good-sized village: there are nearly 10,000 registered players, around 200 of whom are likely to be online at any given moment. A majority of players are located in North America, but there are also sizeable contingents from Great Britain, Western Europe, and Australia, and smaller numbers from elsewhere. MUDs now come in various types: there are LP-MUDs, DikuMUDs, TinyMUDs, MUSHes, MUSEs, MUCKs, MOOs, and others. The programming differences between them are unimportant. What's more interesting is the way they have evolved. Some MUDs are still based on heavy fantasy role playing, just as the original Dungeons and Dragons was. But others are more social in character. They have abandoned live-action narratives, and instead become societies in miniature. MOOs like LambdaMOO and Dhalgren (the MOO that runs on a machine in my office at the University of Washington) still have fictive settings based on science fiction and fantasy novels. And the people there still have fictional aliases of their own choosing. But no attempt is made to act out pre-given scenarios. Instead, people simply interact, much as they would in a cafe, bar, or club. Role-playing is less a matter of taking part in a story, and closer to the way we play roles in everyday life.
A MOO is composed of text and only text. But that text evokes people and places. When you first log in to Dhalgren, for instance, this is what you see:
You are standing on the grassy banks of a wide river. A steel
suspension bridge spans the river, leading to the eastern bank.
Across the water, the city of Bellona flickers. On its dockfront,
down half a mile, flames roil smoke on the sky and reflections on
the river. Here, not one car comes off the bridge. Not one goes
on.
To the west is the mouth of a cave... To the east is the bridge
into the city. There is also a taxi here, which can take you to
places of special interest.
It's your choice what to do next. You can walk west, and enter into the cave. Or you can walk east, over the bridge and into the city. You type in your decision, and the machine responds. Each time you move, you get another description. Many places contain details that you can look at more closely. Sometimes you find objects that you can pick up and play with in some way. These range from virtual drugs, that spew psychedelic messages all over your screen, to virtual cats that purr when you pet them, to virtual chairs in which you can sit, to virtual sex toys that you can strap on to your virtual body. In any of these places, you can also run into other people. You can talk with them, look at them, have them look at you. You can also perform all sorts of actions with or upon them. You can hug them, lick them, dance with them, throw food at them, whip them, have sex with them, whatever. You can find out who their friends and enemies are. The variety of this stuff is limited only by your imagination. For you can build spaces and objects of your own, as well as explore the ones that others have created. And you can name and describe yourself just about any way you want. One of my MOO identities, for instance, is Spacealien. If you ran into me in this guise, this is what you would see:
Spacealien
A grayish being, 4 feet tall, hairless, with hypnotic eyes.
S/He is awake and looks alert.
Carrying: anal probe
And if you then looked at the dubious object I was carrying, you would see the following:
anal probe
Owned by Spacealien. A metal rod, over a foot long, of alien
manufacture.
There is a tiny sphere, like a ball bearing, at one end.
The sphere is surrounded by flexible metal prongs, which enclose it
like a wire cage, but which can open up to let it roam
freely.
All this colorful, wacky detail creates a vivid sense of place. Going to a MOO feels much more "real," which is to say much more fully embodied, than anything else you can do on a computer. It's more interactive than playing a CD-ROM or cruising the World Wide Web, and more intense than typing on a chat line. At this point, for me, it easily beats watching TV, as well as providing more stimulation than the rest of my so-called social life. Admittedly I'm much more of a nerd than the general population. But you'd be surprised just how absorbing MOO life can get. You meet all sorts of people on a MOO; though different subcultures emerge in different spaces. LambdaMOO and Dhalgren seem to attract a mixed population of counterculturally-inclined hackers, riot grrls, foot fetishists, s & m enthusiasts, sociologists researching life online, graduate students desperately trying to avoid working on their dissertations, and other such disaffected intellectual types.
What's most interesting and important to me about MOOs is how they allow people to experiment with notions of personal identity. The "self" you have on a MOO is not given it advance. You can make a new one any time you want. It's simply a matter of changing your nickname, or writing a new description of yourself. Some people I know have different online selves for different moods, just as in real life they might wear different clothes. Others only establish single online personas, but ones that are quite different from how they live and act in the flesh. Most fascinating of all is the gender play in MOOs. It's much easier to appear in drag on a MOO than in a physical space. And the amount of cross-dressing that goes on is truly astonishing. Boys play at being girls, girls play at being boys, boys even play at being girls who are playing at being boys. There are also other genders available, besides the conventional two: you can be either (s/he like Spacealien above), you can be plural (they), or you can even belong to the mysterious splat or Spivak genders (nobody is sure exactly what they are). I don't know if you can really change who you are inside, simply by adopting a different set of pronouns on the MOO. But I do know that presenting yourself to the world in such a different guise radically changes the way you are seen and treated by other people. My "self" isn't something fixed once and for all. It isn't something contained exclusively inside me. The experience of self also involves how I project myself outside myself, how I interact with others. The semi-fictive world of the MOO helps to show me how all identities are at least partly fictive. And it's in that sense that the MOO, although entirely textual and virtual, is just as 'real' to me as anyplace else.