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Mudding: Social phenomena in text-based virtual realities.

A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or, sometimes, Multi-User Dimension) is a network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose user interface is entirely textual. Participants (usually called players) have the appearance of being situated in an artificially-constructed place that also contains those other players who are connected at the same time. Players can communicate easily with each other in real time. This virtual gathering place has many of the social attributes of other places, and many of the usual social mechanisms operate there. Certain attributes of this virtual place, however, tend to have significant effects on social phenomena, leading to new mechanisms and modes of behavior not usually seen ‘IRL’ (in real life). In this paper, I relate my experiences and observations from having created and maintained a MUD for over a year. 1 A Brief Introduction to Mudding The Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes. E.M. Forster [1] A MUD is a software program that accepts ‘connections’ from multiple users across some kind of network (e.g., telephone lines or the Internet) and provides to each user access to a shared database of ‘rooms’, ‘exits’, and other objects. Each user browses and manipulates this database from ‘inside’ one of those rooms, seeing only those objects that are in the same room and moving from room to room mostly via the exits that connect them. A MUD, therefore, is a kind of virtual reality, an electronically-represented ‘place’ that users can visit. MUDs are not, however, like the kinds of virtual realities that one usually hears about, with fancy graphics and special hardware to sense the position and orientation of the user’s real-world body. A MUD user’s interface to the database is entirely text-based; all commands are typed in by the users and all feedback is